April 04, 2005
Awaiting Tiger
Tiger should be out in the next few weeks, there's quite a few changes in the next upcoming release of OSX from Apple.
In particular I'm keen to see Spotlight and it's integration in all of the Mac applications. Hopefully the non-Apple applications a lot of use like Thunderbird can also taken advantage of it soon. It will also be interesting to see what happens with Quicksilver, Launchbar, etc, that offer similar functionality. I've come to depend on Quicksilver almost daily, very cool tool and makes application/data navigation very efficient indeed! :)
Dashboard also looks quite cool, and seems to be an area Konfabulator is also in. I like the ability of using html/css as the frontend and javascript as a connector to backend components (is also kind of like XUL in Mozilla). The quicktime demo at Apple shows some really nice looking widgets out there. Looks like more eye candy to come.
Automator also looks interesting - being able to automate the process or flow of doing some action. Rather than writing script one visusally constructs the flow using the automator GUI.
In addition to the new features above (plus all the others Apple is raving about), I hope there's some improvements to the current functionality.
In particular, Java 5 availability. enhanced Bluetooth support so that the Mac can act as a voice headset for a mobile phone (essentialy acting as a speaker phone), and a fix for iChat so that it doesn't always send HTML to non-iChat clients, amongst others.
Safari is also an interesting one - it reminds me about one of the Engadget podcasts towards the end of last year where Phillip and Len were talking about the success of Firefox and whether commercial software companies like Microsoft and Apple should spend money to compete against it (or perhaps more to the truth, catch up to it) rather than embracing it. Since Microsoft gives IE away for free it's only a cost -> is it a cost shareholders wish to endure? Some may want the company to focus on more profitable parts of the business... anyway, it was an interesting discussion.
MacRumours mentions April 15th so the countdown is on :)
Posted by crafterm at April 4, 2005 08:05 PM | TrackBack