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OS X Operating Systems Programming IT Technology

Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger 371

Posted by Zonk from the catch-the-thingie-by-the-tail dept.
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."
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Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger More

Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger

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  • Silly people (Score:5, Funny)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:34PM (#12385491) Journal
    Silly people! Dont' they know Apple is going out of business? They have been for the past decade or so.

  • Other Widget Download Site (Score:4, Informative)

    by sammykrupa ( 828537 ) <sam@theplaceforitall.com> on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:35PM (#12385511) Homepage Journal
    Here is another Widget download site:

    http://www.dashboardlineup.com/ [dashboardlineup.com]

    (I should say that I am partly affiliated with it.)

  • Is that for warganging? Driving on the open road, searching for unsecured WiFi ports?

    Now that would be sweet!

  • Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:38PM (#12385528)
    An OS level script that resizes a Photoshop document. That makes up for Photoshop's glaring lack of scripted/recorded actions that can be batched.

    Does Photoshop 1 even run under OS X 10.4?

    • Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jandrese ( 485 ) * <kensama@vt.edu> on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:41PM (#12385573) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, but this way it can be combined with non-Photoshop operations. You could build a script to generate an index and filesystem with an integrated browser to build customized demonstration CDs.

      • Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Dink Paisy ( 823325 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:08PM (#12385839) Homepage
        Photoshop can be driven by Javascript, VBscript and Applescript. Those aren't limited to Photoshop. Although, now that I think about it, the premise of Automator seemed to be that you could easily create scripts. So it's probably just using the existing scripting capability of Photoshop, but exposing it to users in a simpler package.

        • OS-Level Scripting is pure Unix; don't ignore. (Score:4, Informative)

          by CarpetShark ( 865376 ) on Saturday April 30, 2005 @03:42AM (#12390979)

          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.

  • ....OmniGiraffe and CandyBar look cool, keep up the freeware and a big thank you to whoever offers it!

  • Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:42PM (#12385575) Journal
    In no time at all there are going to be a whole slew of Dashboard-centric sites, Automator-centric sites, Spotlight-centric sites, and so forth. Just like there are a myriad of PHP, Javascript, CSS, etc sties, we're going to see a bunch based solely on this new Mac OS.

    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.
  • Anybody gotten their copy of Tiger or even shipping information on it from Amazon yet?
  • my roommate works at @pple store and she says it's open late from 8 to midnight for all u apple geeks to go gawk.
    • Your roommate got her facts wrong. Last time it was 8. The Tiger events start at 6 at all Apple stores (that's local 6, wherever you happen to be).

      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
    • Do you know of any giveaways they are doing tonight?

      ---> Kendall

  • Taking Advantage (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:48PM (#12385642)
    Did anyone else misread the headline and think: "Oh no! They are releasing spyware for OS X!"

    *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.
    • I'm glad I finally saw someone else worry about that... when I first heard the idea of automator scripts that can be saved and sent to other computers, that was my first concern... Just started installing tho, so I guess I'll find out soon...

  • Thunderbird spotlight plugin PLEASE (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:48PM (#12385643) Journal
    I would LOVE to be able to search my mail with spotlight...but I can't yet find a thunderbird plugin....sadness overwhelms me
    • Spotlight's indexer has a file-level granularity.

      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...

      • 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

        • Interestingly enough...my mail is IMAP based, and I noticed that mac mail works with with it AND it does work with spotlight after you enter each folder it seems to download a scanned index of the mail...
  • [reads the article] Oh! I thought this was a Dupe of TigerDirect (the third part in question) taking advantage of the release of Mac OS X Tiger to make a claim against Apple for a little free advertising!

    Carry on!

    P.S.- Just ordered the Mini a few minutes ago.

  • Can I put a tiger in my tank? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @01:53PM (#12385691)
    I knew a guy in college who tried to take advantage of a tiger. They never did find all the bits.

    "Bloody zoos!" - Rick on The Young Ones

  • Liger next? (Score:2, Informative)

    by ayeco ( 301053 )
    What's bigger than a Panther, better than a Tiger, and cooler than a Jaguar? A Liger of course.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger [wikipedia.org]

  • Wikipedia Widget? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:02PM (#12385769)
    one word:
    sweet!

  • It looks like the "wireless finder" widget is just a handy way to look up known access points in a database. It's not a Dashboard clone of MacStumbler (which is theoretically doable since Dashboard widgets can load native code through Javascript extensions).

  • Which? (Score:4, Funny)

    by MoogMan ( 442253 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:07PM (#12385821)
    Wait, is this Mac OSX Tiger or TigerDirect? I'm confused...
  • For anyone who bought panther the day it came out--is it possible? If I go to an apple store do I have any expectation of walking out with tiger? Or should I expect it to be long out of stock?

  • You bastards! (Score:4, Funny)

    by demonbug ( 309515 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:15PM (#12385917) Journal
    "Third parties already taking advantage of Tiger"

    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?
  • Anyone knows if there's "official" support for partitioning the disk to support several versions of MacOS X? While I'd love to write code on Tiger (and must make sure my games work on it), I also need to support older versions. I know how to install multiple versions on the same Powerbook, just wondering if there's any known side effects or differences from a 'virgin' mac :P

    Cartoon-like miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/ [funpause.com]
    • Can't you just have multiple System folders in the same partition, and pick which one to "bless" (start up with)?

    • Re:Multiple OSes officially supported? (Score:5, Informative)

      by As Seen On TV ( 857673 ) <asseen@gmail.com> on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:42PM (#12386266)
      Sure, you can do that. You can do it from the installer. Each partition shows up to the operating system like a separate volume.

      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.

    • About partitioning a hard disk

      Use Disk Utility to partition a disk into sections, or "volumes," each of which works like a separate disk. You might want to partition a disk so that you can have different versions of the Mac OS, or organize your information in a logical manner. To learn more about using Disk Utility, open Disk Utility, in the /Applications/Utilities folder, and choose Help > Disk Utility Help.

      That looks kinda official to me. (from the MacOS help)

  • NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org Spotlight Plugin (Score:5, Informative)

    by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:19PM (#12385955) Homepage Journal
    One that probably isn't on the page may be the Spotlight plugin to allow for indexing of OpenOffice.org 1.x and NeoOffice formatted files. Unfortunately, I couldn't open source it prior to the Tiger release because the APIs were covered under NDA, but no longer!

    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

  • How Apple builds "community economies" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @02:32PM (#12386140)
    It looks like even though Tiger [apple.com] has only been out a few hours, Apple is well on its way to building three more "community economies".

    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.
    • Spyware application vendors and anti-virus application vendors come to mind.
    • Creating a 'Consumer Economy' is relatively simple but I don't think anyone is really trying for it these days. That being said, it all comes down to the following thing:

      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
  • From the little chance I had to play with it, Spotlight looks like the best candidate for that special new feature that changes the way you work with your computer from here on and that everybody from Microsoft to Linux will spend the next months copying. This is really, truely, seriously cool.

    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

  • I originally misinterpreted the headline to mean something... well... something rather sick and twisted that people were doing to a large feline.

    That's about as politically correct as I can put it.

    As I said... I think I need more sleep.

  • Widgets are already suffering from size bloat. Look at this one [dashboardlineup.com]

    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

  • Yes, it's tooting my own horn a bit, in that I wrote the articles, but it's really interesting what some developers are looking to do with Core Data (see here [eweek.com]) and Automator (see here [eweek.com]) could potentiall knock all our socks off. Those are some smart and talented people.

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