OSX 10.4
A while ago I managed to overclock my PowerBook to 88 gigahertz while using a USB flux capacitor. I was transported into the future where I picked up a copy of "Tiger" OSX 10.4, which will be released tomorrow. These are my thoughts after using it for a while. In the future, of course.
Spotlight: Spotlight is one of the two big features that Apple is pushing as a Big Thing in Tiger. The pre-indexing is good, although it took a LONG time for it to build the first index. 6+ hours long. My index ended up being around 200MB, stored in some format which I hoped was GDBM (so that I could poke around in it) but isn't. While it's indexing, the little magnifying glass has a white dot that blinks on and off which is nice and unobtrusive. If you have stability problems, wait till indexing is done before you use Mail. Spotlight works something like Quicksilver, with some differences. With Quicksilver you type "ph" and you can launch Photoshop - nice and fast. With Spotlight you have to type "photoshop" and then you can launch Photoshop, while also seeing every email you've ever sent or received that mentioned Photoshop, and every document on all drives everywhere that has the word "photoshop" anywhere in it, and all your saved bookmarks, and everything in your address book that mentions photo-shops. You could just type 'ph' but then you'll get everything on your hard drive that includes those two consecutive characters. There is such a thing as too much information at your fingertips, and Spotlight provides it by default. You can tell Spotlight not to display certain kinds of information, which helps, but it's still like drinking from a firehose. I haven't found Spotlight to be indispensable since I'm already good about putting things in predictable folders, but it works.
Dashboard: The other feature that Apple is pushing as a Big Thing. Unlike Konfabulator, Dashboard widgets cannot be mingled with actual windows, unless I'm missing a config setting. It took me a while to realize that you could add dashboard widgets by hitting the little "plus" sign, which reveals many useful things like Flight Status. The "water ripple" effect when widgets are added is nice. Dashboard isn't indispensable, but it works.
Mail 2: Little "mail folders" drawer gone, replaced with regular panel. For some reason I liked my drawer on the right and the panel's on the left which gorked my chi for a few days but is OK now. Not cool: GPGMail causes Mail2 to crash without any explanation, as does PGPMail. George Bush can read my innermost thoughts, at least until a new GPGMail is released. Spotlight-style searching works pretty darn well, although I'd still like to see a regular basic boolean search. Spotlight indexes mail in the Trash but does not include the Trash in its results unless explicitly asked for, which is unexpected (to me). The Ars Technica Review of Tiger mentions most of my gripes about the new Mail buttons. Mail 2 is much faster overall: perhaps because the pre-indexing means that it doesn't have to read my two year archive of pictures of people falling down that my brother keeps sending me. Also possibly because messages are stored in individual files rather than in one big mailbox file. One cool feature: "slideshow", which displays emailed images full-screen with buttons to import the photos into iPhoto. You would think this would be fairly minor or wankertastic but it is in fact very nice.
Safari 2: Alas I am a Firefox man. Though Safari is faster it does not save passwords or have Adblock. I have mixed feelings about Safari's ability to read RSS feeds directly: on one hand it's very clean and nicely implemented. On the other hand it makes RSS become the Web and we've already got one of those. Also includes "Safe Downloads" which is touted as a feature but actually just says "the file you downloaded contains an Application!" I wish that dialog had buttons saying "OK", "cancel" and "of course there fucking is - that's what comes in .dmg files". Because I use Firefox I haven't found Safari 2 indispensable, but it works.
CoreImage: Excited about what this *will* do, but I'm not really sure what it *can* do right now. I wish they included a little demo app to make me say wow so that I could be as excited as I think I ought to be. The RSS News Screen Saver apparently uses CoreImage, but not enough to make my jaw drop. DashBoard does a nifty CoreImage "dropping a stone into water" effect when you add a new widget: not tremendously exciting, but it hints at good things in the future.
Quartz: the graphics rendering engine is FAST now. Finally fast enough that I don't feel like the OS is crippling the hardware. Previously, I'd be using 10.3 and thinking "this is a 1.5ghz machine that's using a fancy graphics chip to move windows around a screen - why is it lagging?" It's not anymore. This is nice.
iChat: iChat AV uses new h.264 compression for videoconferencing. I tried this with another time-traveller and it works much better than previously: we were getting 320x240, 15fps between Montreal and San Francisco over normal household DSL. It's a far cry from what the screenshots in the ads say you can do, but it's better than I've seen before. I'm curious whether matrushkaka will be able to read my lips.
Parental Controls: OSX already kicks ass for a multi-user household because of the multiple-user-login feature. Some parts of the new Parental Controls feature are very interesting: you can easily create whitelists of people your children can IM or exchange mail with, for example. Other parts are a little silly, like a feature that prevents children from looking up profane words in the Dictionary. Looking up "fart" in the dictionary and giggling uncontrollably is one of the joys of being a kid. This feature is not especially useful to me since I don't have children, although I locked matrushkaka's account so now she won't be able to define the word "asshole".
Dictionary: I wouldn't have known about the Dictionary if it wasn't for the Parental Controls box. OSX includes a complete Oxford American Dictionary which doesn't just display words: it displays them CLASSY. As nice as it is, part of me wonders whether a complete OAD is necessary in an operating system. Maybe the spell checker interfaces with it: the universal spell checker API that OSX provides is certainly nice. Which reminds me: I can find the feature that lets you add custom words to the spell checker, but I can't remove words that I added before realizing they were misspelled and my friend Cristin Pescosolido is getting pissed that I keep misspelling her name and I'm pissed that I can't tell the spell checker that I told it the wrong spelling the first time.
Rsync: For most people this is minor, but for me it's a big deal. Rsync and other command line unix apps are now aware of resource forks. This means I can back up my files to an external hard drive without all my damn Final Cut edits getting corrupted. I'm still not exactly sure why we need resource forks at all - someone please explain this to me.
Third Party Apps Which Do Not Work Anymore, Not Necessarily In The Order Which They Bust My Balls:
- Emacs
- Quicksilver
- GPGMail
- CocoaMySQL
- YourSQL
- Many DarwinPorts including, most notably, the readline plugin for Python.
- Drag-and-dropping torrents into Azureus
- Drag-and-dropping JPGs onto the Adobe Photoshop dock icon don't open the files in Photoshop anymore.
Thoughts: Recently I was listening to a recording of a discussion a few years ago between Jef Raskin and Bill Atkinson and a few other people. Someone (I forget who) mentioned that Microsoft had done a product satisfaction survey for MSWord, and the top 12 most commonly requested features were already features in Microsoft Word. It was, for all practical purposes, complete.
Tiger feels a little like Microsoft Word, which is good or bad. Like Word, OSX is complete: it has a stable kernel, a fantastic window manager running on a next-generation graphics subsystem, a standardized command line in a familiar and proven POSIX environment, and a security model where users can actually use their computer from user-space. Things are in their place and work well together. Thankfully Apple hasn't added any talking paperclips in Tiger, but at the same time the improvements are less major because it's already damn good. Tiger is 5500% better than windows, because OSX 10.3 is already 5000% better than Windows. Even without Spotlight, Mail, iCal, iPhoto, GarageBand, AddressBook, and the other products, Tiger would still be 5100% better than Windows. You're paying $125 to go from 5000% to 5500% better.
So is it worth buying? I use my PowerBook about a billion hours a week and I'm a compulsive updater, so Tiger's marginal improvement is still worth it to me. On the other hand if your mom uses a 400Mhz iMac to upload pictures of her cats it might not be worth it for her.
Spotlight: Spotlight is one of the two big features that Apple is pushing as a Big Thing in Tiger. The pre-indexing is good, although it took a LONG time for it to build the first index. 6+ hours long. My index ended up being around 200MB, stored in some format which I hoped was GDBM (so that I could poke around in it) but isn't. While it's indexing, the little magnifying glass has a white dot that blinks on and off which is nice and unobtrusive. If you have stability problems, wait till indexing is done before you use Mail. Spotlight works something like Quicksilver, with some differences. With Quicksilver you type "ph" and you can launch Photoshop - nice and fast. With Spotlight you have to type "photoshop" and then you can launch Photoshop, while also seeing every email you've ever sent or received that mentioned Photoshop, and every document on all drives everywhere that has the word "photoshop" anywhere in it, and all your saved bookmarks, and everything in your address book that mentions photo-shops. You could just type 'ph' but then you'll get everything on your hard drive that includes those two consecutive characters. There is such a thing as too much information at your fingertips, and Spotlight provides it by default. You can tell Spotlight not to display certain kinds of information, which helps, but it's still like drinking from a firehose. I haven't found Spotlight to be indispensable since I'm already good about putting things in predictable folders, but it works.
Dashboard: The other feature that Apple is pushing as a Big Thing. Unlike Konfabulator, Dashboard widgets cannot be mingled with actual windows, unless I'm missing a config setting. It took me a while to realize that you could add dashboard widgets by hitting the little "plus" sign, which reveals many useful things like Flight Status. The "water ripple" effect when widgets are added is nice. Dashboard isn't indispensable, but it works.
Mail 2: Little "mail folders" drawer gone, replaced with regular panel. For some reason I liked my drawer on the right and the panel's on the left which gorked my chi for a few days but is OK now. Not cool: GPGMail causes Mail2 to crash without any explanation, as does PGPMail. George Bush can read my innermost thoughts, at least until a new GPGMail is released. Spotlight-style searching works pretty darn well, although I'd still like to see a regular basic boolean search. Spotlight indexes mail in the Trash but does not include the Trash in its results unless explicitly asked for, which is unexpected (to me). The Ars Technica Review of Tiger mentions most of my gripes about the new Mail buttons. Mail 2 is much faster overall: perhaps because the pre-indexing means that it doesn't have to read my two year archive of pictures of people falling down that my brother keeps sending me. Also possibly because messages are stored in individual files rather than in one big mailbox file. One cool feature: "slideshow", which displays emailed images full-screen with buttons to import the photos into iPhoto. You would think this would be fairly minor or wankertastic but it is in fact very nice.
Safari 2: Alas I am a Firefox man. Though Safari is faster it does not save passwords or have Adblock. I have mixed feelings about Safari's ability to read RSS feeds directly: on one hand it's very clean and nicely implemented. On the other hand it makes RSS become the Web and we've already got one of those. Also includes "Safe Downloads" which is touted as a feature but actually just says "the file you downloaded contains an Application!" I wish that dialog had buttons saying "OK", "cancel" and "of course there fucking is - that's what comes in .dmg files". Because I use Firefox I haven't found Safari 2 indispensable, but it works.
CoreImage: Excited about what this *will* do, but I'm not really sure what it *can* do right now. I wish they included a little demo app to make me say wow so that I could be as excited as I think I ought to be. The RSS News Screen Saver apparently uses CoreImage, but not enough to make my jaw drop. DashBoard does a nifty CoreImage "dropping a stone into water" effect when you add a new widget: not tremendously exciting, but it hints at good things in the future.
Quartz: the graphics rendering engine is FAST now. Finally fast enough that I don't feel like the OS is crippling the hardware. Previously, I'd be using 10.3 and thinking "this is a 1.5ghz machine that's using a fancy graphics chip to move windows around a screen - why is it lagging?" It's not anymore. This is nice.
iChat: iChat AV uses new h.264 compression for videoconferencing. I tried this with another time-traveller and it works much better than previously: we were getting 320x240, 15fps between Montreal and San Francisco over normal household DSL. It's a far cry from what the screenshots in the ads say you can do, but it's better than I've seen before. I'm curious whether matrushkaka will be able to read my lips.
Parental Controls: OSX already kicks ass for a multi-user household because of the multiple-user-login feature. Some parts of the new Parental Controls feature are very interesting: you can easily create whitelists of people your children can IM or exchange mail with, for example. Other parts are a little silly, like a feature that prevents children from looking up profane words in the Dictionary. Looking up "fart" in the dictionary and giggling uncontrollably is one of the joys of being a kid. This feature is not especially useful to me since I don't have children, although I locked matrushkaka's account so now she won't be able to define the word "asshole".
Dictionary: I wouldn't have known about the Dictionary if it wasn't for the Parental Controls box. OSX includes a complete Oxford American Dictionary which doesn't just display words: it displays them CLASSY. As nice as it is, part of me wonders whether a complete OAD is necessary in an operating system. Maybe the spell checker interfaces with it: the universal spell checker API that OSX provides is certainly nice. Which reminds me: I can find the feature that lets you add custom words to the spell checker, but I can't remove words that I added before realizing they were misspelled and my friend Cristin Pescosolido is getting pissed that I keep misspelling her name and I'm pissed that I can't tell the spell checker that I told it the wrong spelling the first time.
Rsync: For most people this is minor, but for me it's a big deal. Rsync and other command line unix apps are now aware of resource forks. This means I can back up my files to an external hard drive without all my damn Final Cut edits getting corrupted. I'm still not exactly sure why we need resource forks at all - someone please explain this to me.
Third Party Apps Which Do Not Work Anymore, Not Necessarily In The Order Which They Bust My Balls:
- Emacs
- Quicksilver
- GPGMail
- CocoaMySQL
- YourSQL
- Many DarwinPorts including, most notably, the readline plugin for Python.
- Drag-and-dropping torrents into Azureus
- Drag-and-dropping JPGs onto the Adobe Photoshop dock icon don't open the files in Photoshop anymore.
Thoughts: Recently I was listening to a recording of a discussion a few years ago between Jef Raskin and Bill Atkinson and a few other people. Someone (I forget who) mentioned that Microsoft had done a product satisfaction survey for MSWord, and the top 12 most commonly requested features were already features in Microsoft Word. It was, for all practical purposes, complete.
Tiger feels a little like Microsoft Word, which is good or bad. Like Word, OSX is complete: it has a stable kernel, a fantastic window manager running on a next-generation graphics subsystem, a standardized command line in a familiar and proven POSIX environment, and a security model where users can actually use their computer from user-space. Things are in their place and work well together. Thankfully Apple hasn't added any talking paperclips in Tiger, but at the same time the improvements are less major because it's already damn good. Tiger is 5500% better than windows, because OSX 10.3 is already 5000% better than Windows. Even without Spotlight, Mail, iCal, iPhoto, GarageBand, AddressBook, and the other products, Tiger would still be 5100% better than Windows. You're paying $125 to go from 5000% to 5500% better.
So is it worth buying? I use my PowerBook about a billion hours a week and I'm a compulsive updater, so Tiger's marginal improvement is still worth it to me. On the other hand if your mom uses a 400Mhz iMac to upload pictures of her cats it might not be worth it for her.