Mac OS X 10.4 Preview
- Article 27 of 53
- iCreate, April 2005
A major new version of the Mac OS will arrive any time now. Rob Buckley brings you the inside story on Apple's exciting new OS and finds out if Tiger will burn as brightly as its predecessor, Panther.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages
Start playing around with it though and you’ll realise that Apple has again pulled off a miracle in the performance department. Unlike Windows, every generation of which requires a newer faster computer just to provide the same performance as the previous version, OS X has got fasterwith every release. Tiger is no different and even with a few programs running, you’ll feel as though your Mac has a spring in its step. That speed boost is even bigger for G5-based Macs, particularly ones with dual processors, so Tiger will certainly begin to pay for itself right from day one. How Apple does it, no one knows.
The introduction of Core Image and Core Video to Tiger should also speed things up further. These provide hardware acceleration for QuickTime and a range of hardware-accelerated image and video manipulation tools for developers that practically amount to Photoshop in a box. But just as Aqua and Quartz Extreme provided a way for every application to have drop shadows, transparent windows and live resizing without any real overhead or development work, so Core Image and Core Video should open up a new world of effects even to applications that were content to sit there and look rubbish.
Tiger is also beginning to show how mature OS X is now. While Jaguar introduced a completely new printing system and Panther messed around with some of the hardware drivers, Tiger has proved refreshingly immune to the “new operating system, new problems” syndrome that has beset previous releases. None of our printers, scanners or other bits of hardware suddenly stopped working once Tiger was on board. Approach a Tiger upgrade relatively confident that nothing’s going to stop working.
So what’s new with this particular pussy cat? Well, Spotlight is certainly one of the high points of Tiger. Spotlight’s instant search facility is pretty much what it says on the box. Click on the magnifying glass, type in what you’re looking for, and almost everything on your Mac that contains your search terms will pop up, whether it’s in an email message, an Address Book contact, a Word file or a PDF. It’s very fast, unlike all previously advertised instant search solutions (no names mentioned Sherlock. Whoops. We just did.), but there are a few limitations.
First, your Mac has to index all your files, going through each one in turn. Unsurprisingly, this will take a few hours if you have a lot of files. However, you won’t need to do anything to update the index – Spotlight is integrated deep within Tiger, so whenever you make changes to files, the index will change automatically.
The second limitation is that it will only work with files that Tiger understands. So developers that have their own file formats and who want Spotlight to be able to search their files will have to create a Spotlight plug-in. No plug-in, no search.
Automator is a nice new tool for the pro user who doesn’t want to learn AppleScript. Essentially, it lets you automate one program, feed the result into another program and so on until the result you wanted is achieved. So you might want to get iPhoto to open a particular album, rotate all the pictures (well, you might…) then send photos via Mail to everyone in a particular Address Book group. A few clicks, drags and drops in Automator and it’s all done.
To a large extent, Automator relies on pre-packaged steps, so you have to hope that it has a step that matches what you want to do. But for anyone that regularly does a series of tasks and wants to take some of the drudgery out of it, Automator will be a blessing.
Dashboard is the most visually exciting new feature in Tiger. It activates when you click on its icon in the dock or press F12, revealing a whole host of widgets such as currency converters, language translators, flight information and almost everything else that was once the domain of Sherlock. You can add widgets by activating a second dock, which appears underneath the real dock, and dragging them out onto the desktop.
While these are the main things that you can show off to other users, there are a lot of little things in Tiger that add up to quite a lot. The Finder now has whole new types of folder, including Smart Folders and Burn folders. Smart folders, which appear like iTunes smart folders, don’t contain files: they contain search results. So if you want to have a folder that contains all Word documents you’ve created in the last 30 days, you can create a smart folder which will show them all; it will automatically update its content as time moves on and you create new documents. Smart folders won’t be confined to just the Finder: Mail, Address Book, Font Book and other Apple apps will get similar functions.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages