Wednesday, June 30, 2004
A few folks have asked me what I think of Tiger, the next version of MacOS X that is due to ship in the first half of next year...
Steve Jobs made a big fuss of some of the new features such as Spotlight, which provides a way to instantly find things all over your file system. This one is no surprise, as Microsoft has touted much the same thing under the "WinFS" moniker for Longhorn. While Jobs joked about how they have this feature at least a year (probably more like 2 years) before Longhorn ships, this whole thing bugged me. Why? Perhaps because BeOS was doin the same thing way back in 1997, when they built BFS (the BeOS File System) where the file system was an indexed database that supported rapid searching based on metadata (filename, document keywords and so on).
Last year I interviewed with the WinFS team, and to bone up on the whole area I read Dominic Giampaolo's book on how he designed BFS when he was at Be Inc. (its a really interesting book but now sadly out of print... If you're interested Dominic made it available in PDF form). It was of course no surprise that Apple beat Microsoft out, as Giampaolo now works in Apple's file system group and helped them to implement the indexing feature in Panther's file system, which is no doubt a key enabler for Spotlight.
I couldn't get excited about iChat AV. I actually gave my iSight away... Perhaps if I was using my Mac at work I might use it. Ah well.
Most of the other stuff seemed like just logical extensions of things they already had. I was especially annoyed by Dashboard, as it is just a total rip of Konfabulator.
The one exciting thing was that they finally got seamless (so they say) 64-bit app support in there. Once Tiger is here I can finally justify to myself the cost and trouble of upgrading to a G5, and dream of the day when Photoshop goes 64-bit (its the one app I use a lot that eats memory like crazy)
On a related note, Dell just announced the new Precision 470 and Precision 670 workstations with the new Xeons featuring Intel's Extended Memory 64 Technology... basically adding the AMD64 extensions to their IA32 core. Now I have a reason to install Whidbey (.NET V2) and start playing with 64-bit stuff (Itanium never excited me very much)
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Steve Jobs made a big fuss of some of the new features such as Spotlight, which provides a way to instantly find things all over your file system. This one is no surprise, as Microsoft has touted much the same thing under the "WinFS" moniker for Longhorn. While Jobs joked about how they have this feature at least a year (probably more like 2 years) before Longhorn ships, this whole thing bugged me. Why? Perhaps because BeOS was doin the same thing way back in 1997, when they built BFS (the BeOS File System) where the file system was an indexed database that supported rapid searching based on metadata (filename, document keywords and so on).
Last year I interviewed with the WinFS team, and to bone up on the whole area I read Dominic Giampaolo's book on how he designed BFS when he was at Be Inc. (its a really interesting book but now sadly out of print... If you're interested Dominic made it available in PDF form). It was of course no surprise that Apple beat Microsoft out, as Giampaolo now works in Apple's file system group and helped them to implement the indexing feature in Panther's file system, which is no doubt a key enabler for Spotlight.
I couldn't get excited about iChat AV. I actually gave my iSight away... Perhaps if I was using my Mac at work I might use it. Ah well.
Most of the other stuff seemed like just logical extensions of things they already had. I was especially annoyed by Dashboard, as it is just a total rip of Konfabulator.
The one exciting thing was that they finally got seamless (so they say) 64-bit app support in there. Once Tiger is here I can finally justify to myself the cost and trouble of upgrading to a G5, and dream of the day when Photoshop goes 64-bit (its the one app I use a lot that eats memory like crazy)
On a related note, Dell just announced the new Precision 470 and Precision 670 workstations with the new Xeons featuring Intel's Extended Memory 64 Technology... basically adding the AMD64 extensions to their IA32 core. Now I have a reason to install Whidbey (.NET V2) and start playing with 64-bit stuff (Itanium never excited me very much)
