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OS X Operating Systems Businesses Programming Apple Technology

Working With Tiger Technologies 133

Posted by timothy from the keep-your-chair-handy dept.
Juanvaldes writes "Apple has put online more developer-oriented information about Tiger. There are also detailed articles about Spotlight, Dashboard, 64-bit apps and Automator."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Working With Tiger Technologies More

Working With Tiger Technologies

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  • New Apple User (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rokzy ( 687636 ) on Monday January 17, 2005 @09:56PM (#11391259)
    I just got my first Mac, an iBook G4, and have been amazed by it so far. the level of integration is astounding. everything Just Works(tm) and also Plays Nice(tm). for example, everything can be voice-controlled, and the voice control actually works and doesn't need training, and when I install a new app ("Firefox") it automagically understand that app.

    Having seen the Macworld Keynote, Tiger looks very good. I'm mostly interested in Dashboard. Seems like a good step forward (I love Expose). Spotlight also seems great, though the number of times I actually use a local search is tiny.

    Apple keeps getting better and genuinely innovating, whereas MS seems to just buy, rebrand, then move on when it's Good Enough(tm). I'm sorry if that sounds flamebait, but it's The Truth(tm).

    • Re:New Apple User (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rritterson ( 588983 ) * on Monday January 17, 2005 @11:01PM (#11391661)
      I use a Mac, so don't take me as a MS Fanboy, but:

      WindowsXP has a built in speech engine. It doesn't need training to understand commands, but you do have to train it to do dictation. I assume any program can use the API, but I only know of one set of programs that do: MS Office.

      Dashboard is almost a direct rip off of a third party app, but I forget what it's called.

      Desktop search was supposed to be part of WinFS, which MS announced about a year ago. You can't call apple the innovator here, just the fastest-to-market.

      I think the true advatages of going with Apple are:

      -that OSX gets faster with each version, *on the same hardware*. Think Longhorn will run faster than XP on my P3 machine?

      -expose. It works just like you'd expect it to. It's faster to pick out a safari window on a collage of thumbnailed windows than it is from a vertical text list of the window titles (a la XP).

      -the .app packaging format. The icon is the entire app. Just drag it to the trash to uninstall it. No registry fragments left behind.

      -ability to run as unprivledged. If i need to change a system setting, it will automatically prompt for the admin password. I can also use su and sudo when I need to. (Linux has this too)

      -the BSD underbelly. I can use the great GUI to do what I need with a few clicks, but there are some things i just can't do without a terminal. Having rsync, ssh, sftp, cron, etc available to me is great. Unlike Linux, I don't feel like I have to use the terminal unless I want to.

      • Re:New Apple User (Score:4, Interesting)

        by WMD_88 ( 843388 ) <kjwolff8891@yahoo.com> on Monday January 17, 2005 @11:07PM (#11391708) Homepage Journal
        Desktop search was supposed to be part of WinFS, which MS announced about a year ago. You can't call apple the innovator here, just the fastest-to-market.

        Spotlight has been in developement a few years. Well before the MS announcement. In fact, fragments of it were in OS 9.

        You are, however, correct about Dashboard and the speech thing.

        • Re:New Apple User (Score:4, Insightful)

          by JQuick ( 411434 ) on Monday January 17, 2005 @11:53PM (#11391978)
          Actually desktop widgets were part of the old MacOS. They were not re-implemented in earlier Macos X implementations.

          A third party developer wrote Konfabulator which enabled users create and run JavaScript applets. He called them widgets too.

          Is Dashboard a knock-off? Apple did introduce desktop widgets first. And their re-introduction and design makes sense. With WebKit and Java as integral parts of the base OS: css, html, and javascript make the most sense, and of course they will still call them widgets.

          The fact that Konfabulator called them widgets is a knock-off of Apple's original widgets. The fact that the widgets in javascript makes some people suspicious that Apple stole the idea.

          I don't know the principles on either side, so cannot say definitively what happened. I just think bald claims that Apple stole the idea are perhaps overstated.
          • I assume the desktop widgets you speak of were in Mac OS classic, along with a lot of other MacOS features that haven't been re-introduced until recently.

            If that is the case, how far back do they go? Do they predate the BeOS system, where you could literally drag widgets from one application to a container? It wasn't as configurable as, say, Konfabulator, but the ease-of-use for the end user was excellent. You could, for example, put a Google Search control on your desktop (or in a container window full

          • Re:New Apple User (Score:5, Insightful)

            by reynhout ( 89071 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @04:59AM (#11393192)
            Apple introduced Desktop Accessories in 1984. At the time, MacOS (then just called the "System") wasn't multitasking, so DAs were a way to run "something else" without closing your running application.

            Some examples: Calculator, Alarm Clock (later, the clock moved to the menu bar), Key Caps (so you could find all the non-standard keyboard characters like the Yen symbol, etc), Puzzle, Scrapbook (like multiple, persistent copy buffers), Notepad (like Stickies), Chooser (to select printers and networks), etc. Yup, 1984.

            They all lived under the Apple menu, and could be used at any time. They required some unusual constraints to WRITE, however...but Apple provided some decent sample code and shareware developers wrote hundreds more of them.

            After MacOS became preemptively multitasking, the only reason DAs stuck around is that users expected them. There was no longer a good reason to code within the DA frameworks, (and by then you could put any app you wanted into the Apple menu, so that was no longer unique..)

            Dashboard is not a knock-off. It's a reintroduction of Apple's own good idea from twenty years ago. As for the naming choice -- well, I think it's dumb...but it doesn't make sense to claim that that's stolen either. There is no more generic term for a small, useful thing. Widgets will be more powerful than DAs and easier to write, but that's a function of the intervening time, not stolen inspiration.

            Dashboard is also interesting because the applets (see?) are like Desk Accessories, but the use model appears to be Apple's first admission that virtual desktops might be a GOOD IDEA that users are capable of understanding (when presented in a very animated-so-you-know-whats-happening-at-all-times kind of way). That's a big step for Apple HIG!

            Next stop, multi-button mouses, STANDARD!

            I only worry that with Expose and Dashboard, Apple might decide that users are all tapped out in the weird-things-that-happen-to-my-desktop department and never implement virtual desktops themselves.

            (Though I'm pretty happy with Virtue. Look it up on version tracker.)

            • It's a knock-off, just like a Rolex is a knock-off of it's cheaper cousins, the Rolex clone.

              I laugh whenever I see people discussing Konfabulator, looking over how it is implemented, and how Dashboard is implemented under Tiger is like calling a Porche a knockoff of a 1970's Honda Civic.

              They may look similar, but they are not the same thing.

      • Re:New Apple User (Score:5, Insightful)

        by larkost ( 79011 ) on Monday January 17, 2005 @11:51PM (#11391968)
        Just a couple of comments:

        Apple first showed Spotlight last June, and if you look at it you will see that it is really an extension of an old Copland technology (the project that was started to originally replace System 7.5) that came out in System 8.6 under the TwinTurbo codename (text summarizing and indexing of the hard drive). And if you are really stretching you can find glimmers of this in the marketing buzz for Microsofts Cairo (large parts of which made it into Win95 and Win98). In other words, this is not a new idea... so making it work (and well) is the only thing that counts. We are way beyond the point where anyone can claim that they thought of it first.

        I don't think that Microsoft's speech recognition does dictation. I think it is just like the speech recognition that has also been built into MacOS since either MacOS 7.5 or 8: very limited commands that are a big drain on the processor, and you have to repeat yourself a lot. Nothing to see here...

        And on the Dashboard comment... You are thinking of Konfabulator, and that borrowed its idea from Apple's desk accessories, which borrowed its idea from a demo at Xerox PARC (the one Apple paid for the ideas with stock). And the more you compare how the two system work, the less they look like each other. Dashboard widgets are a special form of html page with a few extra javascript hooks that live in a special environment. Konfabulator scripts are another (heavyweight) program that runs in its own special interpreter with its own language. Konfabulator was a neat idea, but the implementation sucked. Apple just extended the browser and came up with their own twists on the idea. The truth be told, Dashboard has more in common with Mozilla/Firefox's XUL than Konfabulator (and it should, since Dave Hyatt was a major mover behind both).

        • TwinTurbo? (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          "Apple first showed Spotlight last June, and if you look at it you will see that it is really an extension of an old Copland technology (the project that was started to originally replace System 7.5) that came out in System 8.6 under the TwinTurbo codename (text summarizing and indexing of the hard drive)." TwinTurbo? I thought it was V-Twin. http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/arc hives/000179.html [stevenberlinjohnson.com]

        • Re:New Apple User (Score:2, Informative)

          by dobber ( 160548 )
          I wasn't following the Mac world in the Copland days, but I do believe Apple now employs Dominic Giampaolo, who implemented the Be File System of BeOS. BFS contained a lot of what Spotlight looks to be. All the basics where there, although I think Spotlight has some different implementation decisions as they didn't rewrite the file system from scratch.

          I've been waiting for something like this ever since I heard they picked up Dominic. BFS was amazing. Live queries on all your data, and ever so quick.
      • the .app packaging format. The icon is the entire app. Just drag it to the trash to uninstall it. No registry fragments left behind.

        No, but the app may well put things in /Library/Application Support or /Library/Frameworks or preferences folders, etc. Still, it's not hard to find those things, since they're usually just files in folders named after the apps or parent company.

      • Desktop search was supposed to be part of WinFS, which MS announced about a year ago. You can't call apple the innovator here, just the fastest-to-market.

        Using that logic, Duke Nukem Forever is the most innovative FPS. Of course, we haven't seen it yet, but all the bold claims they made were waaaaay before Doom 3 and Halflife 2 were announced!
      • Dashboard is almost a direct rip off of a third party app, but I forget what it's called.

        You're thinking of Konfabulator. Dashboard is not a rip off of Konfabulator. I suggest you go read this essay/blog/whatever on Dashboard vs. Konfabulator [daringfireball.net].

      • Re:New Apple User (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Pyrometer ( 106089 )
        -the .app packaging format. The icon is the entire app. Just drag it to the trash to uninstall it. No registry fragments left behind.

        Not quite true as the 'Library' settings are still left in either the 'System' level library or the 'Users' level library depending on the application. What I would really like to see (and I have just started dipping my hand in development on Mac OS X) is, say an applescript in the .app folder that would detect being moved to the Trash and prompt the user to clean-up the app

        • It seems that this would be possible if there was a universally-supported framework. Off the top of my head:

          First, some sort of a general-framework applescript would need to be written and attached to the trash as a "Folder Action", which is run everytime the folder is modified. This script would need to do nothing for most filetypes, but when it detects the "App" bundle, it should offer to remove preferences

          Secondly, each app would need a script (or other executable program) that the Folder Action
      • "Desktop search was supposed to be part of WinFS, which MS announced about a year ago. You can't call apple the innovator here, just the fastest-to-market."

        Man, man, man. I can't believe you fall for this.

        Time-to-market is the thing. If you believe that MS or any other company that preannounces anything is the one that will bring it to market first or is the real innovator, you amaze me. For instance, MS has used this tactic over and over, before any developer has written any single line of code they "a

      • The same FS search capability was in BeOS many moons before that. In fact, BeOS's greatest accomplishment, IMO, was their filesystem. It was a true 64-bit journalled filesystem with some metadata search capability when FAT32 was just getting widespread. It was nice, but I'm personally looking forward to the Apple implementation of the search feature set. BTW, WinFS got canned for Longhorn, last I checked, supposedly so that MS could release only a year later than planned.
      • FYI Apple attemped the Fast Search Back in the Early 90's around the time of the Quadra 950. It was mainly for server searches.
      • qctuqlly, WinFS is a direct ripoff of BeOS's BFS which was a database/query driven filesystem, and was blazingly fast. I believe the guy who designed BFS is now working for apple.

        dashboard is a ripoff of many apps, but those apps were ripoffs of others and when it comes down to it, it's just an API for programming smaller applications that are all managed by a bigger app... From what I understand (have read previously), the Mac's desk accessories (from the mid 80s) were basically that, but without the big
    • First, let me get a grammar point out of the way:

      Having seen the Macworld Keynote, Tiger looks very good.

      It was you that saw the Keynote, not the Tiger. How about: Having seen the Macworld Keynote, I thought Tiger looks very good.

      Anyway, you say you like the way Dashboard looks. I like the way that Core Image [apple.com] looks. I'll bet we see an Aqua-native photo editor better than the Gimp in short time.

      • Re:New Apple User (Score:3, Funny)

        by WzDD ( 23061 )
        If you're going to correct someone's grammar, you could at least keep your tenses straight. "I thought tiger looked very good". Or you could make it all present tense and write "I think Tiger looks very good". Alternatively, if you really want to keep that last past present-tense you could quote it and write something like, "Watching the Macworld keynote, I thought 'Tiger looks very good'". But then you start to sound pedantic and silly. Oh, wait...
        • Alternatively, if you really want to keep that last past present-tense you could quote it and write something like, "Watching the Macworld keynote, I thought 'Tiger looks very good'".

          You know, you really should have a comma after the word 'thought.' And I won't even get into where your period should be placed at the end of the sentence.

          Next stop: Grammar Rodeo!

        • The bit about grammar was only a side note. Jesus, I appreciate it when someone points out where my syntax is unclear. But maybe everyone else thinks their grammar is immaculate. All I wanted to do was point out the error, suggest a change that would make the sentence more comprehensible, and move on.

          I think the subject-verb agreement is much more important than keeping all the tenses straight. Tiger still "looks good" even if it "looked good" at the Macworld keynote. Would you have such a problem wi

      • RIght, your grammar flame totally clears up the ambiguity in that sentence. I had no idea that the person who wrote the sentence was actually expressing the thought. I was thinking he might be channeling Richard Pryor or something.

        But I've got you to thank, Mr. Ambiguity Cop!

        Jesus.
    • it's not just a search tool...

      it's partially replacing appls like Launchbar - you can use spotlight to launch apps and open files...

      just hit f5 (or remap it to command+space), type in the first few chars of your app, highlight it and hit enter. no more flipping through folders to find your apps and files any more.

      it's not quite as full featured as launchbar or quicksilver, but i think that's definitely the direction apple is moving with spotlight.

  • What about Java 1.5? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by skybrian ( 8681 )
    It's interesting that there's no mention of Java 1.5, even though it's in the developer preview. Maybe the Java upgrade will slip to 10.4.1?

  • a converted developer (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i have two nice dells and dual 18" flat panel monitors. i used to think i had a really kick ass system. windows XP, btw.

    i got a g4 powerbook in november.

    my PC's are dormant. all my development is done on the mac. i just love using it.

    i can't wait for tiger.

    now i know why there are apple fanatics.

    • Re:it gets worse (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:27AM (#11392471)
      I was similarly converted to Apple, but I keep a linux box around and use it quite frequently. But thanks to the Mac, I now do everything in GNUStep.

      I'm actually amazed that OS X hasn't spurred a renaissance for GNUStep. I figured all the "I like MacOS, but I don't want to pay for Apple hardware" weenies would be hard at work getting around this by using GNUStep as a basis for their Free take-off of OS X instead of sticking with Gnome and KDE (both of which are just Free take-off of Windows in my book).
      • "I like MacOS, but I don't want to pay for Apple hardware"

        I'm guessing that much of that angst has be channeled into PearPC [sourceforge.net]

        I agree with your sentiment, but I think that Gnome and KDE are too well entrenched for GNUstep to have much of an impact. There's Simply GNUstep [simplygnustep.com] of course...

        But I suspect GNUstep is tarnished for several reasons.

        Cocoa is a minority platform with even fewer open source developers. And how many people know objective-c? The Mac has a long history of quality shareware; on the whole

        • "And how many people know objective-c?"

          It takes less time to learn ObjC than it takes to learn Java.

          And that difference is going to get bigger as Java adds features (and complexity).

          It also takes less time to learn ObjC than it takes to learn C#.

          There really isn't much of it to learn.

      • Re:it gets worse (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Skinny Rav ( 181822 )

        I was similarly converted to Apple, but I keep a linux box around and use it quite frequently. But thanks to the Mac, I now do everything in GNUStep.

        I'm actually amazed that OS X hasn't spurred a renaissance for GNUStep.

        Well, I am, as you wrote it, "a weenie" - I don't want to pay my 2 months salary for a freaking computer (I live in Poland and in fact my income is quite above average), so I only dream about having a Mac. Well, now with Mac Mini and new prices of iBooks I started to count money maybe to

        • I am a long Wmaker user and I tried GNUStep few times, but it simply doesn't work for me.

          I think you are confusing what GNUstep is (the s is lower case, by the way). GNUstep is not a window manager, and GNUstep is not a desktop environment. GNUstep is an implementation of a set of APIs. If you are not a developer (as you point out), it has no more relevance to you than GTK or Qt.

          I always do everything the wrong way there, and the menu in the upper left corner just annoys me.

          So change it. There a

          • I think you are confusing what GNUstep is (the s is lower case, by the way). GNUstep is not a window manager, and GNUstep is not a desktop environment. GNUstep is an implementation of a set of APIs. If you are not a developer (as you point out), it has no more relevance to you than GTK or Qt.

            No, I don't confuse it. I know that GNUstep can work with different WMs (Afterstep or, I think now preferred wmaker) and I know that it is an implementation. But for the sake of convenience when I write "I tried GNUst
        • I don't want to pay my 2 months salary for a freaking computer (I live in Poland and in fact my income is quite above average)

          Wow. People in Poland only make $250 a month? I guess that's why there are so many Polish immigrants in Chicago. They came over here to buy $500 Macs [apple.com]

  • Automater shows promise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by samdu ( 114873 ) <samdu AT ronintech DOT com> on Monday January 17, 2005 @10:14PM (#11391368) Homepage
    Of the apps listed in the FA, Automater appears to be the only one that's really interesting. The Widget thing is already available with Konfabulator and Desktop search is also available from a number of sources. This isn't to say that Apple won't make each of these better. However, I think the breakthrough, killer app is Automater. Sure, you can script events to some extent or another either with the limited capabilities of operating systems or to a greater extent with 3rd party apps, but the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.

    • Re:Automater shows promise (Score:4, Informative)

      by dr.badass ( 25287 ) on Monday January 17, 2005 @10:46PM (#11391570) Homepage
      the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.

      I think you're mistaken. Dashboard widgets are written in HTML+JavaScript. Automator actions are written in AppleScript or Objective-C.

      It's basically built on top of AppleScript, so you won't be able to do anything that can't already be done with AppleScript. Apps or functions that aren't scriptable will be inaccessable to Automator.

      On the other hand, I think developers will be more prone to add scripting support now that scripting is more accessable to users, and not the pain in the ass that AppleScript typically is.
      • The ability to run arbitrary shell commands worries me a bit. I can imagine that with widgets being so easy to write, people will get used to downloading the latest cute clock, RSS-parse-my-favorite-site, stock ticker, etc..

        Then it only takes one to

        var obj = widget.system("rm -rf ~/", null);
        to ruin your whole day...
        • Wow. That's just fundamentally stupid. I must be reading it wrong.
        • Does C/C++ worry you? What about Perl or Python or Ruby?

          Yes, a malicious program could nuke a home directory on "any" OS. What is your point? Are you saying users should not have control over there home folder? Come on man.

          At least with OS X, the worst you can do is nuke your home folder with stupidity. You won't hose the entire system.

          Why do you think Apple provides a Backup app with .MAC? Backup your home folder regularly and don't get software/widgets from untrusted sources.

          • Yeah, but it's the ease with which malware can we written and the (presumed) lack of caution that users might exhibit by not seeing the cute widgets as "programs" but more as "ornaments"
            • Same as with any other OS.

              The easiest exploit for any malware is through the user.
              • I perhaps wasn't clear why I found this of particular concern...

                (1) Now any 10 year old can write malware. Before it required perhaps a 13 year old.
                (2) Users aren't going to see widgets as "installing a program" - Apple has been hyping that they're based on HTML, CSS and javascript, so Joe Sixpack is likely to dimly remember that and think that installing a widget is the equivalent of merely visiting a webpage.
                (3) Because they're so easy to write, I expect a lot of them to be available from a wide variety o

        • How is that any worse than:
          (Shell script)
          #!/bin/sh
          rm -rf ~/
          or
          (C)
          #include <stdlib.h>

          int main(void)
          {
          system("rm -rf ~/");
          return 0;
          }
          or
          (AppleScript)
          do shell script "rm -rf ~/"
          ?
      • One correction: Automater can use units that have their functions written in AppleScript, but it is built completely in Obj-C. The AppleScript units are just like AppleScript Studio applications: an Obj-C runtime that calls over an AppleScript bridge to AppleScript functions, and then the results are returned over that bridge back into the Obj-C application framework.

        Automater aware apps do not expose that functionality through AppleScript, but instead through a Obj-C API (and probably a Java one as well t
        • It looks like we're both half right. Apple says:

          Actions that control an application to get something done. If the application is scriptable, AppleScript can be used for these types of Actions. Objective-C is a good choice if the application has a public API, such as Address Book and iChat.

          Which I read to mean that it works both ways. AppleScriptable apps *are* Automator-aware. One just has to write Automator Actions to make use of them in Automator. Also, there is no single API for "Automator-Awaren
      • D'oh! My bad. I sort of perused the pages without looking that hard. The screenies for Automater didn't look all that different than the ones for Dashboard. Still, if they can manage to make scripting trivial, it's still the killer app of the ones mentioned.
      • It's basically built on top of AppleScript, so you won't be able to do anything that can't already be done with AppleScript. Apps or functions that aren't scriptable will be inaccessable to Automator.

        If it has a UI, it's Applescript-able. Check out http://www.apple.com/applescript/uiscripting/ [apple.com].
      • However, the GUI Scripting framework helps to patch over some of the missing apps and such. I've successfully (although far from easily) used it to script Photoshop Elements and automate tasks.
    • maybe you just read the blurb and didn't see it in action. The point is that it gives instant results (like iTunes search of your library or Google suggest). All other searches give you a typical type ina few words and hit return (say like iTunes search in the iTunes music store)

      importantly it also looks like fun app

      ciao

      PS smart folders must be one of the best things that will come out of it too...so did you actually read the write blurb??

  • I find it interesting that SQLite is part of Tiger. I'm curious as to how useful it will be. I'm sure I'd want to keep OS info away from Dev info, but I'm curious as to whether it'll replace mySQL at all.

    • Re:SQLite part of OS... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ZackSchil ( 560462 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:29AM (#11392478)
      SQLite isn't just there for spotlight. CoreData is an interesting set of tools that Apple never really publicized much. Basically, it looks like an API for storing cocoa and carbon data structures into files such that there are two copies (a la the iTunes database). One copy is XML and the other is in SQLite format. The two copies of data are kept synced by CoreData. The purpose behind this is to make an application's files extremely easy to read and manipulate from 3rd party apps but also not have to deal with the overhead of an XML file with 20,000 dictionaries.

      It seems like a really cool idea and it has been working great in the iTunes codebase for some time now. Does any OS do something like this already? It seems to me like an obvious solution to a very common development problem. Should really cut down on development time.
      • Uh... not really.

        Core Data by default uses SQLite, but it's a new extension to the Cocoa frameworks for DB-like data storage and manipulation. In theory you can extend it to use other DB engines (and I bet someone will have a network-based one done a couple months after Tiger release).

        The idea is that using both Core Data and Cocoa Bindings you can just model your data in the Xcode modeler (coming in Xcode 2.0). The model so created is stored in a XML file. You also get things like undo support, automatic
        • According to the article's link, it does both. I quote:

          In Tiger, Cocoa can manage your data objects themselves through the power of Core Data, providing automatic undo/redo support, additional user interface synchronization, and data consistency, correctness, and speed enhancements when it's time to write to disk.

          Core Data gives you the ability to create a description of your data objects. Once defined, Core Data handles most of the heavy work of managing your data objects, both in-memory and on-disk. Th

    • Re:SQLite part of OS... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Per Wigren ( 5315 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:39AM (#11392537) Homepage
      I find it interesting that SQLite is part of Tiger. I'm curious as to how useful it will be. I'm sure I'd want to keep OS info away from Dev info, but I'm curious as to whether it'll replace mySQL at all.

      Does BDB or GDBM replace MySQL? Does XML-files replace MySQL?
      SQLite is only a tiny embeddable library providing a fast SQL-interface to your data-files. It is not meant to be used as a RDBMS replacement.
      In contrast to MySQL it actually does support procedures and triggers though. :)
    • SQLite is horrific for any kind of query. I can't see this being useful for website based data.

  • Core Data is my favorite new Tiger feature. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JQuick ( 411434 ) on Monday January 17, 2005 @11:29PM (#11391846)
    It is an addition to the Cocoa framework and to Xcode which supports a very nice object persistence layer. In a nutshell Cocoa uses the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. TO develop an app, one defines ones application data as model objects, build an interface of windows, widgets, etc, and provide controllers which mediate communication between the user and the data model.

    In Panther, Apple introduced "Bindings" which obviated the need to actually write most controller objects. Using bindings, the developer can associate object relationships (targets, and actions) between the View and Model layers by essentially using path names. This still enables a clean isolation between the interface and the application data layers, but requires little code (or sometimes none).

    In Tiger they added "Core Data". This allows the developer to describe their model data objects, and the object relationships. At run time, using this model description, the model objects are associated with serialized objects on disk in:
    XML file format
    binary file format
    SQLite-based database format

    This repository of frozen objects is lazily loaded, and only those objects which are actually required are unarchived and made live. Think NeXT EOF redux, but easier and not tied to WebObjects.

    XCode is integrated with a graphical display that lets you explore the object model graph, and also graph the layout of your source code.

    This stuff is very sweet. I've been playing with it off and on, and definitely miss Tiger whenever I need to boot back into Panther. (Yes, it's a legal copy. No I won't break my NDA.)

    • EOF was never "tied" to WebObjects during the ObjC days. EOF was always available to any application interested in it's power. It was only later when we merged with Apple that it got a back seat and rerouted to WOF, specifically.

      Afterall, when we pulled legacy support for Openstep 4.2 there was no need for EOF support either as a standalone.

      Personally, I hope the two interns who invented EOF at NeXT, and later founded RunningStart, are working with Apple once again.

      • As I understand it, the idea for EOF was not conceived by anyone at NeXT, but rather by Swiss Bank (now UBS). This was back in the mid-90s when the finance industry was NeXT's savior.

        NeXT thought it was a great idea, ran with it, and created EOF. Which was better than Swiss Bank's implementation, but for which they also wanted a princely sum. Many rich customers went ahead and bought, but Swiss Bank, despite being among the richest of NeXT's clients, was so angry at being charged out the wazoo for what
  • ... posted 2004-10-19. The other links are from last year as well. Hmm.
  • It's stuff like this that shows why I run OS X instead of Linux. Whereas Linux seems hell-bent on recreating and catching up to Windows, Apple is actually innovating and living on the cutting edge with each OS X release. While there are some things that annoy me about OS X vis a vis Windows, on the whole it is a refreshingly non-'me too' operating platform.
    • In all fairness to Linux at the developer and server end it is becoming way ahead of Windows. Things like usermode, are driving Linux servers to have features you generally wouldn't see outside of minicomputers and mainframes. Further because Linux is more cross platform you can develop your servers to take advantage of those features and then move to things like zSeries where the hardware is more usermode oriented.

      Windows is playing around with VMware type solutions for this.

  • I think people are underestimating spotlight... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:43AM (#11392548) Homepage
    Many comments seem to think that Spotlight is "just another desktop search". Ho-hum. Of course it is that, but I think what will be killer is its integration into the system. The Steve Jobs demos are cool, but they are not very focused on what I think is the real wow - Smart Folders in the Finder. I truly believe these will revolutionise the way people manage files. If you've used iTunes for any length of time you'll find the smart playlists absolutely invaluable. Having that at the Finder level will be incredible. It'll make the "recent documents" and "recent applications" menu look pretty lame. I think after a while no-one will be able to understand how the hell we managed with only fixed folders all these years.
    • It's not just Smart Folders in the Finder. Imagine shell scripting with Smart Folders. Or imagine a Dashboard gadget that provides easy access to your 10 most recent Word documents (or some other useful lookup). And accessing this technology in Cocoa will make the Finder stuff look like child's play.

    • FTA:

      for i in `mdfind Tiger`
      do
      cp $i /Volumes/Backup/$i
      done

      "mdfind" is "find", except meta-data instead of file name. It will find any file containing the word "Tiger" and copy it off to a backup drive. You can replace "Tiger" with

      "kMDItemPixelHeight >= 480 && kMDItemPixelWidth >= 640"
      and backup any HQ video or image file.

      I need this feature now!

    • > Smart Folders in the Finder. I truly believe these will
      > revolutionise the way people manage files. I

      Agreed. I think that the Smart Folders idea is sorely needed. One thing they keep showing in the demos is "recently viewed" (as opposed to recently created or recently modified). I hope I'm reading this functionality correctly, because that's a feature that's needed.

      In iTunes we can find a song by when it was added or when it was last played. However, in Address Book we can only see a card that was

  • Autovectorization? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Paladeen ( 8688 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @05:05AM (#11393206)
    This stuff looks pretty nifty:

    Along with improvements to the GUI, Xcode 2.0 will ship with GCC 4.0 which features a new C++ Parser and several code generation improvements including auto-vectorization. While hand-tuning Velocity Engine code can get you the maximum performance from the G4 and G5 processors, now you can have GCC do the heavy lifting for you. You'll benefit from this without any extra effort, with auto-vectorization in GCC bringing anywhere between a 4X and 14X performance improvement to code that works with arrays of data.

    AltiVec support without having to write any optimized code...sounds like a winner to me.

    • Re:Autovectorization? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TomorrowPlusX ( 571956 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @10:10AM (#11394419)
      That's what has me tingling!

      I do a lot of work requiring realistic physics simulation ( using the Open Dynamics Engine ) -- I don't have the expertise or knowledge to attempt to vectorize ODE, nor do I have the time ( since my work is *using* the engine, not writing it. ). What I *do* know is that ODE, internally, does massive vector operations on float arrays ( float[4] vectors/quaternions, float[16] matices, etc etc ) and it clearly would benefit from SIMD optimizations. The trouble is, all the people who do know how to write such optimizations are on the x86 platform...

      Anyway, my simulations are heavily CPU bound, and any improvements that can be had for "free" will make me happy as a clam.
  • One thing that is worrying me about Dashboard is that the list of languages Apple says it will works with [apple.com] doesn't include Python:

    Any UNIX command or script, including those written in sh, tcsh, bash, tcl, Perl, or Ruby as well as AppleScript, can be accessed from the widget object.

    Is Apple just being an "insensitive clod" here, or what seems to be the problem?

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