Friday, June 24, 2005

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

These are some thoughts I had back in December, following the Apple conference where Tiger was introduced. I'm opining on the main features of Tiger, which are:

Automator seems to be some intermediate between an AppleScript front-end and an IDE. AppleScript, incidentally, is also being described as being new, although I seem to recall it being in Mac OS. Dashboard is the idea of a virtual desktop with the generalisation removed. Do Apple users really need this level of guidance? You could have just given them a virtual desktop and shown them how you think it could be used.

Spotlight is a desktop search engine, apparently based on Lucene, from which dotLucene, the library driving the Linux Spotlight equivalent, Beagle, also springs. Spotlight is why you want Tiger.

I don't want to say much about RSS processing in Safari, other than that I'd be surprised if they had a better implementation of it than Thunderbird, and Thunderbird had it much earlier, as did Firefox - even before the conference!

Then there are CoreImage and CoreVideo, components that remarkably acelerate your graphics manipulations - it made quite an impression at the conference. I expect CoreAudio will be similarly effective. I hope I'll find time to look into how they are designed and work - what level of the OS they reside at etc.

So now you know what I was thinking back in December!

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