DrunkenBlog

MacOS 10.4 Tiger Musings (WWDC 2004)

So my bday started out as a bit of a bummer. I'd cleared off a section of the day for grunt so I could jump back and forth between the WWDC keynote when something interesting popped up...

As it turns out, this was the only WWDC keynote in recent memory that wasn't streamed. At all. Bummer. I couldn't really understand the reasoning for this, as it's not as though they don't have the bandwidth and its not as though people needed another reason to think Apple might be changing their name to 'Apple Entertainment' in the near future.

At any rate, I figured if they didn't think it was that big of a deal I shouldn't devote too much time to it, so it was dead to me for most of the day. Plus, you know, the whole Iraq handing over power several days earlier than expected and sort of sucking up a lot of my attention was something I thought might happen.

In the same previous post, I kinda sorta figured this was going to happen too, which was worth a chuckle. You really had to see this coming a mile away, and honestly the whole 'Tiger' brand is just ruined in my head... I guess I'm just like that.

So I passed on most of the Tiger stuff initially, even when I saw that they'd posted a stream of the keynote, and somehow got it into my head at 3am the next morning that hey, until I slept it was still my birthday and considering my lifestyle I wouldn't have all that many of these left, so just enjoying it wasn't enough, I needed to suck the marrow out of its bones. This ended up exacerbating a whole confluence of events, including deadlines and other things (some blog related) that meant I didn't get around to until late last night.

I kept notes while I was watching, which need to be taken with a salt mine as, well, I was just jotting notes while I watched and read up on it at various sites. I seem to be gushing a lot less about it than most of the bloggers who are there who are just loving on this thing.

Perhaps its the alcohol making me somewhat immune to the RDF, or a subconscious aversion to some of the homoerotic undertones on other sites at the moment (not that there's anything wrong with that), or perhaps there's some seriously cool stuff being shown during the sessions? Ah well, browsing some of the many mailing lists I'm on, lots of people do seem kind of underwhelmed, but I haven't been able to spend the time to see why or what kind of users they are.

Anyways, about the keynote...

Started out really basic, lots of polite applause at appropriate times. Jobs can be such a likeable guy, he really has a touch of the salesmen in him and its hard to get tired of watching him. The Apple Store stuff was nice. I'll admit that if there was a screensaver out there of the Apple Stores I'd prolly be running it, the Chicago store is just a beautiful, beautiful building. I had to drool over the Tokyo store, hopefully it might help sales there which have dropped like a stone lately.

The iPod stuff was amusing. There was polite applause for Airport Express (something I'll blog about later), but then Jobs started going into the iTunes store's popularity and you got the impression that people were tuning out. Yeah, its nice, but this is stuff to get picked up by the press, not something developers are there for. Then he went on about the iPod BMW deal which just made me cringe.

It was completely ignored, either because it isn't something developers are there for or because the entire solution is lame as hell. If you haven't followed, its basically just a cable into your glove comparment that you plug the iPod into. Yeah, it just flops around in there. Classy... if it had been a cradle, where you just slapped the iPod in there might have been an actual reaction. Even if it wasn't something you wanted sticking out to get stolen, have a place to slide it in between the seat. People just aren't digging this and its entirely fair for them not to. There just had to be a better solution than having to bend over into the glove compartment every time you get in and out of the car. I'm not kidding, there wasn't even polite applause.

Then there was the PowerMac G5 stuff, which was interesting, and Jobs starts to go on about how the G5 has a 1.25GHz bus, which is how fast stuff gets in and out of the processor, and is often much more important than the actual CPU speed. He also mentions that the fastest the competition offers is 800MHz... and he's got a point here, the bus speeds on the G5 are yummy, and yes, getting data in and out of the CPU is very important depending on what you're doing.

But these are simplistic marketing bulletpoints, and fail to mention how P4's have hyperthreading, their Centrino line decimates Apple's mobile solutions when it comes to bus speeds and the AMD-64 has an on-CPU memory controller which vastly alleviates its slower bus speeds. Since this confuses people sometimes, think about it this way: on a P4 or G5, every time the CPU wants to communicate with RAM it has to go out over the bus (using bandwidth, and the bus is much slower than the CPU frequency), but with AMD's solution the RAM controller is integrated directly into the CPU and its pretty much the future in terms of CPU design. Talked about the 8x superdrive, and the fact that they were all duals. No one seemed to care.

Then the "2.5GHz" issue was talked about shortly, but everyone pretty much knew this story already. But then he talks about how Intel increased 12.5% with 90nm and IBM improved the G5s' clockspeed 25% with 90nm, and how pleased they were. Had a whole little table and everything. Lame, just so very very lame. He should have stopped with saying how they misjudged the jump to 90nm... pointing out that Intel was able to get their incredibly overgrown and creaky arch to where it is without 90nm and liquid cooling isn't boding well for the G5 at the moment. And Intel doesn't have liquid cooling on their 3.6GHz 90nm part...

Much of this is due to the G5 being such a "rough" chip (another post on that later), but with how intricately hand-crafted the P4 is, there's not much to brag about here. "We'll keep striving for that 3GHz and I hope that one day we make it" was an interesting final line. Jobs' RDF was failing pretty miserably here, this was a place for a self-effacing joke and why they're having problems, no one but some bloggers seemed to buy the spin on this.

Ahhhh but then the new Apple displays were released, with the great line "Our competitors buy the panels we reject". Thank god, just thank god. The current displays were so long in the tooth they were growing into their brains, with how image-conscious Apples' products are, having one of the older displays next to a G5 was just... distasteful. Dual USB and dual firewire are built into the displays, but I have to admit I didn't dig their placement. I guess it depends on how you're going to use it, but I much would have preferred them in the bottom of the bezel with the markings on the front.

Then he makes a big point about how there's one cable coming off the display that splits into DVI, USB, firewire, etc once it hits the computer. Way to go Apple, you reinvented a solution you first created back in 13 bloody years ago with the AudioVision monitors that used a similar 'spaghetti' style of connector for their new monitor that had a microphone and stereo speakers built in. And yes, they're "going to DVI for this new generation of displays". No, you mean you're going back to DVI.

This is just a huge fucking pet peeve of mine when it comes to Apple, as this isn't the first time they've done this and prolly won't be the last. They moved all of their LCD displays to the ACD connector which carried USB, power, etc. It was a superset of DVI that no one else implimented, and it had the distinction of allowing you to plug one cable into the back of the computer from the monitor. Nice, but just so fucking annoying. It really steams me. They created an entire market for ~$150 DVI > ACD and ACD > DVI connectors that just didn't have to exist, and switching from DVI to ACD screwed up their entire product line.

Powerbooks came with DVI connectors, which meant you had to buy an adapter to use an Apple LCD. Anyone with a PC who wanted to buy an Apple monitor had to shell out for them. If you had a PowerMac and wanted to use two Apple LCDs, you had to shell out for the connector as macs have one DVI and one ACD connector. And now of course the PowerMacs still have ACD ports until they change them to dual DVI, meaning extra money out of your pocket for dual displays.

This increased the costs of the actual video cards themselves, considering Apple was the only one using this stupid damn connection. All of this so they could have one stupid cable. Otherwise the displays will look beautiful next to a G5, I'm really interested in checking out the claimed increase in picture quality.

There are two things that sort of wig me out about them:

• They start at $1299 and 20", meaning they've just ceded the entire low end of the LCD market. Lots of people don't want to drop that kind of dough on an LCD, but I suppose it was a nice gift to the low-end 3rd party LCD makers. They're really pricey, but if the quality improvements are really there that's alright.
• I'm sort of iffy about the display stand. I really think they're onto something really really yummy with the iMac's swing arm, once you've gotten used to being able to put the display anywhere you want it for ergonomics, or swing it around for a "hey, check this out" to a friend/client, or even just turning the display so you can keep an eye on something while you're in another part of the room... I was looking for something more here after all this time. And the rigid stand might make it easier for VESA mounting (smacking it up onto your wall)...

I'll admit I'm just drooling over the 30" display and I'm positive I'm not the only one. I just want the damn thing (which is good) but considering it requires a special $600 graphics card that'll have an infinitesimal lifespan when it comes to an investment, and the cost of the display itself... few people are going to be picking this up for quite awhile. But damn do I want it. Damn. $4k. Just well out of my price range, and I'm not the only one as about 3 people clapped when the pricing was announced.

He did get a great reaction when he talked about the new graphics card that has to go with them, which is pretty slick stuff and similar to what Nvidia is bringing out for the PC market shortly and what Alienware is doing... the difference being that Nvidia and Alienware are doing it for improved framerates, and Apple is doing it just to be able to drive the insane resolutions for general usage. It's the first time in a long while I'm aching for the cost of these things to go down.

Then he started going over Panther, and mentioned that 50% of the mac userbase was using OSX... something like 12 million users and goes onto mention that no other OS in the world has half its userbase on the one OS. This was arguably very misleading though, as he's sort of gives the impression that 50% of the base are running Panther... but we really have no idea. 25% of those could still be on 10.2, etc... I'd love better figures.

I sort of tuned out at this point, as he started going into "the transition to OSX is now over" which was both reminiscent of "major combat operations in iraq being over" and, well, I thought the transition was supposed to be over at the last two WWDCs, with, ya know, OS9 coming up in coffins and such. I'm guessing there are reasons that coud be gleaned as to why they're doing this, but when I saw the "three major OS transitions in the history of computing" and WinXP isn't even mentioned I just had to tune out. This fell pretty flat for most of the audience too, and you know it wasn't supposed to with the whole "pauses for applause" going on.

I'm really not kidding, he even said "i think we should all take a moment to pat ourselves on the back... the transition is over" which is the equivalent of throwing up an applause sign... nothing, but he's a good enough presenter to pick up that its not going to happen within half a second and move on quickly. He's really very, very good.

Some of the new apps were talked about, including Oracle bringing over their database products, MS Office, Quark, PeopleSoft, Sun... along with a great, great line about getting Oracle & PeopleSoft as far apart as possible on the slide that got a good laugh.

The guys from Maya came out and mentioned that 25% of their sales are for the mac now, which is a bigger deal than it seems really. Macs pretty much lost whatever share SGI and other turnkey boxes didn't have to WindowsNT in a big big way long ago, so some of these guys coming back and staying back is worth talking about. I thought this was going to be great when he came out going hyper over the new displays, but the speaker himself honestly kind of sucked once he started into his scripted presentation, I honestly thought I was reading a press release. He also mentioned Maya Unlimited was coming to the mac, which is a big deal also considering Apples' current resurgence in the film world.

Uh, then there was another really badly scripted (who the hell writes these things?) presentation on the new Myst coming to the mac that just felt like a cruel joke. Oh, and as an aside, the new "Myst 4 Revelation" game will have 70 minutes of fully-integrated high-definition video you find via clues. Yeah, this is going to suck, as FMV has never, ever been done well in a game. Although Peter Gabriel is doing the soundtrack, and I do like his older stuff... then again its not like they're going to have Bungie back to show off Halo. :) But really it just felt sad.

Then "Guitar Rig" was shown off, and the applause wasn't forced or polite. The presenter was enthusiastic and did well, but again, who writes these things? They were really trying to give an air of cool, but "a huge range of the most excellent guitar gear" along with "guitar rig means most excellent sound quality" didn't help that. But the guy was from Berlin, and really it looked like the app spoke for itself. And I swear to God, Jobs said "wooo!" which was worth sitting through the presentation for.

Then a really slick little satellite-tracking app called "Orbit" was shown off which was extremely impressive. This was just a really beautiful demo for something a guy whipped up in 3 months, and the applause (deservedly) was prolly the biggest of the show so far.

Then things picked up in a big way with the introduction of Tiger, but going by the chirping crickets some of the developers seemed surprised it was going to ship so late, I.E., first half of 2005, which prolly means its another year away. I wasn't too surprised by it, as a lot of the things they're doing are not easy to accomplish... but I'll blog more on that later. Realistically though, I hope there is a ton of stuff we aren't seeing in terms of the basic apps as many of these things are severely wanting at the moment and a year is a long time to wait... and there was a time when the things Jobs said during the Tiger intro that would have gotten big, big applause and whoops at previous conferences.

I'm so, so not digging the same black disc with a silver X, but with a patch of orange and black stripes, not that white would be better. :) I really dug what they did for jaguar, it had a classy feel but with a touch of fun. This just looks like the quick photoshop job you'd see on a 15-yr olds gaming website. But, whatever, hopefully it'll be changed.

Jobs segwayed into full native 64-bit support in Tiger, which is going to be a big big deal from a server standpoint and hopefully Photoshops' Tiger release is going to go absolutely nuts in terms of what it can address. Better SMP support will be great, but I'm going to have to get a developer pal who was at some of the sessions drunk to see whether or not the funnel situation has been improved, as well as better thread safety in most of the APIs.

ACLs (access control lists) and ACEs (access control entries) were also announced, which is interesting. These basically allow more flexibility than you can get with standard unix permissions. IE, you may have someone on your system whom you want to have the ability to certain root-owned files, like say Apache's httpd.conf, but you don't want them to be using sudo with full root access.

You might be able to pull this off with tricky groups settings and the like, but you're asking for trouble. ACLs will allow you to do this sort of thing, as well as things like inheretence... really nice stuff, although most of my limited experience with them is through AIX, and I don't remember them being fast at all. The next step for this in terms of security is the same sort of paradigm, but for actual processes in memory which is some of what you're seeing with things like SELinux. Really good stuff if you're an administrator, but a normal Joe isn't going to care.

Then he talked about better Window support in Tiger, like TexEdit supporting MSWord tables, and better SMB performance in general... and um, better HTML composition (I'm assuming thats in Mail, but geesh) but man, I dunno, many of these things aren't something you want to be waiting a year for and I'd really wish they'd be rolled out sooner. Especially the SMB stuff. It's gotten better with 10.3, but networking with Windows is not as easy as Apple makes it out to be.

Ahhhh, and then Jobs started talking about searching, or rather "Spotlight". There is a lot of stuff that I don't understand about this but that I'm really looking forward to learning about, namely I'm really interested in just how this is going to work with metadata. It looks like metadata is back in a big way, which is both a blessing and curse... Speed is also going to be a big consideration I'm looking forward to learning about, especially indexing... and even RAM usage. These things could just murder an iBooks' available resources, including RAM and hard drive speed. It does actually look slick, but god damnit when he demo'd it the damn thing the finder still had a metal window so I missed a few seconds while I was ranting to myself.

This is one of the two main things people having been looking for in terms of Panther, namely adding on an SQL-database to the file system. And yes, it is very very exciting. And yes, Longhorn will have it, and yes, Longhorn had to trim theirs back as yes as they wanted theirs to actually go out over the entire network which while it would have been amazing would have been one incredible feat. This stuff isn't easy, and I'm really grooving on it. Smart listings, similar to Gmail if you've used it could be a big big boon to my productivity.

There were some neat demos involving searching the system preferences which I originally dismissed, but then realized there have been times when I've been confounded as to where something might be, like changing the system off of military time.

The Spotlight bar in the upper right hand corner looks very slick, I know people are going to use... but the damn thing better be easily keyboard accessible. I'm not kidding around, having to take your hands off the keyboard to move the mouse up to the Spotlight icon, then back to the keyboard to type it in. Now if I can hit a key combo, then type, then tab/arrow down and hit return... damn damn damn. Beautiful.

But my biggest excitement comes from the fact that these will be general APIs, so that while developers can interface with the SQL-data generated for the file system they can also incorporate this into their applications for themselves. I'm really hoping for some great things from this...

Then came a nifty presentation on H.264, a new video codec being incorporated into Quicktime. I'm really loooking forward to playing around with this. Right now the best quality I've been getting for um, archiving my movies has been with 3ivx. Apples built-in MP4 compressor looks like ass next to it in terms of quality and file size... I really hope they hit one out of the park with their implimentation of this codec. I also want to see what its going to do to CPU usage, and where the cut-off is going to be.

Ah, and then we have Safari... Apple has discovered RSS and built it into Safari. They've started incorporating this for awhile with RSS feeds for their knowledge base news, etc. I have been wondering what Apple was going to do with RSS, and it looks like they're taking a similar tact to other browser makers. Auto-detection is nice, but really this presentation just bombed. You view them all individually, or you can open them in tabs... you also get a neat little "RSS Search" bar where you can um, search RSS feeds (I'm sure there'll be some uses for this, but most RSS feeds are excerpts, not the real content...).

Again, this just bombed and you get a sense that Apple thinks they should be doing something with RSS but aren't really sure what...

I'm a huge, huge fan of RSS in general, and really was hoping for more in a big way. Right now this just looks to be half-assed buzzword inclusion. They have all the building blocks for something much, much greater. Great search technology, saved smart searches, a neat slider for dynamic article length, auto-discovery... just make the connection in your head with how these have been included in all the other apps (finder, mail) and imagine it passing off its auto-discovery find to an iRSS app that allows you to great smart searches for "Mac-related" or "Political", etc. Wouldn't have to be a seperate app, thats just how I think.

OmniGroup I hope you're listening, as your browser needs all the help it can get right now, and NetNewsWire can't benefit in any way that I'm aware from the browser being able to do auto-discovery of RSS fields. Maybe someone will come up with a hack to command click the RSS symbol and have it create a new entry into NetNewsWire or something and they'll do all the nifty stuff I've just mentioned...

I actually wanted to see something pervasive with this, something we hadn't really thought about. RSS is about giving heads up regarding content, usually over a network, but there's no reason it has to be limited to that. Apple has nifty XML parsers built into Cocoa, etc... I'd love for iCal to be able to publish an RSS feed if they aren't going to build Rendezvous into it. Anything... all in all, the RSS stuff sure isn't worth a year-long wait.

I have to admit that I have a problem with Safari, in that I am really really not happy that its so tied to each operating system release. Have 10.2? Safari sucks for you. I highly doubt they'll release a new Safari for 10.3 once 10.4 is out, which makes things really difficult if you're a web designer or developer. Safari is still... immature, with spotty support and capabilities. In a year I'm sure it'll be fantastic, but as a developer or designer you have to not only support a minority platform, but support multiple versions of that browser on a minority platform unless you want to let in 10.4 users but not 10.3, etc. Often times they just end up saying "screw it" and throwing in browser detection and not letting you in at all. With wider times between releases hopefully some of this will go away, but egh.

Ah, now we have CoreImage and CoreVideo. Schiller came out to demo these, and arrrg you get the feeling he's a nice guy, but when he starts going "That's incredible!" I feel like I'm watching a saturday morning blender infomercial.

I'm going to start out with my confusion about these first, as I haven't had the opportunity to play someone more knowledgable with alcohol yet. But basically, besides the souped up filesystem with SQL tacked on, one of the big things coming with Longhorn is a fully GPU-accellerated window system. But wait, you say, OSX already has this with Quartz Extreme? No it doesn't, only one part of the process is accellerated.

This seems to confuse people (judging by the people who say OSX has this), but to make it really simple, an app draws its window into the window server, which keeps track of every window that is being drawn in its own seperate memory buffer. The windowmanger then composites them altogether so you get all your transparency and eye candy. With Quartz Extreme, the composition was GPU-accellerated, but not the drawing. This is one of the reasons why certain things are so achingly slow in OSX still, especially things like text and resizing... all that drawing is done by the CPU.

It's so much better than everything being done via software, but geesh the eye candy still puts the hurt on in a big way.

One of the things Microsoft is doing with Longhorn is making the entire process hardware accellerated. Drawing and compositing, which then degrades in gooy-ness depending on the beefiness of your hardware. If you have the hardware, all of the eye-candy is suddenly "for free" (well, it still sucks up RAM). Many expected this to be in 10.4 so that Apple could beat Microsoft to the punch with it. People pretty much figured this was going to require GPUs with pixel-shader support and lots of VRAM (this is one of the reasons why I bitch about the GPUs and VRAM in Apples, computer... future-proofing) but just going by the keynote and Apples page on it, I can't tell if this is in 10.4.

Now these do require a GPU with pixel shaders, but is all drawing hardware accellerated? I dunno. CoreImage can take Quartz input and apply effects, but it doesn't mean the drawing of the text itself is being accellerated. I'm going to be extremely disappointed if its not, I really just can't stand the speed of text in OSX. It drives me batty. Halfway through 2004 I'm not supposed to be waiting on a terminal window to draw its contents down the screen... looking through the list of filters that are included, I'm sure tons of eye candy will be done using these and it'll be much faster... but I'm not really interested in how fast the genie effect gets the window to the dock, even though it'll be nice that that's for free.

At any rate, CoreImage is built into the system in the same way that CoreAudio is. If you aren't aware of CoreAudio, back in the OS9 days just about every single audio app out there implimented their own low-level way of working with input devices and plugins. With CoreAudio, you don't buy an audio plugin that works just with one app anymore, the plugin maker makes it for CoreAudio and any audio app can suck it in and use it. You don't have to use one or the other MIDI implimentations, all the audio apps are supposed to switch to CoreAudio and that'd be taken care of. It didn't go that smoothly, but that's the idea.

It's also basically the idea for CoreAudio and CoreImage... you don't buy a Photoshop filter, rather Photoshop is supposed to support CoreImage and when you throw a new set of filters into your system, any image app that supports CoreImage can use them. They're also hardware accellerated with very fine quality (floating point, yay!) in that they're passed over the AGP bus and rendered with your video card. You can imagine that with Quartz Extreme offloading everything to the video card, and crazy-ass transitions and effects being used by every shareware app out there that a CPUs VRAM and cycles are going to be sucked up like no one's business.

*shakes head @ Nvidia 5200*

CoreVideo is very much the same thing, only applied to video... and wow, the demos of this thing running are fast on the hardware they were using. If you're doing video stuff, you know just how painful it can be to render out your video and transitions, this has the potential to really speed things up in a big way. Even if you're just playing with iMovie, if you have the hardware this will really change parts of the game.

The big problem of course is how will they really be used? I'm dead serious here. Adobe already has huge amounts of effort in AltiVec and SSE and their own very tailored cross-platform system... are they going to create another code branch for this? Possibly, but not for awhile, and I highly doubt that the demo is the whole story... one of the reasons CoreAudio took so long to take off were real problems with what it supported. But wait, you say, this puts the power of Photoshop in the hands of any developer!

No it doesn't, it puts the power of filters in the hands of developers. Filters are a small part of what makes Photoshop what it is. There is an incredible amount of technology, code and effort built up into these apps... its going to be interesting to see how these get used and by whom. Graphic Converter and such may have just been given a big gift at the very least, and perhaps it'll seriously lower the barrier to entry for someone else to hit the market... we'll see I guess, Keynote presentations sure the hell are going to prettier.

And then we come to .Mac. I'm going to admit I really, really detest .Mac. I know it serves a purpose for a certain type of user, I just don't like how Apple handled how they went paid, and I certainly don't like the quality of the service. I'm not kidding here, the service, in my experience and going by others I know who still use it, just isn't very good. It's extremely spotty, lots of outages and problems. And building a subscription service that deep into the OS, to the point where there are basic needs you can't use unless you pay them $99 a year... just pisses me off. An example would be their new nifty "Backup" utility which I'd like to turn people onto, but really should be part of the OS... but nope, its tied to .Mac.

Syncing data is another basic task that tons of users have to deal with... keeping their bookmarks straight across computers, calendars, etc... Yeah, iSync is there, but you have to pay for .Mac first.

*Growls @ .Mac*

Tiger has some really really nifty stuff in terms of Syncing, but guess what? Have to have fucking .Mac. Oh no, it would be too easy for them to allow you to specify your own servers if you have them...

The really great news is that they're going to be releasing an SDK for iSync, which means 3rd party developers will be able to build their own rules and such for what gets synced. This really should have been in 10.3, but hey. I can't get really excited about this until I know whether or not the SDK is built around iSync as a service, or .Mac. I'll freak out in a good way if 3rd parties can extend this for their own apps, but not through .Mac crap, as I just know some 3rd parties out there are going to do something great. Create an sFTP space either locally or remotely, add in your address & user/pass and sync over the net or Rendezvous. Yum. I'm going to have to ask around on this.

And then out comes Dashboard. Holy hell, Dashboard is cool and had me drooling like you wouldn't believe. Apps built in Javascript, rendered using Webkit (the built-in HTML engine), and when you press a button they all come into view... Desk Accessories on steroids. Super easy to code so gazillions of them come out...

The problem of course is that there is another app for the mac, called Konfabulator, that is basically the exact same thing. Man this is already causing some screaming, so I've just decided to keep an open mind as more information comes out... but geesh, Apple is going to get tore up over this, and it does raise very serious questions that developers are going to have to ask themselves. While I do love the idea of the dashboard holding all the widgets in an overlay, there better be a way to tell it I want an app to actually exist in the normal workspace...

Again, no denying Dashboard isn't cool as hell. It's really going to be an awesome set of technology, the entire problem is that it already existed via a small 3rd party who really pioneered this stuff as far as I'm aware. No, not small desk accessories... but you could see this controversy coming from a mile away.

Then came Automator, which I will admit was a brilliant idea for their core audience for who can be thrown for a loop by AppleScript. If you've ever used Photoshop, you have an idea of what Actions are... Automator is Photoshop Actions for your entire OS, where you graphically link up actions with options... I have to admit it reminded me a lot of mTropolis (no one will know what that is, so never mind, just another tech I'm bitter about) and I think it's going to give Apples' creative customers the same type of productivity boost that many of them first got with Applescript. I have to give them some serious props here.

An, and then came iChat... and wow, all of a sudden you saw some of the real gusto come from the audience. It's worth tuning into the end of the Keynote for it, as it and the Orbit presentation are really what had people excited... and it was just weird not to see that enthusiasm throughout the rest of the keynote as there usually is.

But, yeah, people were spontaneously clapping over iChats new features and to be honest it was the most entertaining part of the keynote. Audio conferences with up to 10 people, video conferences with up to three others... It's slick, its cool, I like it, but I'm just so not the target audience for this. I can count the number of people that have macs that I like enough to want to see and hear, and have an iSight, etc.

For what it is its extremely impressive, but its a beautiful mosaic in a teacup. If its not cross-platform its of extremely limited value to me unfortunately. Some people are going to be able get great usage out of this, and I'd like to but I'm just not one of them unfortunately. I was really hoping for more from Apple in the chat space , if this is all there is for the next few years... just please, for the love of god, release iChat for PCs to sell iSights or something. Anything. Dying here.

I'm sure there is a ton of stuff that wasn't mentioned on the client side that's going to be very interesting, so here's hoping. A lot of the iApps need some serious serious work.

XCode 2.0 has some seriously interesting stuff in it, the visual modeling features should pair extremely well with Obj-C and Java and if done well should be a great hit. I'm going to have to spend some time brushing up on GCC 3.5 in a big way to get a real idea of how much this is going to help, but I know Apple has been putting a lot of effort into GCC behind the scenes and it looks like its going to really pay off for this release. Auto-vectorization should be really, really helpful.

The idea is that all these macs have Altivec built in, but in order to use it you have to specifically create a code path and, well, rewrite your code in Altivec. 9/10 this doesn't get done. Auto-vectorization generally isn't perfect but it gets you a big head start, and there are lots of bits of code that can be vectorized, but that a developer might not even bother creating Altivec code for... but the compiler is able to step in and give things a bit of a boost. It's really exciting to see GCC improving.

Then there's the fact that Apple has included resource fork support in a bunch of the commonly used CLI tools like cp, tar, rsync... I'm of two minds about it. It's good in the sense that jesus christ this should have been done for 10.1 or 10.2. The problem was that most Cocoa apps just really didn't do anything as far as metadata was concerned, even though they had the ability to... that was an OS9 thing. But man, touch an OS9 app or file with a CLI tool and you risk destroying it if it depended on its resource fork data.

It looks like Apple is trying to push metadata back in a big, big way, so having CLI tools out of the box that can handle it is a relief. There are 3rd parties tools that can do this, but an area where this is problematic would be if you tarred up a directory using hfstar and uploaded it to a *nix or Windows server and at some point needed to access the data but didn't have hfstar or something around. The only worry I have is that I seriously got sick of resource forks in a big way since I'm often having to interact with *nix and Windows machines. I like metadata, I just hate resource forks.

There are some really interesting things on the OSX Server side of the fence, but most of them look to be about integrating various open source technologies and giving them a pretty face, which isn't a bad thing... All-in-all, I have... tempered excitement... regarding 10.4. What I've seen I really like, and I'm keeping an open mind about what I didn't see but wish I had (like a network-aware Quartz). It looks promising.

But another entire year is going to be a long time to wait though, so I'm hoping there'll either be absolute gobs of stuff not shown or the last 6 months will be nothing but testing. With special attention to Firewire. :) I'm sure we'll see a big iLife update between then and now, which will enliven things... Oh yeah, no iMacs. Surprised me, I would have bet money on it as they're so long in the tooth, so something is going on. Perhaps we'll just get quiet speed bump in the next month or two...

Ah well, I have to crash now. Someone introduced me to white russians over top of Cinnamon Toast Crunch as a late-night cap last night and its really, really done me in.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    June 29, 2004, at 07:54 AM