| Put
a Tiger in your Mac?
On June 28, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs previewed Mac
OS X version 10.4 (codenamed Tiger) in his keynote
presentation at WWDC.
Attendees
each received a developer's edition of the next
generation of its operating system, and Jobs treated
them to a demonstration of Tiger's feature highlights.
This
upgrade will ship some time next year. As always,
I recommend weighing the benefits and costs of
any type of upgrade to make sure it meets the
user's needs. Users interested in making the leap
to 10.4 should look at the following features
before moving up.
Enhanced
UNIX
Tiger will offer 64-bit processing power for every
process that is programmed to take advantage of
it. Developers will also find fine grain locking
SMP support and Access Control Lists attractive.
Greater
Windows compatibility
Better SMB performance, authentication, and HTML
support are among the improvements Tiger offers.
More
powerful searching
Based on the search engine used in Apple's iTunes
application, live searching now applies to the
entire system.
Apple's
new search technology is called Spotlight and
allows superfast searching that works with current
applications and is fully integrated into the
Finder, Address Book, System Preferences and Mail.
H.264
Video Standard
The next generation of the MPEG4 video encoding
standard, H.264 is integrated into Tiger and its
utilization of QuickTime. This open-source industry
standard is scalable from high definition video
down to 3G cell phone graphics.
Safari
RSS
Apple will be enhancing Safari to support RSS
technology, seeking out news-servers and auto-detect
websites with an RSS component.
Better
.Mac integration
OS X version 10.4 will bring .Mac syncing throughout
the system to make it easier to sync all your
devices from Macs to iPods to cell phones.
Dashboard
Apple's calling it Exposé for Widgets.
Exposé was introduced in the Panther incarnation
of the OS as a way to navigate open windows and
applications quickly. Widgets are mini applications
like clocks, calendars, etc., which can be accessed
at your leisure.
Automator
AppleScript has been a powerful programming language
to simply automate hundreds of tasks on our Macintoshes
for years. With Tiger, Apple will be offering
a visual scripting tool, called Automator, which
will bring the power of scripting to even more
people. Even those who have never written a single
line of code.
iChat
AV
Tiger's version of iChat now allows you to bring
even more people into the conversation. Apple
rewrote the interface and added a few tricks to
display multiple video screens allowing for conferencing
with up to three other iChat AVers. And you can
audio-conference with up to nine other users.
These
enhancements may be incentive enough to upgrade
to Tiger, or you may want to wait and see what
else is in it for you. As always, make sure the
leap is right for your needs.
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