Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger 371
tezbobobo writes "Tiger been out hours and already the Apple download page has been updated to take advantage of the update's new features. These cover areas including Spotlight plugins, Dashboard plugins, and Automator plugins.
These allow a range of actions from searching within omnigraph documents (spotlight), to resizing photoshop documents (automator), and (my fav) a dashboard wireless locator. The best bit -- a cursory glance indicates about half are freeware."
Re:Typical worthless crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
You gotta hand it to Apple. They create an entire industry around an iPod (don't you love how Belkin, once a patch cord company, makes loads of money off iPod accessories) and are now already sporting sites all over for an OS just recently (and in some places not even out yet) released.
Taking Advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
*Phew!*
Still, I'm hope they made sure that Automator is secure with Mail.app unlike vbscript and Outlook Express originally was. I'd rather not have my email being Automated to send certain things to everyone on my address book.
SuperKaramba (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:TigerDirect? (Score:1, Insightful)
and that matters to anyone else exactly HOW?
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:3, Insightful)
For Thunderbird messages to be indexed, searchable and retrievable, each message should be saved as an individual file.
You might want to mention that Thunderbird's version of the mbox format does not do this, instead one file is created for each mailbox. Unless this changes, it will not be easy to implement Spotlight searching on individual mail messages in Thunderbird.
This is actually a potentially large failing in Spotlight. Being able to find the right file is a wonderful thing, but for really big files it would be much better to find a location within that file.
Re:Other Widget Download Site (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it is funny that the konfab guys think that confab widgets are easier to develop than HTML/CSS + scripting language of your choice which is found in Dashboard.
Not flaming, just offering an opinion... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could argue the "Cult of Mac" thing. The fact is, every group trolls here. Apple threads get Windows- and Linux-fanatics. BSD threads get "- is dying!" trolls like nobody's business. And SCO threads... well, in that case it's pretty much deserved. But nobody is spared. In a community this large, everybody hates something.
It's just plain old garden-variety groupthink, where a lot of people receive a stimulus and respond similarly. It's not a cult, but it's just two or three steps removed.
Now, as for the success of Apple on Slashdot... you need to go back a ways, but it wasn't always the way. Practically any thread mentioning Apple would attract its share of detractors, anonymous and virtiolic. Then something unforseen happened: Steve Jobs returned.
I'm not really fan of Steve Jobs either, but I will admit that a (mostly) benevolent dictator is the best thing Apple could have gotten at the time. He challenged -- and changed -- computer culture, to the point that those silly looking triangular bubble-shaped iMacs that every "expert" at the time pooh-poohed still pop up in some clip-art collections.
Over time, Apple apparently started doing some things right. Not everything, but enough to continue their survival. "Apple is dying!" went from troll's battle cry to last bastion of the hold-outs, and now where it's used, it's sarcastic. Even you admit in your post that they're doing some things correctly.
In this case, the customizeability isn't quite programming, nor should it be. The fading of Hypercard from the public eye was enough warning that most people don't want to deal with programming. There's enough control under the hood on OS X that those people who want to can play with perl, python, ruby, c, c++, obj-c, java, emacs, vi, pico, php, etc. For the rest of them, there's this neat thing that does what they tell it -- programming in essence, but not in name. And that might make it easier for people to swallow.
Re:How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:2, Insightful)
True enough that Dashboard widgets take a page right out of Konfabulator's playbook and nothing but Job's RDF can distort that fact.
Still, Deshboard is really just a next version of Sherlock, Apple's tool for searching the yellow pages, tracking packages, and looking up movie times, all rolled into a Konfabulator desktop model.
Seems like the right thing for Apple to have done would be to buy Konfabulator out right.
Re:SuperKaramba (Score:2, Insightful)
Perfect match... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The clueless Windows user that call the tower the hard drive.
2) UNIX geeks that are tired of messing with Linux
Windows gamers do not match. Windows gamers match 100% using an XBox or PS2 for gaming. They would save a bundle in hardware upgrades as well...
Re:How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that it spawned a whole new javascript runtime for each widget, correct?
I just don't know how they could be expected to purchase a "widget" software vendor when the only thing worth buying was the community's goodwill; the architecture itself was crap.
Not only that, but Apple has had legal tangles with Arlo Rose in the past (A straight rip of the Aqua interface for his Kaleidoscope product). Most intelligent companies generally do not hop into bed with legal opponents (counter-examples exist).
Read this for a much more cogent elucidation: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_ko
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, Spotlight is cool. But developers are also smart enough to remember that Apple has played Lucy with the football to developers' Charlie Brown. Quickdraw GX, anyone? Publish and Subscribe? OpenDoc? Or better yet, AIAT/V-Twin/SearchKit- which was Apple's pride and joy of searching and the Next! Cool! Thing! for search a couple of years ago? What if MS had spent time on that and now was being told, "oooh, sorry, not the cool thing any more"?
The simple fact is that developers are wise to not just drink the goddamn Koolaid the OS manufacturer hands out at developer conferences(whether it's MS or Apple), but to consider what the right thing is for themselves and their customers. Sometimes, that means saying "no", or pushing back- if MS, Adobe and others hadn't pushed back in 1998, there'd be no Carbon, and likely Office, Photoshop and other core productivity apps would be Windows-only by now, because rewriting them in Cocoa or sticking them in Classic/Blue Box was a non-starter.
Re:How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a self-reinforcing phenomenon. An existing strong community advocates for your products, and as long as you don't disappoint, it reinforces your product and community. Apple has such a strong and tight-knit community base, information and news tend to circulate quickly and thing get amplified. For instance, I've heard more about the Tiger release from Apple users than from Apple itself...
It's questionable whether pure number or dollar-wise there are more Apple add-ons than say PCs. I would say not. For example I bet for every single 3rd party add-on (software or hardware-wise) for Macs there are probably two, three or more similar ones for PCs. It's just the one for the Mac gets quick circulation within the Apple community whereas the ones for the PC either compete against each other or are somewhat diluted in the multitude of options. I remember when I used my Macintosh heavily, it seemed like there was one and only one good app for every purpose. For windows there are dozens and sometimes they're all mediocre.
As for cell phones, at least in this part of the US there are tons of add-ons -- face plates, blinking what-nots, games, etc -- although the market for those tend to be middle/high-school crowd. Again because of the shear number of cell phone models the community gets diluted. (I guess diluted community is an oxymoron).
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:1, Insightful)
You know, it's really not. Here's why, in several interrelated but overlapping points.
1. HFS is optimized for small files. It has to be; an average installation of Mac OS X has over a quarter of a million of them, most just a few hundred bytes long.
2. A big file is a single point of failure. If you're not using self-validating format (like an XML-based format), you're kind of up a creek if that file should happen to get damaged. Do you want to tell your users that they just lost five years worth of e-mail because one byte got screwed up?
3. Entourage has a long-standing and well-known limitation related to its database anyway. When the database hits two gigabytes, Entourage craps out. (That limit was raised to 4 GB in a relatively recent patch. I don't know about you, but I'm sitting on five gigabytes of mail here.)
4. If you think about it for a second, you can see that it's basically impractical -- so impractical as to border on impossible -- for Spotlight to work any other way than the way it does right now.
So bottom line, Microsoft has to re-implement their backing store anyway. Why not do it in a way that's more reliable and more compatible while they're at it?
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:3, Insightful)
How about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't completely implode if a single byte gets written incorrectly?" Or how about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't crap out when it hits two gigabytes?"
They actually DID the second one. Of course, a 2GB to 4GB improvement means somebody had been using a signed INT to index the database... I'll never understand why Microsoft is so fond of monolithic binary data stores (Registry, Entourage db etc.), the goddamn things break and can't really be fixed. Entourage 2004 does fuck up a LOT less than X did, but 2-4GB of binary data that could (should) be represented as text on disk (thank the person who advocated
I swear there's a corporate directive to go with monolithic stores wherever possible (for very large values of possible).
No point, just a bad day at the office because Entourage and GroupWise don't get along.
A Slashdoter confirms, "PC Gaming is Dying!11one" (Score:1, Insightful)
I could go on about why you are wrong, but since you love making generalizations and assumptions, and this has been discussed on games.slashdot and countless websites/forums/usenet groups/etc, I won't even bother.
Since this "PC gaming is dying, a console is all you should need" is just as old as the "BSD is dying" trolls, and it has been proclaimed to be dead for years, lets just say you are still wrong and end it at that.
Re:Please don't flame me into oblivion but... (Score:3, Insightful)
To be honest, that was my first reaction, too. However: The little plugin thingies are going to be one of the first places where lots of people cut their teeth on programming.
The original summary mentioned sites providing three types of third-party software to take advantage of tiger. Both automator scripts and dashboard widgets are great for quick and fast small tasks that can be easily distributed and used. They are great for really really quick or small operations and will be great for adding customized functionality for many people.
That said, I don't think either is very important compared to the third item, spotlight plug-ins. This is new and real filesystem level functionality being extended by third parties. If this happened in Windows, Linux, Solaris, or NachOS it would be on the front page of Slashdot, and rightly so. A single day after the OS was released, thanks to dozens software developers, a user of tiger can instantaneously search their entire system based upon the contents of all sorts of file types. Apple allowing this for fifty or so very common data types is great, but the fact that people have already provided plug-ins to let my searches extend to OpenOffice files, Omnigraffle diagrams, Realbasic projects, Corel Painter Files, VOIP logs, and many more proprietary file types really makes me think that this technology will be used and extended to the point that it will really, really change the way I use my computer on a fundamental level. This is, as far as I know, the first time this sort of thing was possible on any system although I have no doubt that it will be embraced by every consumer OS within a few years time.
This is definitely "News for Nerds."
Search Kit 2? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can Spotlight?
If not, why not?
Frankly I think your hostility to the Mac BU (and by extension anyone who questions this 'feature') is misplaced. Why should every mail application (or other application) have to change their storage format to a single file per object?
If this is the case, this is a gap in the Spotlight API, and a step backwards from Search Kit - it would not be backwards compatible. If it is backwards compatible you can indeed index several things in one file (I know because I'm doing it presently with search kit).
You can add arbitrary URLS (ie an url scheme of your devising) with
SKDocumentCreateWithURL
Then add text to be indexed with
SKIndexAddDocumentWithText
I haven't looked at the Spotlight API so I couldn't tell you if this is the case with Spotlight, but everyone seems to be saying that you need to feed it a file URL for each object searched. Perhaps because of the tie in with the operating system to see when files have changed.
BTW, your posts are very interesting, and I'm glad you post here, but you do sometimes give the impression of talking as 'the voice of Apple' on all subjects. Is this intentional? You can't possibly know about everything Apple does.