The third and final WWDC product I want to talk about is – of course – OS X 10.9 Mavericks. While iOS 7 was clearly the focus of this year’s WWDC, its venerable desktop counterpart certainly wasn’t left behind. Apple announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the first OS X release not to carry the name of a big cat.
While there’s not a whole lot of groundbreaking stuff going on in this OS X release, it’s still got some nice features oriented towards more demanding users of Apple’s desktop operating system. First and foremost, Apple finally addressed the Mac’s rather abysmal support for multiple displays. Each display can now finally have its own menubar, and the dock can be visible on any screen you desire it bo on. A fullscreen application on one, and the desktop on another is also possible (it’s magic I tell you). If you have an Apple TV, you can use your HDTV as an additional display. In fact, this alone is enough reason for me to buy an Apple TV – very handy.
Mavericks also adopts actionable notifications, like the ones Android introduced. You can reply to messages, delete emails, and so on, and so forth, straight from the notifications themselves. Websites can now tap into notifications as well, so that they can send you notifications even when Safari isn’t running. Quite handy.
The Mac’s perpetual black sheep, the Finder, also got some love. Apple finally got around to implementing tabbed file browsing in the Finder. Apple also added tagging to the Finder and other parts of the operating system, so you can, say, tag all files related to your thesis with “thesis”, and easily find them from the Finder sidebar. Why you wouldn’t just use folders instead is beyond me, but alas, I’ve never been in sync with how Apple disregards the file system.
At the lower levels, Apple also did some interesting things. The company focussed on power use, and implemented several technologies to reduce the power consumption of the operating system: App Nap, Timer Coalescing, and Compressed Memory. Compressed Memory compresses the least recently used data residing in memory using the WKdm algorithm, which not only frees up memory but also reduces the amount of swapping going in the background. Not only is this faster than swapping to disk (even to SSDs), but Apple also claims it saves power – essentially, that compressing data in memory uses less power than writing data to disk without compressing it.
As the name implies, App Nap will limit the resources allocated to invisible applications (e.g. those hidden by other windows ) and that aren’t actually doing something. They’re not pausing the application; they’re allocating less resources to it. This should lead to obvious power use reductions. I’m curious to see if this will cause delays when switching applications – Apple obviously claims it doesn’t, but I’m sceptical.
Lastly, there’s Timer Coalescing.
If allowing the CPU to spend as much time as possible idling is good for power, it stands to reason that frequently waking up a processor can hurt battery life. Typically, there are numerous applications and background processes that use timers with different intervals to schedule routine work. The challenge becomes: How can the system do all of the required work while maximizing the amount of time the processor spends at idle? The solution is Timer Coalescing, which shifts the execution of timers by a small amount so that multiple applications’ timers are executed at the same time. This can dramatically increase the amount of time that the processor spends idling.
As a final note, the old and venerable Apple Filing Protocol will no longer be the default protocol for sharing files on Macs. Instead, Apple will switch to Microsoft’s SMB2, which is, according to Apple, faster and more secure than AFP, and on top of that, it also increases compatibility with non-Mac machines on a network.
All in all, Mavericks seems like a decent update – nothing revolutionary, but more than enough goodies to be interesting. There’s also a number of interface tweaks to remove analog design from the operating system, which is a huge, huge plus for me. I can’t wait!
That left Windows as the only desktop OS that doesn’t use tabbed file browsing.
Edited 2013-06-13 14:54 UTC
I kinda don’t care about tabbed file browsing (no issue with multiple windows) but lack of plain, editable addressbar in macos is annoying…
I agree they should have an address bar. 3rd party tool comes to the rescue:
http://bahoom.com/finderpath/
Selecting View > Show Path Bar will give you an always visible folder path if you really want one, but it’s largely redundant since Cmd-clicking the window name provides the same navigation without taking up space the rest of the time.
Cmd-Shift-G will display an editable path field that you can type an absolute or relative path into (e.g. /Applications, Documents/foo.text) and open that folder on ENTER. (Doesn’t seem to accept ‘..’ to go up a level, but this is Finder after all.)
For bonus points, if you use Terminal then stick the following in your ~/.bash_profile, then type cdf to switch your current working directory to Finder’s frontmost folder:
function cdf { # change current directory to front finder window/selection
cd “`osascript << EOF
try
tell application \”Finder\”
set sel to selection
if sel is not {} then
set f to item 1 of sel
if class of f is in {disk, folder} then
return POSIX path of (f as alias)
else
return POSIX path of (get container of f as alias)
end if
else if Finder window 1 exists then
return POSIX path of (get target of Finder window 1 as alias)
else
return POSIX path of (get desktop as alias)
end if
end tell
on error
return \”/\”
end try
EOF`”
}
To go the other way, just type ‘open .’ and your current working directory will appear in Finder.
yadda, yadda, yadda… I know about that but this is kinda retarded – i simply want want bar, with current path that I can edit when i want and copy to other windows… yes – I have navigation on the titlebar but it’s not that convenient, I know about cmd+shift+G but I can’t copy nor edit current path (it seems to remember the last one) — bollocks!
I use XtraFinder which gives you tabbed browsing (optional) and also allows you to copy the unix path, open a terminal at the current location, etc etc (loads more options)
It’s free: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42067/xtrafinder
I’ve been using it for a while and it’s mostly stable (the odd crash over the last year). Prior to that I used TotalFinder which is very similar but you have to pay for it.
Update: I don’t think it allows you to edit the path manually though, which I see is a requirement of yours upon re-reading your post
Edited 2013-06-14 13:30 UTC
neat!
thanks, maybe I can’t edit path but it’s still amazing improvement and ok – i’ve tested alternatives but this one is veery good (and free
).
Nice. Thanks for the tip and the script!
http://qttabbar.wikidot.com/
You were saying?
All above mentioned is good, but what about fixing abyssmall memory management, broken on OSX since early 10.6?
What is abysmal about it? Yes it caches like an ecentric hoarder but I don’t see a performance impact – whether I’ve got 4GB or 8GB or that matter.
Tagging is better because you can script it.
Ex:
* All files created during work week get a “work” tag.
* All downloads are accessible in the download tag, even if you move them around (I do know about hardlinks, but who use that for this?)
* You can tag ressources with a task in your todo list without moving them
Then there is the fact that it is easier to search for something and that you can have multiple tags by files.
Overall, if tagged was well implemented, and I don’t think it is in 10.9, it would be better than folder. For now, it is just yet an other feature. I think tags belong to the document titlebar more then finder.
As Elv13 above explained, tags allow you to group together files regardless of where they are. Also, I love the ability to add multiple tags to the same file.
I find it a bit surprising you don’t see how flexible tags can be.
Flexible, yet they’d be entirely unnecessary if people weren’t so divorced from the idea of a folder. Most computer users today literally do not know what a file is, let alone where it’s stored. I’m not exaggerating in the least.
I am very anal about my directory projects because I create complex video, multimedia, and print projects with numerous assets. But I still see plenty of value in tagging because that makes it easier to find assets across projects that might relate to my next project. This can help “power user” with massive file systems hierarchies and novice users with a cluttered documents folder. I think this could benefit most OSX users.
This.
Tagging can also be useful in multiple user systems because folder structures for WIP content tend to be ad hoc and representative of clashing mental information maps. Being able to designate something by more than its physical location helps increase findability.
After reading through the Core Technology overview PDF on mavericks i am interested in how the OS is going to work.
The biggest problem ive had in recent releases was when Lion messed up Expose, however bringing that back in Mountain Lion fixed that, i haven’t got any other complaints.
I used to be more vocal on HFS+, as during the leopard/snow leopard era i had a couple of filesystem cascade crashes where every folder just corrupted itself. The HDD was physically fine the fs not so much. However i haven’t had one of these in the Lion + era so perhaps a revision has been made to the FS and it fixed the stability of it, i trust NTFS more still (apart from the king which is ZFS).
i am interested in the compression and i like the idea of bringing CPU cycles in line, i have a macbook air which has fixed 4GB RAM, personally for the work i do on it, it’s fine, i don’t develop or edit large photos / videos. However i do notice that it sometimes starts getting a little full so if the compression reduces this down ill be happy.
As said i like the idea of bringing the CPU cycles together along with the other battery enhancing (app nap) stuff, again im not going to complain as my MBA does incredibly well, however an extra hour or so would be a big bonus for an inexpensive software upgrade.
I love the idea of Calendar, Reminders and hopefully the address book looking professional again, i hated the leather look of Lion and thought that calendar looked great from the Leopard/SL era.
The most interesting part of the overview document was that SMB2 is the default sharing protocol, which is surprising that apple are not going to push AFP and simply go with SMB. Although i will admit that this makes sense as it’s a protocol with the help of Samba that all the OS’s can read.
Overall im excited for this release. It does feel that Lion was similar to Microsoft’s Vista, in that it brought a lot of changes and some new underpinnings and now apple are able to take advantage of these and start pushing out more features.
I don’t. When NTFS crashes it can be far more subtle, let’s say a cluster bitmap corruption (i.e. the bit that tells the filesystem what space is used and what is free). Ever seen that? It looks, on the users’ end, like files are randomly disappearing as they’re being erased by new files without the os realizing it. Yes you can repair it, but you can’t get the files that were replaced back again unless you have a backup, and if you’re not watching it closely you may not notice this right away. It’s nasty. At least when most other filesystems crash you know it and in some of them, like the ext? filesystems and zfs, it is self-correcting as there are multiple copies of the superblock and inconsistencies are checked against them.
So firstly, I work on Windows filesystems (see bio.) I get to see a lot…
I don’t think this is what happens. Imagine a cluster is in use by FileA but (for whatever reason) the bitmap doesn’t record it as allocated. Now FileB gets allocated the same cluster. FileA is still there, because the system didn’t detect the condition. It’s just that FileA’s contents end up the same as FileB’s contents, because they’re using the same block. And if only one cluster was in this condition, the party stops here, because the cluster is now marked in use so only these two files will share it.
Given how bad this is, NTFS works hard to avoid it, both at the design level and by making pessimistic assumptions in event of detected corruption. As above, I see a lot, and I don’t see this often.
ZFS has checksums so it can detect corruption in its structures (assuming, of course, that the corruption was not generated by a bug), and use a good copy if one exists. ReFS, Microsoft’s next generation file system, also checksums its metadata, and when used with Storage Spaces can also locate a good copy of data if one exists. Ext2/3 do not. Ext4 checksummed its journal and more recently metadata too; I don’t know how it would be able to recover though, since AFAIK it doesn’t keep redundant copies, so it has nothing to recover from.
I have been working with computers since 1982, on the Internet since 1988, on the Web since 1992, and in the I.T. sector since 1997. I have enjoyed the Windows NT line of computers ever since NT 4.0 was released (got my first copy late 96), and I have *NEVER* seen something like this happen. And I have repaired thousands of NTFS-based Windows computers and Windows installations in my day from 4.0 clear up to Win8.
Was I just lucky? *knocks on wood*
Edited 2013-06-13 20:29 UTC
I think there are certain patterns of use which make the situation more likely that sane people try to avoid for other reasons. I’ve seen simuluar behavior, but in all cases ( just my line of work) the systems were in bad environmental places with heat issues and high particulate matter and the drives were not high quality, long in the tooth, and nearly full. I was never sure what to blame hardware failure, or software corruption.
So far I have seen this happen once on a DAS attached to a 2003 server. One user kept calling in for a couple days about files disappearing and reappearing. The help desk and admins were scratching their heads a bit but didn’t think too much of it. Then the file system just crapped out entirely and we had to restore the entire volume from backups.
Probably not. I’ve seen three cases of this, total. Once on XP, twice on 7. It’s not a common problem, but it is one that I’ve *never* had with *any* other filesystem and means I’m disinclined to trust NTFS as much as others do. It may not be common, but it can be quite nasty if you happen to see it. I’ve never figured out the exact chain of events to cause it; if I had, I’d have reported it for whatever good that would have done.
i have to agree with the other posters, i haven’t seen this problem myself, ive been using NT since 4, since about 1998.
The worst ive ever seen an NTFS volume was on a windows 2003 server, i can’t remember what brought it about, either a problem with power or something, but it seemed pretty corrupted, however after a couple of automatic restarts after a chkdsk during start up it went along fine, couldn’t see any data loss on the drive either which was surprising.
Ive seen some pretty bad use of disks on windows, unplugging when files are copying, powercut/power cycling, but NTFS always bounces back.
Actually, Apple uses their own implementation called SMBX, since they don’t like GPL3
thats interesting i never knew that,
i thought MacOSX used samba
It has nothing to do with liking or disliking GPL3 (liking/disliking implies an emotion based reason rather than technical) but the fact that Apple wanted to do one thing but the licence said that they couldn’t thus they kept with the GPL2 version till their in house implementation could replace it. Unless you’re advocating that Apple should break licenses to keep people like you happy then they made the right move – it also allows them to talk directly to Microsoft and possibly share code which hopefully will translate into a better implementation.
The impression I get with HFS+ is that Core Storage is going to be where all the ‘fun’ occurs and to the applications sitting on top things will keep working as they do. I’m sure they’ve looked at the scenario of replacing and realised that it’ll cause more problems that it solves with the benefits being minuscule to the end user when compared to the pain that it brings. This way you get to ‘clean house’ and improve HFS+ without the disruption a new file system will result in. I’d say it is very much a layered way of doing things very much like how FreeBSD bought enhancements to its own file system.
True, and a good amount of that memory, I’d hazard to guess, is stuff that the end user is no longer even using such as the case of Safari where if you close a tab the memory isn’t instantly reclaimed – hopefully with the new per-process tab and other infrastructure improvements along with a quick adoption of new technologies by third parties the situation will improve greatly.
Photobooth still has the horrible Scott Forstall look so I’m hoping that a build later down the track will result in its cleaning up in favour of the same sort of professional appearance rather than the gimmicky crap that was introduced during Scott’s time at the helm.
Not surprised; it has been one good thing that I’ve noticed with Apple – they’ll kill something off that no longer has an advantage and a reason for existing other than for sentimental value. Apple has also put Quicktime off to pasture as it is now considered deprecated in favour of AV Kit which will hopefully translate into a better experience for Windows users of their i-devices. One thing I noted over on Reddit in a reply is how the removal of Scott has resulted in serious power user improvements finally appearing in OS X where as it seemed to be for the last couple of releases the focus was on user visible gimmicks such as faux leather, the Games Centre etc. rather than addressing the stuff that heavy lifting pro’s need fixing up.
Edited 2013-06-14 16:09 UTC
Exactly how are you going to transfer this tag data back and forth when sharing files? I somehow doubt that emailing will allow you to send the tags, and I’d bet they’re put in the Mac extra files everyone hates so much.
Email clients don’t add arbitrary mime headers to messages already… err, wait. Not saying that Mail.app in OS X 10.9 does this with tags, I’m just saying it can be done. The question is if including the way a document was tagged is useful to the recipient of an email which I’d argue that 9 times out of 10 isn’t. When they receive an email with an attachment they find interesting enough to save they’re probably going to tag it according to their own standards.
Edited 2013-06-14 15:43 UTC
Tags are nothing new: BeOS had attributes from the start, various *nix filesystems also support extended attributes and even NTFS understands the concept. There are plenty of archive & compression formats that understand and can store tags/attributes; ZIP being the most obvious and popular one.
What we really need to do is get everyone to agree on a standard set of tags…
Considering how hard it is to simply build a standard, weakly overlapping menu hierarchy for desktop applications (as done on Linux and BSD desktops), I don’t expect a standard tagging hierarchy for each and every kind of file to appear anytime soon.
Edited 2013-06-16 06:44 UTC
Here’s two.
http://authorities.loc.gov/
http://dewey.org/webdewey/login/login.html
Do you think that classifications which are designed for sorting books (i.e. published content) could work well for software or unpublished personal files ?
I feel spontaneously skeptical about the idea, but if you can develop that point a bit I’m all ears !
Edited 2013-06-17 18:22 UTC
SMB2 is all very well as a default protocol for networking, but it doesn’t preserve all of the metadata. I understand that Time Machine will still maintain AFP for backups, too.
I had a movie on my iPad that I wanted to display on my TV – and I vaguely remembered from years back there was a cable for that.
So I went to the store, and I ended up buying the Apple TV instead.
Sure it’s a netflix player and also opens up iTunes content to the tv, but I like how I can take a movie on my iPad and just have it play on the TV using airplay.
No need for a cable – nice. So now, you can use the tv as another monitor from mac os x? I won’t use that immediately but also nice as an option.
I’ve been happy with OS X for a while now, so I don’t really care about minor updates, and usually count myself lucky when they don’t remove features. Removing java and x11 being obvious ones – but they also sometimes have philosophy shifts where oh, now you can’t modify the finder to add versioning with this extension or add a template to this app – ARGH, not when I was using that.
So, no reports of removed features so far, is nice.
But I will give you one disappointment – I want touch support in Mac OS X (with of course, hardware to go with it).
And frankly that leads me right into the next thing I want – an iOS app player. Sure I have an iPad simulator, but I mean an actual arm emulator that plays iOS apps.
Or maybe they should publish the exact same API (along with Cocoa, not instead of) they use in their ARM devices to let the people port easily their apps to run natively on OS X.
“ditto blocks for metadata, and copy-on-write Btree-catalogs”
I am not sure about this, but these feature don’t appear to be present in previous versions. Also, it is increasingly clear that Apple will not abandon HFS+ anytime soon. Instead, they will simply add modern storage features into the volume manager layer.
I don’t know enough about the technical details to know if this fear is in any way grounded, but wouldn’t timer coalescing result in a slight latency on user actions?
Clock speed increases would presumably hide this over time, but can someone with a better technical understanding of the impact of timer coalescing comment on the likelihood of this being at all user-perceptible?
Windows 7 already does this and I haven’t noticed any impact – from what I understand those which really must wake up the CPU will do so but those whose tasks aren’t time bounce sensitive then they’ll be held back a few milliseconds to avoid having to wake up the CPU unnecessarily.
Ironically, the MAC OS in the early 90s handled multiple monitors much more elegantly than windows did at the time. The main drawback was always the menubar being tied to the primary screen. I found an app called multimode that got around that by duplicating the menu on another monitor.
When they added full screen apps, they bizarrely made any other screens you used go to a useless linen texture wasting however many monitors you had attached. As a result I never used the full screen mode.
I am glad that they have finally decided to fix both of these things this in 10.9
Edited 2013-06-13 21:16 UTC
that app is actualy called multimon… OSX’s spell checker and I don’t like each other much.
Apple’s new ‘Sea Lion’ looks great!! It’s nice to see Apple implementing lots of little touches that seem superficial but are actually quite useful. I’d like to welcome Apple’s Finder to the world of tabbed Windows. Linux Window managers have had this feature for ages now. I cannot fathom why Microsoft has never implemented tabbed browsing in Windows explorer!! Another feature lacking in explorer is the ability to print directory listings. Ah well, maybe with Windows 9…
Trash tabbed finder, give me cut & paste!
This, 1000 times this. Who downvoted him and why?
Not a clue, but I know why. A quick Google would turn up that cut and paste already exist in the Finder, even though they’re a bit nonstandard.
I used Total Finder for this back in the day when I struggled with Mac OS X. I’m not aware of other methods. Anyway it’s quite unreasonable to make the user jump through hoops for such a basic feature. But, that’s Apple for you ….
You already have it, though why the hell it’s hidden as it is blows my mind. Copy as you normally would, then move (hold down the option key while selecting paste from the menu, or else press cmd+option+v). Voila, cut and paste. Not many seem to know this little trick, and why Apple leaves a Cut item in the menu when it does nothing is beyond me and only adds to the confusion surrounding this.
As a side tip, holding down the option key in menus can give you hidden items in a lot of places. Explore your favorite apps’ menus with the option key down, and you might be surprised what you find.
Wow, just wow … Glad I jumped off the Apple bandwagon.
Then why did you say this:
Which implies you’re a current Mac user. If you’re not a current mac user then why should you care about the lack or presence of a given feature?
Edited 2013-06-14 14:56 UTC
Because I was a Mac OS X user for several years before I left the platform in frustration. This issue was one of the things that drove me away. I’m also an OS enthusiast, so these things are relevant to me.
I would prefer having my folders always closed and in the top of the finder (Ã la Windows Explorer).
The “quality” of keep the folders expanded as the last time we use it is very awful to me.
still not supporting open PC hardware like Microsoft does and i am still waiting for them to support AMD cpu’s.
Maybe OSX 11 will be it. This time without steve jobs consent.
Just make Mail.app worthy of the name. It drives me more nuts than the Finder these days.
BUT. I also like the sound of tagging, very much.
By the way,
Opera is shipping their Opera Mail detached from their browser. You can take a look at it!
Ah, thanks for the tip
Does anyone know if they FINALLY got around to updating opengl from 2.1/3.2 to something more recent?
OpenGL 4.1.
In previous versions of OS X, SMB shares were shown in the Finder as beige CRTs displaying a blue screen of death, and now Apple says that SMB is faster and more secure than their file sharing protocol.
I just love the irony.
TIL SMB2 equals Windows.
“The more you learn!”
Apple could’ve chosen breeds of domestic cats for new code names for OS X. OS X 10.9 Persian, anyone?
What about canids instead?
OS X Dog
OS X Wolf
OS X Fox
OS X Coyote
OS X Jackal
OS X Tanuki
😉
Clearly inferior to felines
I vote for OSX Maru! http://i.imgur.com/3jaqv.png
Excellent idea, that is what I call thinking outside….. errr inside the box.
FINALLY. It’s amazing it took Apple so long to clue into the fact that the “big cats” naming scheme was complete idiocy. For one, they blew their wad too early by starting with the biggest cats – giving the perception that their newer releases are less powerful than the previous ones. Really, what sounds more impressive: OS X Lion? Or OS X De-clawed Overweight Housecat?
Which leads into the other problem: there was no rhyme or reason to the names, and no reliable way to tell which releases are newer. Both tigers and lions are larger & more powerful than mountain lions, so that means OS X Tiger & Lion must be newer than OS X Mountain Lion, right?
It almost feels like a deliberate way of making obnoxious hipsters feel special & “in the know”. You know, the kind of insufferable tw@s who used to endlessly repeat the story of Clarus, the Dogcow (the dogcow goes “moof”… because cows go “moo” and dogs go “woof”, lol get it lol?).
Must be lucky guy not to know any obnoxious hipsters as I’d never heard the tale of Clarus the Dogcow before.
It is so much better a progression like 3.1 -> 95 -> 98 -> 2000 -> XP ->Vista -> 7 -> 8 (I am probably missing some version).
I think on mac there is an actual numerical version that makes sense and is widely used (in “about this mac” I get 10.8.4 and not the non-sense mountain lion marketing name). So it is not as bad.
You missed ME, but that’s a good thing. Erasing ME from history and our collective memory would be great.
You could say the same thing about the OS that Apple was peddling at the time.
Better not, or else we’ll just repeat it. Then again, we don’t seem to learn much from history anyway…
Somehow, Me was good for me …I suspect large part of issues was because people were trying “tricks” from earlier 9x releases, which – due to too big changes in the underlying OS – often broke the system.
Or maybe the mix of VxD and WDM drivers causes the issues… (my newish PC would have only WDM)
LOL WUT? …you do realize that 2000 comes after (19)98, which comes after (19)95… and that 8 comes after 7, right? RIGHT?!?!?
And 7 and 8 come waaay before 95. Also, XP and Vista aren’t even numbers, so, your point is… ???
Edited 2013-06-17 19:33 UTC
If you want to get pedantic, OS 10.0 was just known as “os ten” (and “os ex” by those with latin numeral issues) . That it’s codename was cheetah was only revealed after subsequent releases were made.
Is if they had Sarah Palin and John McCain introduce OS X 10.9 Mavericks. That would have been cool. Keep the politics out of the computing I guess.
http://www.os4online.com