What makes Tiger innovative, rather than merely iterative, is that it breaks down the barriers between the self-contained computer and the Internet. It is the first operating system to incorporate and expand upon the intensive hard-drive search popularized by Google says MacNewsWorld.
Apple’s New Operating System Turns Up Heat on Microsoft
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Interesting juxtaposition of articles around this one:
*Microsoft to add ‘black box’ to Windows
Has serious potential for reducing privacy/security
*Microsoft pulls yet another feature from Longhorn (the “Secure Computing Base” feature)
Has serious potential for reducing security/privacy.
Need to upgrade system anyway, has great software, many hardware options in various price ranges….looking forward to less spyware, fewer hassles…..
“It’s not that Tiger is about to eat Longhorn for lunch — after all, Microsoft Windows runs 94 percent of the world’s personal computers.”
Here we go again… another “journalist” mis using market share data to talk of install base. UGH!
Windows has roughly 87% of the OSes in use today. Sure that’s nothing to sneeze at, but when you make it sound like Linux, OS X and everything else only ocupy 6% of the cvomputing industry… they’re doing it a major disservice… but then, thats to be expected from an ecommerce times network news site.
I mean, spotlight is nice and all, but personally I think Automator is more “revolutionary” than Spotlight. Very easy to create workflows, easy to integrate them with other applications (like the context menu of finder, or the pdf menu in the print dialog), and easy to share with other users(!)
Instead of explaining to your dad how he should put a zip file of resized pictures on his ftp server, you can just mail him a workflow and ask him to double click it..
…this will dumb down the dad, not a good idea.
Automator is the real power here. Scripting on windows with VB does not even come close to the elegance that this is going to provide for network administrators. It also makes scripting possible for knowledge workers you might not nessarily have the knowledge or experience to write scripts from scratch.
Tiger is the best OS at every level I’ve ever seen so far.
Windows has 87% of the market because 87% of the computers out there are PCs!
I’m sure Apple can bring the PC to a new level and it is a shame they are ignoring it. Too bad, the PC won’t get better by itself, or by Microsoft.
I’ll have tiger on my mac this weekend, cannot wait.
Apple can go ahead and continue to ignore the PC world, IMO. They have no obligation to try to make the PC world better. By focusing on their own platform and their own niche they’ve produced some amazing products that are only getting better. I think this is thanks in large part to their much more narrow focus and ideals. It isn’t logical that they could simply retool everything they’ve ever known and magically bring that kind of quality to the PC world. It is *possible* they could, but those resources to do so would have to come from somewhere which could mean the very elements of OSX that we all take for granted would likely suffer some in the process. As an Apple customer and shareholder, I don’t care about the PC world nor do I want Apple to divert resources away from what has clearly been working fine for them both financially and technically. Don’t fix what ain’t broken. If you’re using a PC and you want OSX, make your next upgrade a Mac. Don’t want to shell out for what you perceive is overpriced hardware? Then don’t buy it. If I wanted a Ferrari engine in my Beetle would that be Volkswagen’s problem? I don’t think so.
“It is the first operating system to incorporate and expand upon the intensive hard-drive search popularized by Google says MacNewsWorld”
Wasn’t it Novell that shipped “Beagle” first?
Besides, what is windows installed base amount to? I have 3~4 systems that came with windows pre-installed but now runs Linux
John
I’m a mac user and love Tiger (running it right now), but i think there’s enough Tiger boosting articles getting posted around here. We already know its a great OS; lets move on. I don’t want mac users to be viewed as christian missionaries, always pushing their angle more than others want to hear it.
Support the platform, but we don’t need 25 million evangelists. That will just create backlash.
When (and if) LongHorn is released, it is going to kick some apple butt!
The way ME and Bob did?
What’s so ******** special bout Desktop search ?
Companies don’t mind bout this.
Most important for them is to have a fast, reliable Intranet search engine.
I’m no expert, and I don’t have my copy of Tiger yet, but it seems to me that Spotlite will be more than just a “desktop search engine”. If I just wanna search for files, I can already do that in Panther. But the idea of smart folders (like smart playlists in iTunes… but more powerful I’m sure) sounds like there can be a lot of things done with it. Hopefully there will be functionality to keep your diretory tidy. I dunno, it just seems that with all the playing around I do (installing and uninstalling) with open source software, and all the documents I create, I find myself clearing things in my directories every week or so. An option to dump all my files that are older than x amount of time into an archive for review would be sweet. That way I keep only the files that I am currently working with in my Documents folder. Wouldn’t that be sweet? Anyway… I probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but something in spotlight that will address directory tidiness would be a very welcome feature to me.
Chortle, indeed.
it will?
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=46175
hmm.. seems to me the people who should comment on how “useless” desktop searches like Spotlight and WinFS (the google and msn searches are not in the same league as either SL or WFS) are the Be users.
tell us.. how useful was it and how useful would it have been had befs had the features of spotlight and winFS.
Searching on BeOS was pretty amazing. At first it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but once you played around with it a bit you realized how great it was. The main reasons it was so good were:
1.) It was insanely fast. I mean instantaneous fast. There were people that used to demo BeOS who only ever opened whatever applications they needed by running queries (you can save old ones) — it’s that efficient (note that most people probably didn’t use the system this way).
2.) It was very precise. There were tools that existed to do similar things to what Spotlight does, namely transfer contents of files to filesystem metadata (what BeOS actually searched). The best example of this were programs to turn mp3 id3 tags into metadata. You could create “smart folders” that contained, say all of your music of a certain genre. Because the queries could be really complicated, you could get insanely specific queries that were live (they update when you add new stuff). In other words, BeOS had the functionality of iTunes built into the file manager and system search, but it wasn’t limited to just music. Because you were free to add your own metadata, you could catalog your data any way you wanted, even types of files that the OS knew nothing about initially. Spotlight takes this to the next level by having the system search the content of files and automatically index it as metadata.
All of this added up to the fact that it was trivial to find anything you needed on your hard drive, no matter how little you remembered about it. I’ve never seen another OS make it so easy and fast to find something (until Tiger). It was hard to go back to Linux and Windows searching after using BeOS. I’m glad that every OS seems to be picking up this technology in some form or another. It’s definitely a good thing, but you have to try it out first to appreciate it.
…I still won’t be able to read common UDF format burned cd/dvds.
is that Universal Disk Format? sorry, never heard of it. Maybe you could enlighten us to why its a better standard to support than the ISO one.
Well, I have been thinking for quite awhile about getting a ‘whitebox’ computer – a small PC to hook up to my HDTV so I could play MAME (arcade emulator) using 3D Arcade as a frontend:
http://3darcade.mameworld.net
Since I needed a small PC, I thought a Mac Mini might be perfect for this (assuming it had the right video output), cuz I could always fire up the Mac version of MAME and play it on that. But then, reality soon set in … duh, the 3D Arcade frontend doesn’t run on OSX, so that immediately ruled out a Mac whitebox! And I don’t think Tiger with its snazzy search capabilities is going to do a thing to change that. I guess it’s just like I’ve always said – seems more the need that influences which computer/OS one uses rather than the actual OS. You can through all the bells and whistles you want into it, but if I can’t do what I want with it, it’s basically useless to me.
As for the search capabilities, I’ve never really taken a look at Spotlight. But then again, I have all my files organized and rarely (if ever) use the search feature as it is, so I dunno if it would benefit me a whole lot anyway. Personally, I’m one of these people who likes knowing where my files are
I hope all the your ROMz are legal or else the longhorn will get you…(Imagine police sirens in the background). On the bright side you have almost a year to enjoy your illegal software.
Tiger is unleashed long before longhorn 😉
Yeah together with the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
Longhorn: The vapors are in the air….
UDF allows packet writing to CDs so you can write and erase from CD-RW disks like a floppy… it is basically a meaningless technology now that we have USB2 flash drives.
UDF is a big waste of time. Note that Windows can’t write to it by default – it can read it (which is all the original poster commented on), but what’s the point of a filesystem which is nastily inefficient for the sake of random access if you can’t write to it?
My first thought upon reading this was that macnewsworld.com probably won’t provide the most objective information on OSX…
For example: Integrates RSS into Safari? Wow, that’s new… hey… what’s that little orange thing down the bottom of my Firefox window?
Fetches up to the minute stock (don’t care), weather (forecastfox r0x0rz) and flight (does anyone actually fly enough to care?) information…. wow, that’s revolutionary too.
Could really care more about Spotlight eh…. locate:// in Konqueror is working okay. Yeah, it only searches filenames, but for some reason I tend to give files meaningful names…
I suppose I could use Beagle if I really wanted to.
“‘Spotlight really is a fundamental change in how you get to things on your computer,’ Schiller said. ‘I am hard-pressed to think of anything as impactful.'”
Um, Google Desktop Search? Apple was kind of beaten to it!
Who are the “10 million Macintosh users who have yet to switch” exactly? Presumably if they have yet to switch, they are not yet Macintosh users – in which case it’d be basically as accurate to say 6 billion.
Not that Tiger’s going to be bad, not at all, but I find it hard to get excited when they’ve basically done what others already have and stuck their own logo on it, and are charging when the others were free.
not *was*, but *is*.
BeOS still works heer everyday.
And Zeta is coming along nicely, without the bloat of XP or the slowing eye-candy (and really candy-like) ugly things.
Plus it can also search Google itself…
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_googlefs_006.png
I am really pumped about Tiger.
Not at the expense of Windows, even though the story of Longhorn is pretty sad right now. (And you know Jobs is going to demo crazy cool features in 10.5 right before the launch of Longhorn to embarrass Microsoft.)
But that doesn’t matter right now. I am getting Tiger on Friday and get to play with it all weekend. Life is sweet.
find myself clearing things in my directories every week or so. An option to dump all my files that are older than x amount of time into an archive for review would be sweet
You want Automator. Guess what, you’re getting that too
.
I can see where Safety wouldn’t want an overhyped system, it can create backlash. The thing is: whatever Apple does is going to generate backlash, with or without user interference. OTOH, I’m looking forward to Tiger. That’s coming out this week. Tiger doesn’t drop features just so they’ll make the holiday season 2006 deadline [at least, not that we heard of].
If there are no major problems with the system [I’m a believer, it’s true, but I work in the software industry, that’s true too] then there is no reason why this system would not be widely accepted. I see no reason not to upgrade to Tiger. Anything that makes the kitty purr is going to make me happy working with the system too.
And I don’t want to be the only one. If people want to be happy with the cow, by all means be happy. The news we’re hearing isn’t very inspiring, and I am frankly disappointed by what I’ve seen sofar. But my view of the world is not the be all and end all. Live like you wanna live, baby! I don’t think the cow is going to trump the tiger, but you don’t have to agree. I’m driving the Tiger this week, the cattle lovers are going to be waiting at least another year. You’re welcome to it.
/I rant when I’m excited, so sue me.
Beagle is at best, a late alpha.
Spotlight is shipping, and was still further ahead than Beagle when demo’d at WWDC 2004.
Even the basic find command in the Finder has a ridiculous amount of metadata search parmeters, including obscure ones like “alpha channel,” “codecs,” and “General Midi Sequence.”
Plus, you can bookmark a search.
I’m not a really big fan of search myself, but it looks like they’re finally getting around to integrating that BeOS metadata stuff into the Mac OS. From what I remember (it’s been a few year) the BeOS’ file system find was easier to figure out & use, but Apple’s slowly getting there.
“The basic find command” in Finder does not have those options in Panther, and the one in Tiger is powered by Spotlight
Spotlight is more than the search field menu in the corner of the screen.
By the way, Spotlight isn’t just inspired by Google Desktop, it’s the other way around. Spotlight was first reveiled in June 2004 at the WWDC, Google Desktop wasn’t reveiled until October 2004 – giving the Google programmers almost 4 months to “get inspired” and create a working product.
No need to act like a kid! Businesses had invested a lot in the PC market and cannot change the whole thing to Apple overnight. What they need is reliable & secure hardware/OS/software at a reasonable cost (including TCO). The PC started by being a simple toy and look where we are now and to be honest, you have to give Microsoft credit for this. What I’m saying is Apple can do better. The x64 right now is not too bad compare to the initial 8086 with memory banks. You can almost run it if you want only with USB or Firewire devices. No need anymore for PCI cards to install except for the graphics. At the end, it will not be a PC anymore it will be a MAC.
There is a big opportunity. People are fed up with Microsoft and are looking for something else without breaking the bank. If Apple stay in the corner, Microsoft will do what they want b/c of no serious competitor.