Mac OS X Tiger Released and Analyzed 563
bonch writes "Ars Technica has gone under the hood of the Tiger release and offers up detailed impressions on the new OS X update. The review covers everything from interface changes, new kernel updates and programming interfaces, the unification of UNIX system startup services into one service called 'launchd', the return of metadata, to the fact Apple has announced that from 10.4 forward there will be no more API changes. A fascinating read about the technical details behind Tiger and the specific changes that have occurred since Panther's release 18 months ago." Today is the update's official launch day, though some lucky people have had it for a few days already.
Grats to the Mac Community (Score:0, Interesting)
I'm jealous.
Things I would like to see:
1) Tiger running on an Intel platform
2) WinXP UI shell running on Linux
It would be nice to have more choice.
RSS (Score:2, Interesting)
What about TigerDirect? (Score:2, Interesting)
File Types in Spotlight (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:2, Interesting)
Tiger Has Arrived! (Score:5, Interesting)
My copy arrived from TNT 24hours ago. Along with a friend who's copy arrived at the same time, we upgraded his iBook and my PowerBook overnight.
I have two words for you:
1. Spotlight
2. Dashboard
If you don't know what I'm talking about (presuming you all do!)... --> http://www.apple.com/ [apple.com] and read all about them! Say no more!
Well, I can happily report that my experience has been a happy one! After backing up
All I can say is that Tiger be pretty, Tiger be fast! It was a complete surprise to find that at long last my problems syncing my Sony Ericsson P900 seem to be over, as are my faxing problems. I haven't tried either *fully* yet, first impressions are good, and happiness should prevail.
A couple of interesting things noted last night:
* The install *really* doesn't like it if you don't enter in valid
* The almost-missed "sending registration details to Apple" message was kind of surprising. My fault for giving my PB a working network connection, but it would have been nice to be asked first before sending off data! Having said that, it's nice not to need loads of installation
keys, etc. And hey - it's probably in the EULA which of course I read in detail before installing (*NOT*)
So, for anyone out there holding out to see what the feedback is like - don't! You'll just kick yourself harder the longer you hold off upgrading!
It's the speed increase, stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)
But the nicest thing about OS X updates is that they continue to improve performance on hardware across the board, including older supported hardware. My G4 1.33GHz is noticeably snappier than it was on Panther.
On the other side, can you even fathom someone uttering the words "Wow, that new version of Windows really makes my P3 fly!"
Spotlight alone worth twice the price (Score:2, Interesting)
Spotlight is astounding. It is amazingly fast, beautiful to watch, easy to use, and wonderfully complete, searching applications, documents (word, pdf, txt, rtf, html, etc, etc), images, music (though I haven't checked *lyrics* yet), mail messages - everything. It's fast. It will change my experience as a user - completely.
I spent so much time playing with spotlight last night that I didn't even open the Dashboard.
I did open Safari, however, and sites (all those I opened) render much more rapidly than in Panther. The RSS feature is nice, but I didn't spend much time with it. Much of the interface responds much more rapidly to user requests, with the singular exception of Expose, as others have noted. I am hopeful that Apple will tweak Expose in an upcoming update.
If you don't own a Mac, visit the nearest Apple retail store and try spotlight. As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.
Application Compatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm worried that some apps that I have might be broken and may take a while for fixes to arrive. The one I'm worried about the most is Office for Mac being broken ( yeah yeah I know iWork is better but I got this for free from a friend )
Re:Fantastic! (Score:4, Interesting)
Upgrade technique? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure this is an upgrade I won't be making. I'm perfectly happy with XP and see no reason to upgrade (many said this about 2k). I really dont' like the fact that their preliminary stated minimum requirements are 1GHz 512MB RAM. Yes my computer exceeds that, but that will pretty much mean I'll be on the lower end of the spectrum requirements-wise. I don't want to take a step back, and I certainly don't want to have to purchase a new computer to just to run a new OS that doesn't offer me all that much.
I am hoping to buy a mac at some point though. I just need to wait until I get some other things taken care of and my job situation stabelizes. I've had my eye on a powerbook for a while, and now Tiger is making me go to www.apple.com even more than normal.
launchd (Score:5, Interesting)
The article and summary both mention the consolidation of many launching methods into an new 'launchd' daemon that is responsible for a wide-range of tasks including starting and stopping applications and other daemons on behalf of users and the system. After more than 100 comments, I have not seen even one mention of it. Is this because it is uninteresting, no one has RTFA, or because nobody really knows what it does yet? The Arstechnica reviewer advocates that the other UNIX type systems immediately steal this idea and code and incorporate it. Nobody here has an opinion on that?
metadata (Score:4, Interesting)
I have difficulty getting users (intelegent users, mind) to file things in a single directory consistantly (yes I know this is ment to avoid directories but a location is only one example of metadata) . Fill in meta data as well? I may as well ask them to fly!
Ok text docs, spreadsheets etc will be fine (ish) as some occasionally appropriate info will be extractable, but what about drawings, scans, films. I know companies and the analy retentive will fill this in but an awful lot of people will not.
On the plus side I see this as the near end of application (un)installation hell....
rm *.mozilla !
ls *.apache !
or whatever syntax you choose, as the metadata will gladly be added by distro builders/app programmers. I've never heard this mentiond.
Ah well I'm off for two weeks holiday. Promise to think of you all while walking the dog
Jo
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Interesting)
If no one in a particular segment of society has seen it, it's innovative to them. Imagine that, somewhere in space, there has been a society who has done every single thing we have about 1000 years before we have. Are we still being innovative? Well...yes, because we don't know about this other civilization. To us, it is innovative.
The same thing goes for Microsoft's useage of innovative. To Microsoft's customers, it is innovative.
However, by all this logic, the word innovative is a useless catchphrase. However, since it's used in advertising, to the intelligent, rational consumer, it is, by definition "useless" already.
Everytime Apple, or Microsoft says "it's new and innovative" I say "you're fucking stupid". Who cares if its innovative? I care if it's useful. Whoever created it first doesn't fucking matter to me. And if it does matter to you, you have some seriously fucked up priorities*.
* It should be known that my computer useage hinges solely around playing video games, so I'm definitely casting stones from glass houses here. But at least I'm okay with admitting it
Re:Upgrade technique? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Yay ars! (Score:3, Interesting)
The privacy problem in Office Documents was mostly that the file contained data that should not have been there.
While that is a big part of the problem, there is also just the data that is "supposed to be there" but that the user is unaware of. This includes revision information, and the metadata like Author, Organization, etc. I've received documents that were clearly based upon the work of other people, based upon the "Author" field and I've received documents that are clearly adaptations of similar offers sent to competitors, based upon the revision information. Basically, I can see applications adding metadata that users are completely unaware of and privacy and security issues resulting.
I would be more interested to see if the meta-index respects the permissions (Unix or ACLs), i.e that an user can only see meta-information of files he can read.
That is an interesting point, especially when you are talking about Apple software that does not run as the user.
Re:Spotlight alone worth twice the price (Score:3, Interesting)
I find that Spotlight is fantastic when I want to get an overview of things - for example, if I want to type in the name of my latest project and get all the correspondance, documents, and (commented) address book entries about it. I can hit Ctrl-Space, type in "Project Gopher" for example and hit 'All Results' and bring up a window where I can organize and sort through things, arrange data, and such.
QuickSilver, however, serves a different purpose. QS seems to be for finding one thing and doing something with it. For example, I can tap Ctrl, type in "Jake Baked" (or whoever), and as I'm typing, it will (after I've typed enough) show me that it found Jake's address book card. Then I hit Enter and it brings up a new Mail message to him.
That sounds a little complex, so an example: to send a message to Johnathan Boyt, I do "John" and that's it. If I had other Johnathans in my address book I could type 'Boyt' instead, or if I knew other Boyts as well, I could type 'jobo' or 'johnb' or whatever.
Similarly, if I want to launch an application, I can do likewise. I decided to try Automator today, so I just had to do "aut" and that was it - and keep in mind, this is tapping Control, not holding it.
Quicksilver is a lot faster than Spotlight (which is saying a lot, as Spotlight isn't the least bit sluggish), so it's excellent for when you just want to do one thing with one other thing. Spotlight is great when you want to find something in, or do something with, your data as a whole. They work fantastically well together, and when you realize what it is that they each do best, your life will get so much easier.
not so good (Score:1, Interesting)
- Spotligh does not index nfs mounted units. So I can't search my 700 GB LVM. Quicksilver does index it.
- I use firefox not safari and I read my feeds with bloglines (which safari rss has copied)
- The dashboard is a pretty useless copy of konfabulator. The good thing about widgets it's to have them visible lying on your desktop and not having to use expose to get to them.
- I don't use quicktime. VLC or Mplayer are much better options and you don't to worry about codecs
- I use gmail not Mail.app
- It performs the same as 10.3 on my ibook and mac mini. Most of the users that have tried it on my forums (including some G5 users) do not report a performance increase http://foro.frozen-layer.net/ [frozen-layer.net]
- There seems to be some issues with applications getting stuck for some seconds without an aparent reaon (It seems to happend to everybody)
If you remove safari rss, mail, quicktime, spotligth and the dashboard. What's left on the update? And I don't think I'm the only one using firefox, quicksilver, vlc, mplayer, gmail and bloglines as better free substitutes for their mac equivalences.
I will probably buy it but only because it will cost me 20 being considered and update (I bought my mini 15 days ago)
Re:Lack of native OpenOffice is huge in my opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
And everybody who doesn't need it can get Pages and Keynote for $79.