Not Much Happening
(Imported from rocketcat-v1)
Things have been pretty quiet over here at the Rocket Cat.
Nadia and Kai have both been pretty busy with study and work.
I didn't even manage to put up a post to commemorate the release of Mac OS X 10.4 AKA Tiger.
I've been running a developer build of Tiger on the PowerBook for a month or two now (since I was in Sydney) and it's been pretty damn cool. I recently upgraded it to the full GM release and I'm locing it.
There has been a bit of talk around the place about cool things in Tiger, however (from my point of view, at least) all the really good stuff is hidden, behind the scenes.
Spotlight is a very cool technology that goes beyond just finding files you've lost on your computer =) There is even access to the spotlight database from the command-line, in fact, with the CLI you can perform vastly more powerful searches than you can through the spotlight GUI. I've created a quick one-line bash shell function that replaces the locate command with one that searches the spotlight database:
function locate { mdfind "kMDItemDisplayName == '$@'wc"; }
With the mdfind command, you can search for all kinds of things - kMDItemDisplayName is just the filename, you can search for many other things, like the bitrate of an MP3 file, the ISO speed or apeture that a digital photo was taken with, the length of a QuickTime movie, the number of pages in a PDF and so on...
Automator is another cool application that builds onto the feature set of AppleScript. Rather than trying (and usually failing) to write programs in a horrible almost-English-but-not-quite syntax, Automator uses drag and drop of modules to achieve it's goals. An example might be something like this:
Find files with a certain specification -> Make an archive of these files -> Attach this archive to an email message with a specified subject and body -> Send the email -> Delete the archive
And rather than having to try and remember, or work out, the exact syntax to be able to do this, each task is a block that's dragged and dropped into place.
There's also plenty of other stuff I haven't touched on yet - like Quartz 2D Extreme which is basically the renderer for the window server written as an OpenGL program, so it runs entirely on the graphics card. Filesystem ACLs - proper POSIX ACLs on the file system, and they (initially) look to be a bit more powerful than NTFS ACLs by their virtue of being an ordered list of allow/deny statements, rather than a big blob of statements where deny will always take precedence over allow. Dashboard is a pretty technology demonstration, but is not everything it's made out to be. Oh, and last, but not least, 10.4 is generally faster across the board than 10.3 - which is a Good Thing.
