Tech Goes Boom

WWDC 2004

The Stevenote has happened and we have our first look at Tiger and the new Displays.

The new displays are beautiful. Really really beautiful, and can take standard vesa mounts, which is really cool. The 20 and 23 get new bezels and firewire, but no resolution increases. The 30 requires a $600 video card just to support it's insanely high resolution.

A quick rundown of the new Tiger features:

Spotlight: Anywhere, anything searching. This seems very cool. It remains to be seen if we will have live search folders in the finder, although they are are for mail. update: now that I have seen the keynote, this is indeed a feature. Color me impressed.

iChatAV: Group audio and video chat. This is something I've been wanting to see for a while. Now using H.264 codec. I'm looking forward to this in a big way.

Safari RSS: While this looks pretty cool, I don't know if it will be able to compete with NNW or another dedicated RSS reader that offers more advanced features, but I expect it will have advanced by the time we can buy it with Tiger.

Dashboard: I can't believe they spent any time, effort or money on this feature. It's Konfabulator. I'm not the biggest of "keep it simple so that people don't get confused" fans, but this seems to be a legitimate example of that. Do I really need another way to access address book, itunes, stickies, the clock, and etc? No not really. If people are really having a hard time getting to and using these apps, shouldn't we refine the OS and those apps rather than add yet another way to access them? Don't get me wrong, I understand the concept, put a bunch of apps that you don't need on screen all the time into a place that you can quickly access, and quickly dismiss once you've done what you needed to do, but why not simply implement virtual desktops instead. Users could adapt to that metaphor just as easily, Apps are still accessed in only one way, just on another screen, and Xwindows users are right at home.

Automator: Applescript for the masses. This is a very cool looking package. I'm very interested in seeing what default actions it will ship with.

.Mac Sync: I am a dot mac member, and while this is nice, I wouldn't call it a selling point of the OS.

Enhanced Unix Support: The most undersold part of the whole upgrade. Due to the new Metadata system, standard unix commands like tar and cp will work without extension or modification and preserve resource forks. ACLs, Access Control Lists. This is a pretty cool little extension to the permissions system that allows you person by person permissions. There is also a new one stop launch daemon which should make starting and stopping services from the command line a lot easier.

Xcode 2: New GCC 3.5 compiler with snazzy new optimization, and a built in reference library. It will also model class diagrams automatically.

OS X Server Tiger newness:

Couple of nice things here. Starting with better roaming profile support for users who have server based home directories, but use laptops.

Your own ichat server with *gasp* encryption and kerberos authentication. That's really cool. Also it ships with a version of Blojsom that will use Open Directories users and authentication.

Software Update proxy. Also a nice feature for admins. You can download that latest update and roll it to your machines when you're sure it's not going to wipe your hard drives.

NT Migration Tool. This is a big one. Very big. Apple is providing a way here to simply drop in a mac os x server replacement for your old NT box.

Link Aggregation: built in ability to pair multiple network interfaces for speed and reliability. Nice to have this built in.

Postfix gets virtual host support.

Managed Network Browsing: Lets you control how your users see the network when browsing in the finder.

Over all, there are some very healthy improvements here, but also some disappointments. Given Steve's timeframe, they still have almost a year to get everything ready to go. Should be interesting to see what happens.