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."
Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
Does Photoshop 1 even run under OS X 10.4?
apple store celebrates tiger (Score:2, Interesting)
Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia Widget? (Score:3, Interesting)
sweet!
Re:Please don't flame me into oblivion but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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. Apple is doing a certain amount of hand-holding here and provides some documentation and a great programming enviroment -- it got even better with Tiger. Since this site is for people who at least would like to pretend that they could code if they only had the time (ah, like me), it does make sense.
One word of advice: If you ever have to ask a question that is critical about Apple on Slashdot, post as AC. Things that are considered normal, harmless questions or even humorous in other sections get trolled to death here. The "Cult of Mac", unfortunately, is not a joke.
Multiple OSes officially supported? (Score:2, Interesting)
Cartoon-like miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/ [funpause.com]
MSN Poll on Tiger (Score:1, Interesting)
How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it so interesting that the iPod (in all its flavors) and Mac mini have oodles of accessories for [google.com] each [google.com].
With Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator all generating the software equvalent of these accessories, it seems appropriate to explore the "community economies" Apple is creating.
Perhaps there is a better phrase than "community economies" to describe the markets that emerge from supporting a specific product as well as the communities that for from them (take for instance, iPod community websites [ipodlounge.com]). Whatever they may be called, it is interesting how Apple seems more capable than other manufacturers, even in other spaces, to develop these "community economies".
But why is this becoming common for Apple products? Apple seems second only to automobile makers in creating accessory markets and communities of owners & supporters. The same doesn't exist for GAP [gap.com] or Sony [sony.com] or even Microsoft [microsoft.com], though an argument can be made that the latter has a huge community of PC software vendors.
But more than the vendors, it is the concept of little sub-economies and users so specific to a particular product that is very interesting to me.
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:5, Interesting)
Nearly two years ago, we went to Microsoft's Mac BU and said, "We've got this new thing going on, and you're going to want to change the way Entourage stores its data." We told them all about Spotlight and how it indexes individual files and associates them with key-value attributes. We showed them the way we were redesigning Mail, and the workarounds we were going to employ for Address Book and iCal.
Their response? "Meh."
We fully expected to see a complete rewrite of the Entourage data format in Office 2004, but it didn't happen. Instead, Microsoft's guys said that they wanted to work with us to make Spotlight index their database.
Well, that's really not what Spotlight's designed to do, see. It's not that we won't make it do that. It's just that that's now how it's designed to work.
So now we have really excellent metadata importers for all the Office file formats
Last I heard, we were still doing the back-and-forth with Microsoft. Not sure where that's going to end up.
Re:How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:1, Interesting)
Remember Konfabulator? You know, the program that Dashboard totally ripped off and has destroyed the market for? That was an example of an exciting third-party application for OS X. Now it's jumped ship to Windows, because Apple have integrated their version into their OS and destroyed their market.
Apple are the new Microsoft. Don't forget that. They'll tolerate freeware... but don't you dare try to sell a program for their platform, because they'll embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Re:Apple doesn't do its trademark searches very we (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't hold your breath on Onyx doing an OS X version anytime soon.
I was the original author of Spotlight, and they haven't developed the IP much from the original version I sold them (I'd sold it because I was busy creating CrossBasic at the time, which was eventually renamed to RealBasic).
In fact they went so far as to threaten me with legal action a couple of years ago, when I started to develop a Mac OS X equivalent, even though the non-compete provision had expired.