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."
Silly people (Score:5, Funny)
I think that explains why iPods are so popular (Score:3, Funny)
Or perhaps... (Score:2, Funny)
Other Widget Download Site (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.dashboardlineup.com/ [dashboardlineup.com]
(I should say that I am partly affiliated with it.)
Re:Other Widget Download Site (Score:2)
10.3 is by far one of the best os's out there. I still like my linux desktop for hard workstation tasks (since I've only an ibook g3) but if 10.4 is anything like the jump to 10.3, I'll be very happy.
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.
Dashboard Wireless Plug-In (Score:2, Funny)
Now that would be sweet!
Re:Dashboard Wireless Plug-In (Score:2)
Re:Dashboard Wireless Plug-In (Score:2)
Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
Does Photoshop 1 even run under OS X 10.4?
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
OS-Level Scripting is pure Unix; don't ignore. (Score:4, Informative)
OS-Level scripting is absolutely NOT to be ignored. Amigas did it years ago with ARexx, and it was an incredibly powerful feature. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it's the GUI equivalent of Unix's small-but-pipeable-commands philosophy.
I'm quite surprised that it's not universally supported on Unix machines now. Luckily, KDE at least does support it via DCOP and scripting APIs along with command line apps to access DCOP calls.
To give a few quick examples:
I recently discovered started using KDE's automatic wallpaper cycling for a given directory full of wallpapers. However, some wallpapers wouldn't suit my mood at a certain moment, and some wouldn't look as good on screen as they did when I downloaded them. So I figured I'd add some buttons to the panel: A red X for "Delete Wallpaper", and a forward arrow to switch to the next wallpaper. Implementing that took LESS than a MINUTE, since I just had to open a console, run "dcop", and see that kde exposes two helpful calls:
kdesktop KBackgroundIface changeWallpaper
and kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper
The first command was added directly to the next wallpaper button, and the second was added to a short script that uses it to get the wallpaper name, changes to the next wallpaper, then deletes the old one.
As another example, I have a quick little script that finds my currently playing song in whatever KDE music player I happen to be using via dcop, without the need for specially made command line tools that access the players API, such as xmms provides.
The real power comes when you want to do things like connecting a 3D rendering app to a photo manipulation app, followed by lipsync tool and a final movie encoder.
ARexx was doing things like this years ago, and it's perfectly possible (and implemented!) on Linux today. It's just a shame more people aren't aware of and using it. We're ignoring potential power, as if we all used DOS and continued to claim that Unix command line functionality was pointless and unnecessary. Maybe when we use Unix the way it CAN be used, we'll finally have a killer app that puts the secrecy of windows' proprietary apps to shame.
At the very least, I would ask people not to insult OS X for finally implementing this important feature. They seem to have done it in an innovative GUI-based way, too.
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:2)
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:2, Informative)
Pay more for what?
CS is alot cheaper than the individual counterparts that make it.
The Professional CS is $1200 with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, GoLive.
It used to be $700,$700,$500,$150,$100
Half that for upgrades.
a cursory glance reveals... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:a cursory glance reveals... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
All signs point to yes. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.dashboardlineup.com/ [dashboardlineup.com]
http://www.iheartwidgets.com/ [iheartwidgets.com]
http://www.thedashboarder.com/ [thedashboarder.com] (go easy on these guys, they're already being beaten to death.)
In fact, several of these have been up for a couple of weeks. Has anyone else noticed that /. auto-links things now? Here's a test : http://dupedupedupe.net/ [dupedupedupe.net]
Sweet! There goes what little HTML skillz I had!
Amazon (Score:2)
Re:Amazon (Score:2)
I am currently installing on my Powerbook right now!
apple store celebrates tiger (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:apple store celebrates tiger (Score:3, Informative)
Official company policy is that events end at midnight; you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. In practice, the unofficial under-the-table policy to local store managers is, "Stay open until everybody's happy."
At the "Night of the Panther" event in 2003, one store -- I can't remember which one, but I want to say it was one of the ones in Texas -- s
They giving anything away? (Score:2)
---> Kendall
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.
Re:Taking Advantage (Score:2)
Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:3, Informative)
For Thunderbird messages to be indexed, searchable and retrievable, each message should be saved as an individual file.
This is actually what Mail 2 does, and also what BeOS's mail did - you could set up live query folders that would hold mail messages based on your criteria. It's no coincidence that BFS' creator Dominic Giampaolo now works at Apple on Spotlight...
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
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:2)
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:2)
If I remember Ars Technica's excellent article on Tiger, there is a trick to do this.
I think the trick was to clone the database as a directory of files with a special extension, duplicating the database, but thus allowing it to be searched.
Yes (Score:2)
I think at some point they will address this shortcoming in a non-hacky way, since Entourage has the same issue and I'm sure Microsoft would like to get it to work.
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:2)
By the way, HFS doesn't handle lots of small files very well, IMO. I had a backup server running on 10.3 (with journaling), and *clean* reboots took hours - several hours. Granted, it had some 750 million files to deal with, and most p
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:2)
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:2)
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:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:5, Informative)
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?"
Or how about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format in order to make your users happy?" That's my favorite.
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?
Um. You do know that Spotlight is basically Search Kit 2.0, right? It's based on, and is backwards compatible with, Search Kit.
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 o
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 inde
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:3, Informative)
You have a point, but exactly why did those technologies fail? Exactly, lack of developer adoption was one of the main reasons.
"Or better yet, AIAT/V-Twin/SearchKit"
SearchKit has been used from Mac OS 8 (8.5?) through 10.3, which spans over seven years (late 1997 to early 2005), so I don't see your complaint.
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:5, Informative)
Here's how it works. The Mac OS Extended filesystem has a minimum allocation block size of four kilobytes. A one-byte file on disk will be given a minimum allocation of four kilobytes. Okay?
Let's say your "mbox" file contains exactly 12,000 messages, and that it totals exactly 11,534,336 bytes. That means each message is an average of about 960 bytes long.
On your Mac, those 960 byte files will be inflated to 4,096-byte files, because of the way Mac OS Extended allocates. That's a ratio of 4.27:1. Your mail store on your Mac will be 4.27 times larger than your mbox file.
That means your mail store on your Mac will be 49,213,167 bytes, or about 47 MB. Even if you double that to account for the property-list metadata embedded with each message, that only comes to 94 MB. Not 105 MB.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say that I don't really buy what you're selling.
Now, setting that aside, your Mac requires considerably more than the 36 MB wasted inside your mail archive just for virtual memory paging. If you're in a situation where 36 MB makes a difference, you're doing something seriously wrong.
How about a real-world example? I have an archive of 22,433 entirely average e-mail messages. On my Panther system disk, that archive occupies 876 MB. On my Tiger system disk, it occupies a grand total of 880 MB. A net loss to me of 4 MB of disk space, for a net gain of all the functionality of Spotlight.
In the real world, e-mail messages are much closer to, or even significantly in excess of, 4 KB than they are in the case you described. And even in the case you described, the net difference is 36 MB, a totally insignificant sum in today's terms.
Re:Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:2)
Sometimes, with demands, always.
"bug reports"
Only if the bug reports are behaviorial aspects that annoy people who are not within the intended audience. For instance, for projects I work on, the intended audience is generally ME.
TigerDirect? (Score:2)
Carry on!
P.S.- Just ordered the Mini a few minutes ago.
Re:TigerDirect? (Score:4, Funny)
Cool. Convertible?
Can I put a tiger in my tank? (Score:4, Funny)
"Bloody zoos!" - Rick on The Young Ones
Core Image Application :: Imaginator (Score:2)
Liger next? (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger [wikipedia.org]
Re:Liger next? (Score:2)
Thanks for the link, though. I was sure it was just a dumb Napoleon Dynamite joke, how was I supposed to know they actually exist?!?
Re:Liger next? (Score:2)
Re:Liger next? (Score:2)
Wikipedia Widget? (Score:3, Interesting)
sweet!
Re:Wikipedia Widget? (Score:2)
This rules
Curses! (Score:2)
Which? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Which? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Which? (Score:2)
A little offtopic, but.... (Score:2)
Re:A little offtopic, but.... (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously: wildly overstocked. Like you wouldn't believe.
You bastards! (Score:4, Funny)
See, this is why I'm in favour of the two-party system; you just can't trust those third parties. Bunch of savages.
Wait, what are we talking about again?
Multiple OSes officially supported? (Score:2, Interesting)
Cartoon-like miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/ [funpause.com]
Re:Multiple OSes officially supported? (Score:2)
Re:Multiple OSes officially supported? (Score:5, Informative)
One of the most important things we abandoned when evolving our operating system from Unix was the idea of separate, hidden partitions for things like virtual memory stores. All of Mac OS X runs on a single, user-visible partition. Which means you can trivially split your hard drive up into separate partitions and run different instances of Mac OS X on them.
Re:Multiple OSes officially supported? (Score:3, Informative)
That looks kinda official to me. (from the MacOS help)
NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org Spotlight Plugin (Score:5, Informative)
The NeoLight metadata importer is licensed under LGPL and illustrates basic parsing of OOo 1.x formatted documents using CoreFoundation XML utilities. It's still in development and could use some developers to lend a hand testing, optimizing, and determining if we're extracting all the relevant content properly.
More information can be found in this trinity article [neooffice.org].
ed
Re:NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org Spotlight Plugin (Score:4, Informative)
If you try it out, please give feedback in the NeoLight Development forum [neooffice.org] on trinity. While I know it's functional on prerelease builds, I haven't had the ability to check it on the release builds (my seeding key expired last Oct. prior to the newer Tiger builds).
ed
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.
Microsoft has a huge community base (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:2)
Popularity + Extensibility + Longevity = Consumer Economy
To illustrate the above, look at an iPod; It is extremely popular (11 Million units sold), it is extensible (with earphones and cases and laser pointers and CF card readers) and not only will the current iPods be in user's hands for a good long time but the basic iPod design is extr
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 K
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 in
The urgent one: OOo / Oasis plugin for Spotlight (Score:2)
However --
There is currently no plugin for Spotlight that looks inside the OpenDocument [wikipedia.org] formats -- the free office formats that OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice/J use to replace the closed Microsoft formats, that KO
Check out my comment below...NeoLight (Score:2)
I had already posted this in an earlier comment [slashdot.org] in this article.
ed
Ye Gods, you guys are fast (Score:2)
I need sleep (Score:2)
That's about as politically correct as I can put it.
As I said... I think I need more sleep.
Fatty Fatty 4 by 6, all your widgets suck some (Score:2)
I guess it can be split apart, but damn! If that's how big it is, I'm not going to bother.
Now put the info in the size that MenuMeters [ragingmenace.com]uses (or slightly bigger), and I'd be far more likely to use it.
I understand that these should be big enough to grab your attention, but not giant and ballooned like a two week corpse.
It seems that most of the 3rd party widgets all need to go on a diet. I've already grabbed some and shrunk them down to
Automator and Core Data support from developers (Score:2)
Re:Typical worthless crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Typical worthless crap (Score:2)
Re:Typical worthless crap (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, seriously. How much Mac software is the equivalent of "faceplates for your cell phone?"
Yeah I mean how many metadata plug-ins do we need to be able to search the text inside our prototyping, graphics, and organization applications. I mean this must be like the 50th time someone has provided a way for me to instantly search my system for tree diagrams in a proprietary format with particular text in them.
Oh wait, no it isn't.
Re:Out for hours??? (Score:2)
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 ma
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:Not flaming, just offering an opinion... (Score:2)
The difference being if you were to bash Windows in a Longhorn thread you would probably get modded up.
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 customi
Because... (Score:2)
If Longhorn came out tomorrow, there'd be a front page article about it and what MS was doing to promote it. If RedHat released a big new linux distro tomorrow, we'd have a front page article about it.
It's just the buzz combined with an otherwise slow news day.
I'm not a fucking troll, you idiot mods! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I'm not a fucking troll, you idiot mods! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:hype... (Score:2)
So what do you call all the NEW applications that ship by default with the OS, that WERE NOT there in 10.3 version? I would call them brand new. But, that's just me.
For the record: I am a mac user. Using 10.4.
The hype is warranted. (Score:2)
Because it takes those techs, adds just enough to them, integrates each one well with the others and provides the technologies in a slick, well managed package. Sure many on slashdot could cobble systems together to do 80-90% of what Tiger does over a weekend. But it would be extremely tuned to their way of thinking, not something they could easily share with friends, co-wor
Re:SuperKaramba (Score:2)
The only big deal about Dashboard is that it's integrated into the OS, so it's universally available. That means a lot of people who've never heard about any of the programs I've mentioned above will "discover" it.
Re:SuperKaramba (Score:2)
Re:SuperKaramba (Score:2)
It's by Apple. Enough said.
Re:SuperKaramba (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:100+ (Score:3, Informative)
If your sister wants great new features, she should buy the upgrade. If she doesn't, she shouldn't.
Or, you know. You could be a really awesome brother and buy it for her.
Re:100+ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:100+ (Score:5, Funny)
You mispelled "download," "patches," and "days."
Re:Custom Spotlight tag action? (Score:2)
Re:Custom Spotlight tag action? (Score:3, Informative)
Extended file system metadata is not going to be supported because it's not filesystem-agnostic. The idea is that we're going to broaden support for new filesystems, not restrict it.
Spotlight is a search tool, not an asset-management database.
Although, sooner or later someone will probably just write a plug-in that imports any extended file system metadata for any file.
No, they won't, because at
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...