OSX 10.4 preview: hits and misses

As it the case every year, the atten­tion of the Mac world focused on the Apple World Wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence with high hopes for new prod­ucts and excit­ing new devel­op­ment from a com­pany that has man­aged to show­case a high cool fac­tor while remain­ing one of the small­est play­ers in the com­put­ing field.

The news of ban­ners pok­ing fun at Microsoft made peo­ple think that the new oper­at­ing sys­tem would be some­thing to con­tend with. With state­ments like “This should keep Red­mond busy”, one would expect some rad­i­cal improve­ment to this new OS… but most of the changes were under the hood and most of them showed a com­pany that seems to be on the defen­sive. Let’s look at what they offered and what are the hits and misses in this new OS:

the Dash­board will prob­a­bly be the fea­ture that most peo­ple talk about as it is the most visual new com­po­nent to the new ver­sion of this oper­at­ing sys­tem. Put sim­ply, it is a col­lec­tion of wid­gets that can sit on your desk­top, sim­i­lar to the third-party pro­duced Kon­fab­u­la­tor, a com­pany that will now have a hard time com­pet­ing with Apple. It also seems to be a defen­sive move to counter the power that XAML will offer to its devel­op­ers. Beyond the issue of Apple run­ning over one of its own devel­op­ment part­ners (ie. Kon­fab­u­la­tor), the fact that their dash­board does not seem to offer any pro­gram­ming inter­face and does not seem to offer a way to inte­grate rich Inter­net client appli­ca­tions (what I call hybrid appli­ca­tions) seems like a fairly tremen­du­ous gap. Why not open it up to devel­op­ers so they can start cod­ing appli­ca­tions now so that, when the new OS comes out, an increased num­ber of wid­gets is available?

Safari RSS is another one of those fea­tures where Apple runs over one of their own devel­op­ers. This is a big win for RSS, sim­i­lar to the news that Microsoft is build­ing RSS into their tools. It may be a leap but I believe that Microsoft will have an RSS reader in their OS too. A cou­ple of missed oppor­tu­ni­ties in the imple­men­ta­tion Apple is high­light­ing, though. First, why keep it lim­ited to Safari? It seems that this is the per­fect kind of ser­vice to inte­grate with .mac in order to com­pete with some­thing like my favorite RSS reader, blog­lines. The prob­lem with keep­ing it lim­ited to a desk­top app is that I don’t spend all my time on a mac (I know, I can hear the shock and dis­may in Cuper­tino) but want to be able to read my RSS feeds from dif­fer­ent com­put­ers and devices. How about inte­grat­ing it with their own ipod line?

New Search Tech­nol­ogy: There seems to be a trend in oper­at­ing sys­tems about mak­ing bet­ter use of search. Long­horn is look­ing to offer bet­ter meta­data and search han­dling, merg­ing Inter­net and hard drive search in a sin­gle tool. Apple is try­ing to restore par­ity on this front with a new fea­ture. At this time, it pro­vides a nice set of file types to search for. Notice­able in this queue is the lack of sup­port for search of win­dows media files, and what looks like a lack of inter­faces to allow other devel­op­ers to offer their data types as part of the scope. On the Microsoft side, the way they han­dle this is through some changes to their file sys­tem (a new file sys­tem called WinFS will sit at the core of the new oper­at­ing sys­tem) with a richer meta­data set. A ques­tion here is whether Apple is chang­ing the under­ly­ing file sys­tem of their oper­at­ing sys­tem to sup­port this. It would be nice to know as noth­ing was said about back­ward compatibility.

Another improve­ments is Automa­tor, a new visual inter­face to script­ing repet­i­tive tasks into your OS (basi­cally, you could call it Apple­script++). This is actu­ally a pretty nice thing and I hope that Microsoft will include some­thing sim­i­lar in their next OS. It could greatly sim­plify things. I guess this is one of those cases where a pho­to­copier could be use­ful in Red­mond.

Another fea­ture that Red­mond should copy is the iChat AV prod­uct, a com­peti­tor of MSN mes­sen­ger. Apple under­stands that those chat prod­ucts are used for col­lab­o­ra­tion and Microsoft needs to learn from that. Desk­top shar­ing, audio and video con­fer­enc­ing, com­plete with VoIP inte­gra­tion is a prod­uct that will become key in the enter­prise mar­ket in the future.

A sig­nif­i­cant announce­ment is the sup­port for 64-bit proces­sors. While this is not a huge mar­ket right now, it is evi­dent that Apple is plac­ing big bets on its G5 prod­uct line. This could be a good move in terms of get­ting more involved with the research com­mu­nity. Great for num­ber crunch­ing but I don’t know what apps will run on this beyond the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Sim­i­larly, announce­ments of improve­ments to their ren­der­ing tech­nol­ogy and sup­port for advanced video cod­ing will prob­a­bly appease mem­bers of the cre­ative com­mu­nity who have gen­er­ally been at the core of the Apple mar­ket. These two announce­ments are aimed at mar­ket pro­tec­tion and are a good move.

Finally, while most peo­ple tend to focus on the desk­top, let’s not for­get that there is also a server prod­uct. OSX v10.4 server is Apple attempt to com­pete in the enter­prise space. The intro­duc­tion of blog­ging soft­ware blo­j­som into this server shows that Apple under­stand that blogs are now an impor­tant fea­ture of the server enter­prise space. This is another sig­nif­i­cant win for RSS and for the blo­gos­phere as it adds legit­i­macy to the con­cepts of syn­di­ca­tion and blog­ging. Also of inter­est in the server prod­uct is the fact that Apple is bundling NT migra­tion tools. If Apple attempts to keep quiet their goals of dis­plac­ing win­dows machines, this might not be the way to do it.