Today was the first day of Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (***WWDC|http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/***). In his keynote presentation, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs discussed several new technologies coming to Apple:
Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” ( ***client|http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/28tiger.html*** | ***server|http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/28tigerserver.html*** )
Tiger is the next evolutionary step for Mac OS X. You can read about all of the cool new features at the above links, but one interesting feature is that the server version of the OS will come installed with a Blogging server based on ***blojsom|http://wiki.blojsom.com/wiki/display/blojsom/About+blojsom***. blojsom is a lightweight, Java-based blogging server inspired by blosxom. Along similar lines, Apple will also be releasing newsfeed-reading capabilities in upcoming versions of Safari. Very cool.
***30″ Cinema Display|http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/28displays.html***
That’s just big. I want one, of course, but that’s about as far as I’m going to get towards owning one.
***XCode 2|http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/28xcode.html***
If you’re developing applications for the Mac OS, you’re going to want this.
Many of the new software features in XCode and Tiger are geared towards full support for 64-bit processing. That’s great news, as 64-bit capabilities were introduced when the G5 PowerMacs were released, but are not as yet fully supported. When Tiger is released, G5 owners can expect a major boost in overall performance.
Thus far Tiger looks a bit underwhelming. An improvement, certainly, but not on the level that Jaguar and Panther were. Dashboard could be cool. I like that they include so many widgets with it, particularly the iTunes control and the address book. If I knew more people with the ability to make decent use of the AV features of iChat, the new version would be pretty darn sweet, but at the moment it doesn’t seem like anything I’d use more than the current version. Safari RSS is definitely another step up. As for Spotlight, I’d probably have to see it in action. Final story: by the time I get a G5, I’ll be glad that Tiger (or perhaps better, by that time) is on it. Will I be upgrading my Powerbook in January (or whenever Tiger is released)? Probably not, unless they offer a sweet educational discount that I find all but impossible to pass up again.
I forgot to talk about the new Cinema Displays. Huge. Gorgeous. The USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 ports are a definite plus. I’m all in favor of switching to DVI (as cool as the ADC idea was), and the 4-cords-that-join-into-one thing is a great way to go about keeping clutter down. They do seem a bit overpriced, but not outrageously so. It’s kind of a bummer that right now there’s only one video card that will support the 30-inch, but it’s not like I’d be owning one (let alone two) any time soon, so I don’t know what I’m complaining about. The drastically reduced footprint is a great improvement, as is the aluminum look.
My ultimate take: This is a high-end, well-disguised subsequent step in the “digital lifestyle” department. With the introduction of AirTunes a while back and now collossal, wall-mountable digital displays, it doesn’t seem like too far of a leap for a possible attempt to make the Mac an integral part of a really high-end home entertainment system sometime in the future. For the present, this is a very good update on what had been the rather rapidly aging cinema display line.
Wow, those two comments combined sure would have made a great blog entry on your site. 😉
Panther was definitely a worthwhile upgrade for everyone to have… the infrastructure improvements, speed and stability alone were worth the price. Tiger looks like it will be a lot of extra icing on an already delicious cake. As for the features… Dashboard is a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator. It already does everything that Apple’s Dashboard does, and is just as stylish. As the Konfabulator folks put it, “Cupertino, start your photocopiers.” Konfabulator: http://www.konfabulator.com/
Most of the other icing features are technologies that are already available third-party, and already done better. The most worthwhile things are the underlying improvements in the architecture, such as support for 64-bit processing and the advanced graphics support. None of which I’ll be able to take advantage of on my aging Macs.
Yeah, I read an interview last night (forget the link) with one of the guys who thought up Konfabulator, and his thoughts on Dashboard. I have yet to use any kind of widget software, since from what I saw on The Screen Savers (oh, how I miss TechTV), the only Windows widget software available right now isn’t all that good, and even if it were, it would suck up quite a bit of valuable processor time on my system. Once I get my Powerbook (a matter of weeks), I’ll probably get Konfabulator to try it out, but at the moment I’m really not sure if it’s something I’d use all that much. I find it interesting that one of the things they focus on when comparing Konfab and Dashboard is that Konfab is amodal. Personally, I think a modal app would suit me better, if for no other reason than that I hate screen clutter.
While I think Konfabulator (and, therefore, Dashboard) is a cool idea, neither of them really work for me. Either you have a few choice widgets set up where you can see them at all times, or you have a bunch of widgets set up and hit the hotkey to reveal them all at once. In the first case, they are wasting valuable screen real estate on my puny 1024×768 screens. In the second case, that’s just too much effort to get to the information.
What works best for me are menubar widgets, such as MenuMeters (http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/) and WeatherPop (http://www.glu.com/products/weatherpop/). The menubar is there all the time, and you can’t get rid of it, so why not put it to use? Of course, if you set up too menubar widgets, you’ll eventually run out of horizontal space. But if you compare the menulets I have in my menu bar (cpu and memory utilization, network throughput, clock, current weather conditions) to the equivalent Konfab widgets, Konfab will take up a lot more space.
Dashboard would be ideal for someone with a G5 and a 30″ monitor… plenty of processor power for those special effects, and just enough screen real estate to have all of the widgets open with space to spare for a couple of Safari windows.