Tiger's 200 New Features 903
An anonymous reader writes "If this hasn't already been posted, Apple set up a page listing,
by software section, all of the new features for OS X.4, or Tiger.
Given that every upgrade touts over a hundred features, it is interesting to see all of the enhancements to this upgrade to see what adopters get out of the box.
There are a lot which are tweaks, some new non-Spotlight oriented features and a few that are interesting, mostly security related features.
2 words: stealth mode.
"
Awsome. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why is stealth mode pointed out as special? (Score:5, Informative)
Most consumer-oriented firewalls overdo the configurability and impose the log on users who would be better of not knowing how many malicious and non-malicious "attacks" are directed towards their computers, as long as the firewall blocks them. It's the attacks that aren't blocked / logged that should be interesting.
Apple always strives to strike a balance between "user-friendliness" and power. Apparently they decided they should give stealth mode to those who need it and make it easier to view a log.
Re:Why is stealth mode pointed out as special? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:charging for . release? (Score:5, Informative)
Comparing to Windows Service Packs, there has been two for XP. Apple has released 9 "service packs" for Mac OS X Panther.
10.3.1
10.3.2
10.3.3
10.3.4
10.3.5
10.3.7
10.3.8
and now 10.3.9.
These have added new features, tweaks and improved security also.
I am sick of people whinging about apple charging for "point updates;" it's is an old and worn out argument and it comes down to the simple point of if you don't want it, don't buy it.
Your comment just lost a couple of cool points in my book.
CoreImage/CoreVideo/CoreData/QuickTime/Sync (Score:5, Informative)
Re:charging for . release? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why is stealth mode pointed out as special? (Score:1, Informative)
Sometimes there are oversights in software that you need to work around, and a software firewall can help (yes, this mostly applies to windows).
A client firewall is often more of a hindrance than a help for the experienced user, but you seem to be forgetting that a huge chunk of the world is made up of inexperienced users.
Re:Too expensive.... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're a student/educator, you can also take advantage of Apple's educational pricing - $69 w/ free shipping.
Re:Awsome. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Burnable folders (while in the real world) (Score:3, Informative)
Feature comparision with Panther and Jaguar (Score:5, Informative)
Re:charging for . release? (Score:5, Informative)
Windows XP = Win 5.1
Windows Server 2003 = Win 5.2
Re:OK, how about... (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like BlackBox runs instead of the default Explorer process, so the OS ends up feeling overall more responsive. So you might want to check it out. You can easily uninstall it by using a sinple batch script.
Re:Why is stealth mode pointed out as special? (Score:4, Informative)
The idea isn't to protect against attack on all those services you have running but don't use, it's to minimise potential damage if you are compromised. If the firewall blocks port 31337 on a windows box, and BackOrifice gets installed, the user is compromised but not exposed.
Also, as another user mentioned, there's the issue of spyware that might set up a listening port, or just any other software which fails to protect itself well, but which you need to run locally. Put holes in the firewall only for those things you know for sure you want the outside having access to, and no matter what crap happens on the client machine, its exposure is still the same.
Also, there's selective access that happens on a client firewall. My database server has a firewall in place to protect its copy of MySQL. Only my http server can connect on that port, anyone else, the OS simply drops the packet (which is the old term for this fancy new "stealth mode").
Firewalls do more than simply provide all or none access to the world, even client firewalls.
Re:2 words: (Score:1, Informative)
Already in XP. Terminal Services/Remote Desktop is standard.
Re:2 words: (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontboo
look at side bar on lower right
Re:2 words: (Score:1, Informative)
Terminal Services, RDP has been in XP since 2001.
'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search
I guess you could blame this one on Google, who pretty much had the first desktop search out there. In fact, they'll even sell you a search appliance for your intranet.
'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc)
XP's files and settings transfer wizard, since 2001.
Thing is, there are a lot of things sat in both Windows and OSX that a lot of people did way beforehand, only to disappear from sight once MS or Apple built it into the OS. The same probably goes for Linux GUIs too - heck even the Amiga had some of the points you mention above before the Mac did.
At the end of the day, they both have some serious credit to give to Xerox PARC, which does pretty much define how we use computers today.
Re:2 words: (Score:2, Informative)
You correctly point out that most of these features aren't strictly new. However, you overlook the fact that none of these features has been implemented even half as well as Apple's done them for Tiger (yes, I *have* tried them). Most people don't understand that there's a difference between doing something and doing it well. If that's you, fine. If not, do some more research before making a fool of yourself.
2D acceleration != 3D acceleration. Apple's using 3D acceleration for their 2D UI, which *is* new.
Unlike Google and the others you cite, Spotlight is updated instantly - no need to wait for the search tool to see the change, or to run updatedb.
Core Image/Video allow you to do things that were formerly only possible in Photoshop/After Effects - all in realtime, without special hardware.
iSync - doesn't sound terribly new to me.
ARD - sounds like catch-up to me too (though ARD has been around for years, just not built-in to the OS).
Target disk mode - been around for years. Just Works.
Xgrid - built-in, no setup to worry about. Just Works. Unlike, say, Beowulf.
So basically, Apple has refined a load of features than can be haphazardly cobbled together using other OSes and combined them into a system where they're implemented *well*.
Sorry loser, but you sound about as well-educated as the average American 15 year-old.
Re:Coincidence? (Score:5, Informative)
No it doesn't, it means the server creates the index of its volumes and the client machines have access to that index. As I said in another post in this thread, Apple was doing that back in 1999 with Sherlock, [64.233.179.104] except the index was separate instead of part of the file system, and the indexing ran at intervals instead of happening in real time.
~Philly
Re:Burnable folders (while in the real world) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Burnable folders (Score:5, Informative)
Try Reading Your Own Links (Score:5, Informative)
I know it's a real hardship to actually read your own links, but perhaps if you had taken this unprecidented step you would see that they list Pagemaker as coming out in "the mid-1980s," not 1980. Further, if you had actually read the article linked from that page, you would have found this: "1985 - Aldus develops PageMaker for the Mac, the first "desktop publishing" application." [about.com]
If you have any further difficulties with basic reading comprehension, please let us know.
Re:Coincidence? (Score:3, Informative)
On a server, you scheduled it to run at midnight, and who gave a shit how long it took to run? That was only for the initial indexing, anyway-- subsequent updates of an existing index took much less time.
How do you compare this with WinFS, Spotlight, Beagle? It is completely different topic, accidentaly having the "SEARCH" word in common
It's not a completely different topic, it is exactly on topic-- you were trying to say that some aspects of WinFS were Microsoft's idea first, and I called you on it by showing that Apple did them in 1999. And yes, the way they did it had shortcomings, but that doesn't change the fact that they accomplished it 6 years ago. Now Apple is improving and reviving those features in OS X, while Microsoft has stricken WinFS from the feature list of their newest version of Windows, AGAIN.
~Philly
Re:CoreImage/CoreVideo/CoreData/QuickTime/Sync (Score:5, Informative)
No, CoreImage goes WAY beyond Photoshop because the effects are real-time GPU accelerated and non-destructive. The developer tools comes with an application called CoreImage funhouse which is rudimentary but works. I look for GraphicConvertor to add CoreImage to the next version and really put a hurt on Photoshop Elements.
It's amazing to perform filters in realtime and scrub the centerpoint to watch the image change. These are effects that were only available to high-end applications like Photoshop that now every shareware author has direct access to.
Re:200+? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Too expensive.... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, because $129 is wayyyyy cheaper than $119.99 [salesintl.com].
Re:WinXPSP2 vs. OSX 10.4 (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to double post a reply to the same parent, but I forgot to mention in my other response...
XP is marked as 5.1, NT2000 is 5.0, so XP is a point release, and MS certainly charged for it.
Re:200+? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:charging for . release? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it really isn't. I'm unsurprised by your ignorance about this. I guess we've just done a lousy job of explaining it.
Spotlight is a full-fledged system service, not just a user interface. Application developers can very easily add Spotlight to their own applications. For example, look at Mail. The additions to Mail to support Spotlight searching were trivial. In fact, the total code size of an early Spotlight build of Mail was significantly smaller, because we off-loaded all of the indexing and searching to the Spotlight service, removing it from Mail.
Comparing Mail to a third-party bolt-on search product is, well, dumb.
Safari RSS = Why the name change?
There has been no name change. The name of the browser is Safari. The version is 2.0. "Safari RSS" is just a marketing name for Safari's RSS support.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
"Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
We already had striping support, which is sometimes erroneous called "RAID 0." We already had mirroring support. Now we've added concatenation. See? New feature.
I have absolutely no problem with people who want to be critical. Critical is where we live. But is it really too much to ask that the people who levy criticisms have the tiniest idea what they're talking about first? It would save so much time.
Re:Secure virtual memory? (Score:3, Informative)
1/ FV Encrypts the user's
2/ Secure VM encrypts the
So, the activities of the FV'd user (and others, and system process) that have been committed to
There -was- a flap on
Re:Programmer Base 10 math Calculator (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Spotlight (Score:5, Informative)
Google indexes content. This is important. Hugely, massively important. But we've had content indexing for a long time now. It only takes us so far.
What's more important than content indexing is metadata indexing.
Metadata literally means "data about data." It's information about your files that isn't actually stored in your files. For example, let's say you take a photograph and store it in your Pictures folder. Spotlight can automatically extract some metadata from the picture all by itself. It can tell that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it's in Nikon RAW format and that you took it on December 24, 2003. The computer knows this stuff already.
Other metadata was inserted automatically when the picture taken. For example, the camera inserted metadata identifying it as being taken with a Nikon D1 using a 1/250 exposure and a 2.8 f-stop.
Spotlight indexes all that stuff.
But there's a third type of metadata. In addition to intrinsic metadata and automatically inserted metadata, there's descriptive metadata. Your computer knows that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it was taken with a Nikon D1, but it can't know that it's a picture of your niece Katie. That's where iPhoto comes in. You use iPhoto to write a descriptive caption -- "Lawrence's daughter Katie on Christmas Eve" -- and that caption gets stored in the photo as metadata. Spotlight indexes it.
So if you come along later and search for "Christmas pictures," Spotlight will find that photo. Because it knows it's a picture, and because you described it as being related to Christmas.
Now, that's today. (Well, in two weeks.) What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
More: Using a very simple user interface, you can define locations. Sitting at your desk, you tell your laptop to refer to that location as "work." Any file created within a 100-yard radius of that location will be returned in a search for "work." On your couch you define a location called "home." Sitting at the coffee shop you define a location called "Starbucks." And so on.
Now your computer knows not only when you modified that file, it knows where you were when you did it. That's all metadata you can use for searching.
This is pretty advanced stuff. It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks. But it's on the drawing board.
Spotlight opens up a whole new way of storing information. It's not a new idea; we've been trying to make it work for ten years now. But the actual working implementation of it is simply revolutionary. It's a quantum leap beyond anything that anybody has to offer right now.
Re:Coincidence? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Entourage/Spotlight (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, mail handles it correctly even in 10.3. Meeting invites open iCal and place it on your calendar (if you accept, of course). It has worked perfectly thus far for my mac. We have POP3 access turned on in our exchange server, and I have been using it as such. The new feature is that I don't have to use POP3 any more, I can connect natively, and access my address book and such, I assume.
Re:Awsome. (Score:5, Informative)
Add to that the usual slow down problems like virus scanners, software firewalls, application preloaders etc... and you can see the speed going down the drain.
Re:gcc 4.0? (Score:3, Informative)
Why the above is funny (Score:4, Informative)
Re:WinXPSP2 vs. OSX 10.4 (Score:3, Informative)
As an Apple employee once told me, it's "Mac OS 10", version 1.0/2.0/etc.
Or, for the people who still claim that 10.4 is a "service pack": Microsoft uses the exact same versioning scheme! Windows XP is version 5.1. SP1 and SP2 are version 5.1.something. Those were free. The upgrade from windows 5.0 (ie: Win 2K > WinXP) was not.
Re:Spotlight (Score:3, Informative)
Not true. Every photo taken with a digital camera has EXIF metadata, and every photo distributed by a wire service has IPTC metadata.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
The old "if it's not perfect, it's useless" lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions.
Actually Spotlight scales spectacularly well across the enterprise because clients have read access to server metadata databases. However, this is just an incidental benefit. Spotlight isn't designed to do what you're criticizing it for not doing.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that you obviously have a fundamental lack of understanding about the problem you're trying to discuss. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But you should first try to wrap your head around the problem before telling everybody what's wrong with the solutions.
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly.
Re:Java Jive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Coincidence? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Entourage/Spotlight (Score:3, Informative)
Exchange Server supports (at least) MAPI, IMAP, and POP. My company recently "upgraded" to a newer/the lastest Exchange Server and turned off IMAP and POP support.
Mail.app does indeed work with Exchange, but depends on IMAP being "turned on" in Exchange Server. So I can no longer use Mail.app. It does not support MAPI. Period.
The latest Entourage (part of Office 2004), however, does work, so I'm reasonably sure it must be using MAPI. Unfortunately, it's unquestionably the worst app I use on my Mac: slow, burdened with "Microsoft featuritis," and ugly/inelegant.
I could not find any Mac OS X e-mail clients besides Entourage that support MAPI. (Microsoft's previous Exchange 2000 for OS 9 did, but it was dropped in favour of Entourage.)
I was using Snerdware's Groupcal until the server upgrade. It no longer works. There is apparently a WebDAV method that Groupcal requires that is not enabled by default. See:
http://www.snerdware.com/support/index.php?x=&mod
There is no way my company's all-Microsoft IT department is going to do this.
So, in sum, Mail.app, at least up to OS X 10.3.9, requires IMAP or POP support from the Exchange server.
The Original Submission...so it is posted (Score:2, Informative)
I'm the A.C. who submitted the link to the features page. Normally, these submissions go into my browser and I forget about them long after the links are ingored by the moderators. So, it is surprising that the mods felt like posting it.
Some follow-ups:
1) I thought that the verbage would be changed; instead it was posted verbatim. Yikes. Me didn't want to come across as some sort of shill for Apple or as a bafoon. I accomplished the latter w/o trying. thanks,
2) I submitted it yesterday. My luck tends to be that of a johnny-come-lately and it just seemed like
3)Stealth Mode, like some mentioned, is totally about privacy. It may seem trivial to most of you but c'mon, peeps, giving non-technical savvy users that option is welcome. And, the firewall feature is built into Darwin. Any obvious privacy additions to the security features are welcome.
4) Most of the features are tweaks, simply product enhancements. There's nothing wrong with that. When the Find application in OS 8 became Sherlock with OS 8.5 it changed the way users searched for files on their desktop. It even allowed for searching the internet from within the Sherlock app. Windows search thing still launched the browser--explorer-- and defaulted to MS' search page. BS, that is.
At base, Spotlight is the better search that seemed to stall between OS 8.5 and OS X. With Metadata not existing, so to speak, in pre-Tiger OS X, the options for search were limited. That is a major reason I don't use X daily. I likes me metadata because I can arrange things the way I want to and not as the OS wants me to. And, the OS "knows" when I move things without popping up warnings or interfering with what I'm doing.
In OS 9 I can search based on the data in the resource fork. That's helped me out especially when I've had to fix corrupted files.
And, of course meta-data makes the OS "smarter."
The goal of comupting advances is still about making the interaction invisible and easier for anyone to use, right?
Arranging files you create in ways that are best conducive to the way you work is just desired. Metadata, especially since I cut my teeth on System 7-OS 9, makes things better.
Finally, beyond metadata, the things I dig most about Tiger and while I'll likely upgrade:
Automator, Core Image/video, Quicktime enhancements. All of those are good for me and my ilk who do multimedia and who don't program. The bulk of the enhancements to the OS assist people like me who aren't code junkies but who want to take fuller advantage of the OS, of Quicktime (which really has so more functionality than Apple seems to promote , like, interactivity and the 3D panoramas of QTVR) and increases our workflow.
Re:Awsome. (Score:1, Informative)
If you had paid the $129 for each release you wouldn't be disappointed. 10.0 was so much better than OS 9 it was night and day. I wouldn't touch a Mac with OS 9. 10.1 and 10.2 both delivered useful features and speed improvements. 10.3 I was less impressed with, but 10.4 - Tiger - is quite amazing. You'll probably never know since you criticize without knowledge but even Spotlight would be enough to justify a point release like this. Microsoft may one day deliver this kind of thing, perhaps in three years with Longhorn, but it will only work if you go and fill out all the metadata required to make it work - or if developers submit to Microsofts edicts regarding schemas and do it for you. Spotlight works on existing data such as EXIF data...
The No. 1 thing that tossers like you need to do is think about FUD. What does FUD mean? The answer is "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" - coined by those critical of IBM's habit of asking "is it compatible?". You use it when you mean "misinformation" because you think it's what clever people on Slashdot do, but you only show yourself to be a fool. You also probably mean "no truth TO the comment" or "no substantiation FOR the comment" than "substantiation to the comment" but let's work on the easy fixes first.
And by the way you're wrong - NT ran faster than 2000 ran faster than XP ran faster than XP SP1 ran faster than XP SP2. It's inevitable that as features are glommed onto an existing code base that at its core is not being improved that it goes slower. If your hardware upgrades are giving you the impression that things are becoming faster overall, you're lucky, but you're also paying for it, and probably a lot mroe than you think Apple users pay as a premium for getting hardware that "just works (tm)".
The core of OS X is being continually improved - and if you like you can verify this yourself, with diffs of the Open Source "Darwin" project. That's what is at the heart of OS X. Microsoft don't let you do that.
Apple users tend to stick with the same hardware for a longer time in part because new machine are announced less often but also because since OS X the speed of new releases on the same hardware have improved, and upgrades have been less necessary.
How appropriate that you name yourself theborg, stephenjborg@gmail.com. How funny if it's also your real name.
Stealth mode annoying to network users? (Score:2, Informative)
I fail to see how the stealth mode on the firewall will annoy legitimate users of the network, unless you define legitimate users to be something which I don't.
Even based on the page you linked to, there is no information which would lead to other users on a network being annnoyed based on your system applying stealth mode. It could be inferred that problems with DHCP lease allocation could cause the same IP to be allocated to two users, but the ISP should have sufficient technical expertise to not get into such a situation (otherwise they shouldn't be an ISP). The only possible way that stealth mode would impact other users ability to use a network would be if the network gateway, or the ISP, applied stealth mode.
The worst it could do to an end user is drop them off the network if they did not respond to ICMP pings, or heartbeats used by the ISP.
Re:Entourage/Spotlight (Score:2, Informative)
It is now a standard protocol and front-end with Exchange 2003.
MS is finally moving away from MAPI and Outlook 2003 can even work completely in HTTP mode. There's a bit of non-compliancy going on over those HTTP requests, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
Re:Programmer Base 10 math Calculator (Score:3, Informative)
Reverse polish notation is stack like...
Consider
5 x (2+3) = 25
In reverse polish notation, it is represented as:
5 enter 2 enter 3 enter + x
Simply,
enter adds the previous number to the stack.
+ removes the top two numbers from the stack, performs an addition operation on them and returns the result to the stack.
x peforms the same function as + but using multiply instead of addition.
Hopefully this clears some of it up for you...
but wait, there's more (Score:3, Informative)
This time, they done good. First: it looks like the iSight now can route audio through the system like any other mic; before, it was an expensive webcam with a crippled microphone. This should, for example, mean that Garageband can use it for recording audio input, which is convenient (and currently impossible). Second, the Audio Unit Lab is going to be interesting. It allows users to create Audio Units - which in Garageband means software instruments and which generally might give the Mac a built-in, midi-accessible sampler. It's hard to believe on the one hand - I doubt it would have features to encroach on, say Ableton Live - but on the other hand, with some pre-loaded audio, a cheapo Casio keyboard with midi ports, an isight, and Garageband, you'd practically be a moble radio station - podcasting anyone?
And the Audio Unit Lab is on http://www.apple.com/pro/musicaudio/tiger.html and NOT on the 200 list!