Redmond, Get Your Copiers Ready

http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html

Rumor sites are buzzing in the past few days about the impending release of the new MacOS X version, codenamed "Tiger." I just wanted to chime in with a few tidbits from TNL's certified tech.

Spotlight: I've never understood the fascination with searching and why such a heavy emphasis is placed upon it. I don't use any particular organization with my files, I just make sure I name them properly. Then, I just find. However, Spotlight is nifty. I don't know if I'd call it great.

Dashboard: The iTunes widget and the one for the Yellow Pages are the gems. Everything else is average.

Mail & Safari: The updates are anti-climactic, really. RSS is standard in Firefox.

Automater: Quite possibly the coolest thing ever made. Go play with it, but nothing beats having it running on the machine in front of you. :)

Anyway, the rumor sites are saying April 15th. I'd guess earlier, but the date should at least be announced on April 1st.

Yeah, saw this before. When is the next generation/upgrade of hardware coming?

so what, it's got integrated desktop searching, I can accomplish the same thing with google desktop search on xp

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Originally Posted by Mike

Dashboard: The iTunes widget and the one for the Yellow Pages are the gems. Everything else is average.

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Konfabulator always performed kind of poorly for me and I was interested in seeing this. Yellow Pages widget sounds like a nice thing indeed.

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Mail & Safari: The updates are anti-climactic, really. RSS is standard in Firefox.

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Meh, Firefox does pretty much everything Safari does but better as far as I'm concerned. Well, except Flash playback seems to be really choppy and shitty in OS X Firefox... but that could just be me. It's fine in Safari. Weird.

When they announce the date I guess I'll order a copy online, because I tried to buy Panther day one at the Apple Store, they wouldn't give me the student discount in-store, so I walked out, installed it off of CDRs, and got my copy online a couple weeks later. Pretty shitty on Apple's part, I think, to honor student discounts online but not in store. I now know that there are computer stores in town that actually will give you those discounts in-store... so why won't Apple?

A lot of people aren't too excited about Spotlight, but hot damn, this was the BIGGEST request I had from Mac OSX. I've got so many files dealing with different things, that it's going to be so nice to be able to search them properly.

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Originally Posted by cka

so what, it's got integrated desktop searching, I can accomplish the same thing with google desktop search on xp

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Yeah, no.

You know anything about BeOS? Basically, the guy who came up with the BeOS file/search system worked on Spotlight. Can Google Desktop show you every image you have that are in RGB and are 800x600? Can it show you every digital photo you took during a certain time period? (And I'm not talking the file's creation/modification date.) Can it find you all movies with a copyright belonging to Apple? Can it search inside PDFs and find you every PDF you have with the words "Metal Gear Solid" in them?

Those are a few examples of what Spotlight is going to do. It not only searches by file names, basic info, and file contents, but also things like file metadata. As well, you can then create Smart Folders build upon Spotlight searches. For example, I could create a folder that automatically shows everything I have concerning Sonim, be them images of her, her songs, her videos, PDFs and files about her, my Sonim fansite web templates and Photoshop layouts, etc.

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Originally Posted by shidoshi

Can Google Desktop show you every image you have that are in RGB and are 800x600? Can it show you every digital photo you took during a certain time period? (And I'm not talking the file's creation/modification date.) Can it find you all movies with a copyright belonging to Apple? Can it search inside PDFs and find you every PDF you have with the words "Metal Gear Solid" in them?

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I've never used Google Desktop, even though I doubt it is capable of those things, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out why you would want to do those things. But hey, whatever finds your lost remote.

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As well, you can then create Smart Folders build upon Spotlight searches. For example, I could create a folder that automatically shows everything I have concerning Sonim, be them images of her, her songs, her videos, PDFs and files about her, my Sonim fansite web templates and Photoshop layouts, etc.

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Smart Folders are why I said Spotlight was nifty and not just good. :)

Anyway, Automater == the shiznit. What I'm looking forward to is something that I can't say is true even though it may really be the opposite of false and I may not have never experienced it firsthand: No OS 9 support. If they get rid of OS 9 support, that marks the end of all that crap. And good riddance, too.

windows still has at least one thing going for it - I don't have to pay $100 for a new service pack every year.

Tiger is the last annual update to OS X, actually. 10.5 won't be out for at least a few years.

The 10.x releases of Mac OS X all added a lot more to the OS than service packs do. Windows XP was a reasonable if half-assed wannabe of the original Mac OS X... now, with Expose, Automator, etc. its just no contest.

edit: .x releases of Mac OS X are closer to Win 98, Win 98 SE, Win ME type upgrades than service packs, really.

I wish Apple would try to release an PC architecture version of their OS just to make MS piss away a bunch of money to try to squash it. It would certainly be interesting to see if they could make a dent.