OS X Tiger approaches

The MacWorld Expo has come and gone. Steve Jobs has demoed OS X Tiger once again and there are neat animations of some of the cooler features coming this year (second quarter 2005) to a Mac near you. I thought three of these were particularly interesting.

Dashboard

The OS X Dashboard (click ‘Play here now’ in the desktop picture shown near the top of the page) “is home to a new kind of application called widgets”. There are a ton of these widgets, for checking weather, converting units, translating words, looking up definitions, terms or synonyms or even working with small tasks in iCal, iTunes and other iLife applications. Basically, anything that you probably use in a web page now can be rendered as a widget using only “HTML, Javascript and CSS”.

“Similar to the way Exposé works, the Dashboard is a semi-transparent layer that zooms across your Desktop with a single button click. To put the Dashboard away, simply press the function key again and you’re back to where you started without messing with your Desktop or Dock. Use the Dashboard to get instant access to information and application controls you use most frequently.”

But you’ve got to watch the animation/video to see them in action. These are like no other “web applet” you’ve ever seen. “Complex transitions, movement and visual effects” make these look like native OS X applications using Core Image. There’s more on developing widgets, including examples and suggestions.

Here are some closeups of the widgets to give you an idea of what they look like:

Weather Widget

Flight Tracker Widget

iTunes Widget

Spotlight

Spotlight is another impressive video that shows how searching will work in OS X Tiger. For those that ever saw the BeOS running, it’s like that, only in Aqua. In fact, Spotlight on Spotlight by John Gruber (Daring Fireball) indicates that it is “Dominic Giampaolo’s baby”. That’s the guy who pretty much single-handedly wrote the BFS in the first place (read Practical File System Design with the Be File System (PDF) for an excellent account of building that file system).

Spotlight’s functionality is built with the SearchKit. The performance of this kit has been improved considerably for Tiger, “3x indexing, 20x incremental search”. The faster indexing means that files are imported into the system faster (less time used by the background task when a new set of files, like a hard drive, is made available) and the faster incremental search means that your results are displayed on-the-fly as you type (see the very impressive demo video or the screenshot to the right).

“Both metadata collection and full-text indexing depend on cooperating per-file-format Importers, either written by Apple or by third parties. Importers are fired on every file the moment it is created, saved, changed, or moved, including when files are made available through a newly mounted drive.”

The indexing task is idle if you are. There is no massive index operation that runs every once in a while; the index is updated in real-time as you work and “[p]erformance is said to be excellent” (network drives were still a problem at the time of the report in August 2004). Naturally, there will be comparisons to Google Desktop and whatever Microsoft’s solution is called, but they aren’t the same. Apple has developed an “elegant array of optimized search technologies” which can be used by any application. The plugin concept for metadata analysis allows your Mac to find as much information as possible, with dozens of common formats supported directly by Apple (including Address Book entries, Pictures, Music and other stuff you search a lot). The SearchKit API ensures that other all OS X applications can integrate powerful search technology directly from the operating system.

Given this search feature, gone are the days of carefully storing files in a file hierarchy. Content will be automatically indexed anyway and available with a mouse click from the desktop. Let’s just hope they don’t make the same mistake as Google by attempting to share these results across machines; it’s useful enough just finding your own information … it doesn’t have to be a search result sharing mechanism.

Automator

Automator is an improvement on an existing feature that probably doesn’t get a lot of use right now: Applescript. Sure, the hardcore Mac user will be writing Applescripts and already has everything wonderfully linked from one app to another to automatically do amazing things. Most of us don’t. The video shows the Automator application in action: it’s basically the graphical UI equivalent of piping between applications using the command line.

On the left is a list of AppleScript-enabled applications on your machine. Click an application and it lists the features and functions that it exposes. Drag one of these actions to the workflow pane, fill in it’s parameters and build your script. These actions flow data into one another to seamlessly build the applications you’ve always wished you had. iPhoto doesn’t do exporting the way you want? Export the pictures, then use another, more advanced photo manipulator to perform final touches before uploading them to a website using a web page or another application. Even better, you can use the power of Spotlight to find the items you want (on your machine), then pipe those into the workflow to work on them.

Imagine writing a script that picks up pictures you’ve created in the last week, resizes them and sends them to a mailing list out of your address book using your mailer and you’ll see that, with Tiger, Apple has created a set of tools that are just what people have been wanting to do, but have always assumed wasn’t possible for them. Now, they can do it with a few mouse clicks. Again, making things much easier for people to get more out of their computers. The potential is already there, but it takes an application like Automator to bring it out.