Tiger Changes?

[DanTekGeek]

Simple question, but I havent seen a simple answer. What big changes are coming in tiger?

[texanpenguin]

Spotlight will change how we use our computers (and finally give us something to replace the god-awful Find tool in Panther), and will replace (at least for me) LaunchBar/Quicksilver/Butler assuming it can find applications I've just installed, too.

CoreImage and CoreVideo are being integrated. These, from what I understand, are a layer on top of Quartz that developers can tap into to perform image and video manipulation tasks easily, so Apple stays well ahead of the pack (read: the Aero/Avalon (forget which :P) project in Longhorn).

Those are the big two to me.

Dashboard (what I refer as the next step in Exposé) will be included, which keeps information and small programs always close at hand.

Automator (formally Pipeline) is a new way to automate tasks, which taps into the power of AppleScript, but finally makes it drag-and-drop easy. Apple plans on releasing heaps of Automator Workflows with Tiger, so it'll be useful without you needing to do anything with it.


And people are saying it'll have full 64-bit optimisation too, which is huge.


The site you want to check out is Tiger Tracker (http://www.tigertracker.net from memory), which will show you screenshots etc of the whole project as it comes to hand.

[symphonix]

A lot of what will be introduced in Tiger has not been announced yet. Among the rumoured but unconfirmed changes are significant changes to themes/appearance.

The official run down is here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/

Features
Spotlight: A new search technology that searches metadata for instant search on files, email, bookmarks, websites, contacts, photos, videos, songs ... all at once.
iChat AV: some new features (3 way chat, new codec)
Safari RSS: This one I'm quite excited about. Safari will now have a very slick RSS reader/searcher.
Dashboard: a kind-of cross between Konfabulator and Expose, only written in Java rather than Javascript.
Automator: Automate manual, repetitive and batch tasks with point and click simplicity. There's some rumour this might be dubbed "pipeline" instead. Basically, its a way of setting up a whole series of complicated tasks in quite a simple, visual interface. The power of AppleScript, without having to actually write a single line of script.
VoiceOver: Access the Mac through speech, audible cues and keyboard navigation for the visually impaired.
Xcode 2.0: lots of new features rumoured for this, should be good for developers.

64-bit: Most if not all of the apps that ship with Tiger will be optimised to run on G5. "Fat binaries" mean they'll also be optimised for G3 and G4. Basically, the compiler creates 3 different executables in one, and the OS automatically selects the best one.

Core Image and CoreVideo: these new technologies will allow developers to perform more video and image tricks in their apps than ever before, applying filters and blends and all sorts of motion and trickery. This means that a lot of new 10.4 only apps should start appearing that take advantage of these features.

Other things rumoured are a further revised Mail.app, and improved security features. It's been said that 10.4 will encrypt virtual memory.

[fryke]

There are several changes coming. Whether they're big are often in the eye of the beholder. 64bit-ness is a big thing for many G5 owners, but for me personally with a PB G4, it doesn't matter much. ... I think Spotlight will be the biggest, biggest, biggest change. And I don't really mean that button on the upper right corner that lets you search your drives' contents instantly, I mean the implementation of it throughout the system. Smart Folders everywhere. You'll see them in Finder, Address Book, Mail.app and basically everywhere you could imagine.
Remember how Exposé made using a computer easier? Spotlight's the same, only with ten times the impact. It's not comparable to Google's Desktop search in that aspect. It's 'the base' for the system. You'll see Spotlight everywhere, although you might not notice it as THE feature it really is, since it's not an application per se. I guess that's why Apple puts it so prominently in the menubar (they could have just mapped Apple-F to it instead, right?) - for marketing.

There are hundreds of features we'll read about. But Spotlight, I think, will be so ubiquitous, come in so handy... I'm at awe.

[Viro]

I don't really care about all those new features. What I want to know is, what version of GCC it ships with, and if there are any noticeable speed improvements on anything below a G5. The move to Panther made things a lot more snappy, I hope the same will happen when I move to Tiger.

[fryke]

I guess definite statements about Tiger's performance on older hardware can only be made when the builds are nearing release. We don't know the amount of debug code still in Tiger's codebase etc. We also don't know which performance 'issues' can/will be solved. But I _expect_ the system to be snappier than Panther overall. What I already _saw_ is that - again - Apple's trying to speed up booting/rebooting.

About Spotlight replacing LaunchBar: Not for me. Spotlight's menubar item can - at this time - not be invoked by keyboard afaik, and while it's fast searching your computer, it finds everything, and I rather have LB display at the first line the application I'm looking for to launch. Spotlight is certainly not a good launcher... However: I expect LaunchBar to interact with Spotlight, so that you can basically enter terms into Launchbar and hit a key combo to give the search over to Spotlight... We'll see.

[Viro]

What about which version of GCC is being used? Is it 3.5 or 3.4? Reason I'm asking is because the 3.5 branch of GCC has the tree-ssa stuff that people are working on. In a nutshell, it basically autovectorizes code to use Altivec, which would mean that a simple recompile of most programs would yield a speed increase because Altivec would automatically be used.

[fryke]

I'll take a look when I'm back home.