Mac OS X Tiger: What's New
Spotlight On Innovation
29 April 2005 Justin Williams Skip to comments
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Want to know what's new to Mac OS X Tiger? This article will cover Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, and the other neat new features Apple has added to your favorite operating system.
Introduction
Without a doubt, to many users the most important aspect of any new release of Mac OS X is what new functionality is Apple going to give us? Jaguar brought us iSync and Safari. In Panther, we got Exposé and the new Finder. Apple really set out to wow its users with Tiger.
You’ve most likely heard a bit about each of the new features in Tiger, but you may not know how they function in a real-world environment. That is where this article comes in. We will go beyond the marketing hype and show you how to use these new features in your daily workflow.
There are over two hundred new features in OS X and we obviously can’t cover them all. We will cover Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Graphing Calculator, and Dictionary.
If you have a favorite feature of Tiger that we didn’t cover, let us know in the comments. Your feedback is what allows MacZealots to grow.
Spotlight On Search
Back in 2002 it was announced that Apple had acquired the services of one Dominic Giampaolo. Giampaolo was the guy beyond the BeOS File System (BFS). Remember BeOS? During the late 90’s, a company called Be released their operating system as an alternative to the big two: Windows and Mac OS. The main selling point of the operating system was the BeOS File System. BFS was fully journaled, which meant that data integrity was guaranteed even in the event of a loss of power. OS X got this treatment in Panther.
The greatest feature of BFS was its ability to have volumes of metadata stored about its files. The BFS doubled as a database for that metadata. Simply put, metadata is the “what, when, and who” of your files. If you have ever tagged your mp3’s in iTunes with the title, artist, or genre, you are creating metadata. Metadata is available in almost all types of files. Your Word documents contain author, creation, and modication information. Your photos have data about when a photo was shot, the resolution, and the camera used to create the image.
The problem with metadata before Tiger was that it wasn’t very useful. You could search for songs in iTunes by the data, but you couldn’t do the same thing in the Finder. The Finder previously only searched by the filename. Not too helpful when all you can remember about a photo is that you took it in 2002 and it was at your home.
I assume that sometime around the time Apple acquired Giampaolo’s services they decided to implement a BFS-like database of metadata for Mac OS X. Letting Mac users search for pictures based on criteria other than the filename of the picture is something Windows can only dream of. What else can Spotlight search for?
- That line in your Keynote presentation from last year about giving excellent speeches.
- Any mention of the name Justin Williams: email, Pages documents, Keynote presentations, photos, etc.
- All fonts created by your favorite foundry.
That’s just a small sampling of the power of Spotlight. How does Spotlight accomplish all of this? When you install Tiger, a Spotlight Server is spawned in the background. This server sits waiting for action from your files. Anytime a file is created, modified, or deleted Spotlight updates the content index with new information on that file. Whenever you need information from Spotlight, click the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner of your Mac and enter a search. OS X will trigger the Spotlight server to query its database for any files that have relevant information.
Apple ships OS X with importers for all the important file types: iChat, Mail, Safari, Pages, Keynote, and Microsoft Office to name a few. They also realized that you are using applications other than that core set and have given developer’s the tools necessary to create their own Spotlight importers. In the future, you should be able to search your Adium chat logs or VoodooPad wiki.
Spotlight isn’t just available from the menu bar. If you are a Terminal junkie, you can use the new mdls and mdfind command line utilities. mdls will list the values of one or all attributes for a specific file. If, for example, you want to find out all the metadata associated with a picture you took a few weeks ago, simply run the following command from the Terminal:
mdls /Volumes/Data/Users/justin/Pictures/WWDC\ 2004/IMG_0007.JPG
The output you receive will give you the same information you can receive from the Finder, but in a text based listing.
As more and more developers add support for Spotlight to their applications, you will begin to wonder how you ever lived without it.
Dashboard Confessional
How many times have you had to jump online to check the local weather, look up a word’s definition, check to see if a flight is delayed, or see how much Apple’s stock has soared? These repetitive tasks are integral to our daily workflow. What if there was an easier way to accomplish it?
Enter Dashboard.
Dashboard is an application that runs in the background of your Mac waiting for your attention. Once it has it, you can perform those simple tasks using mini-applications called Widgets. Widgets install in your Mac’s home directory under the ~/Library/Widgets folder. Dashboard searches this folder and adds each new Widget to the Widget Bar.
Widgets are made of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript. In essense, each widget is a mini webpage. Developers can also embed plug-ins that extend functionality beyond what is possible on a single web page. This is done by creating mini Mac applications inside the widget using the Cocoa programming framework.
The Dashboard had a troubled beginning when it was announced at WWDC 2004. Many in the Mac community felt that Dashboard was a blatant rip off of Konfabulator. The developer of Konfabulator, Arlo Rose, ripped Apple for copying their application.
It seems that Apple thinks Konfabulator is pretty cool! Just to clear the air, Apple has not bought Konfabulator, it hasn’t hired the developers, it hasn’t even talked to us. They just seem to like our product. A lot!
We already knew that many individuals at the company liked Konfabulator (for various reasons but mostly because it was something that differentiated the platform in a very Mac-like way). Now we know that the corporation likes it … or something that looks just like it.
Whether or not you agree with Rose is irrelevant at this point in the game. The Dashboard is here to stay and Konfabulator is a great utility for Windows XP and OS X now. It’s not like Rose is living on the street in a box because of Apple. I digress.
Apple shipped Tiger with fourteen widgets, and that is only the beginning. Since Widgets are so easy to make, Mac users from all over are creating new widgets each and every day. You can find the latest additions to the Widget library by visiting DashboardWidgets.com. Along with new widgets, DashboardWidgets also has news related to Dashboard and a forum for those interested in developing Widgets.
When you download a new Widget in Safari, Apple takes care of the heavy lifting for you. Safari RSS can detect that you downloaded a widget and will add it to your Widget Bar and remove the download from your desktop automatically. No user intervention required!
Automate Your Life
AppleScript has been a staple of the Mac for over a decade. AppleScript is an English-like language used to write scripts that automate actions on your Mac. AppleScript provides users with shortcuts to complex tasks like batch renaming files, retrieving data from servers, or marking mail as spam if you are using SpamSieve.
The problem with AppleScript has been the barrier to entry. Even with its simplified language, it is still difficult for the novice user to understand and use. Regular computer users don’t want to spend their time writing and debugging scripts. They want to just work. For example, this is intimidating:
display dialog "Do you want to print? " buttons {"Cancel", "Ok"}
tell application "Finder"
activate
open selection
end tell
tell application "Acrobat 6.0.2 Professional"
print pages of every document with shrink to fit
close all docs
end tell
What if there was a way to harness the power of AppleScript in the simple drag-n-drop interface that Mac users are so accustomed to? That is where Automator comes in. Automator lists Actions for each of the applications on your Mac. These actions can perform various tasks. In NetNewsWire, for example, you can subscribe to a feed, get the current URL from NetNewsWire, or export your subscriptions to a file. Keynote includes actions for printing slides, showing slides, and opening presentations. It all depends on the application.
When you string together actions in Automator, you are creating a Workflow. Workflows can be exported as Workflow files or stand-alone applications that can run on their own. You can also create Workflows as a plug-in for the Finder and other parts of OS X. If you control-click on your Mac’s desktop, you will see an Automator option in the menu that pops up. That is where plug-ins go.
Why would people want to automate this type of stuff? Let’s look at an example of uploading your Christmas photos to your .Mac account. What are the steps you usually go through to accomplish this?
- Pull photos from camera into iPhoto
- Create Album called “Christmas Photos”
- Upload photos to .Mac
- Tag each photo.
What if you could simply click a single button to have all of that done for you? With Automator, that is possible. What about other uses?
- Renaming a group of images so they all have the same naming scheme.
- Scaling those renamed images to fit in an email.
- Sending that email.
Like Spotlight, developers can add Automator support to their application by creating custom actions to perform certain tasks. Actions can be written in AppleScript or Objective-C (another programming language). If there are actions you want your favorite application to perform, contact the developer and let them know.
I find Automator to be somewhat sluggish on my G5, which means it can’t perform too well on other Macs. I notice the most problems when it tries to work with iPhoto actions. It feels compelled to launch iPhoto and spend a minute or two indexing my photo albums and entire library each time it runs. This makes Automator unresponsive. Hopefully this issue will be fixed in future versions.
Grapher
Mac OS X has always had a scientific calculator to perform all of the basic math functions anyone might need. The one area where they lacked was graphing calculators. Rather than spend a lot of time writing their own application, Apple sought out Arizona Software and purchased it’s Curvus Pro X software. The Curvus website read:
On July 22, 2004 Curvus Pro X was bought by an international company (whose name cannot be revealed) and its distribution has been discontinued. It is therefore not possible any longer to download nor to buy any kind of registration license for this program.
We would like at this point to thank all the users sincerely who registered and supported us during the development of this program.
At the time it was unknown who had purchased the software, but beta copies of Tiger began to shed the light. Around September of 2002, AppleInsider reported that Curvus Pro had been renamed Graphing Calculator. While the name didn’t stick, the functionality has.
Grapher is very easy to use for anyone that needs to perform complex math equations. It has the ability to create explicit and implicit equations, differentials, vector and scalar fields, cartesians, and a lot of other math stuff that is way over my head. I got a C in Calculus after all!
If you ever need to create complex math equations, Grapher should fit your bill.
Dictionary
As I discussed before, looking up items in a dictionary is one of those repetitive tasks we tend to do a lot on our computers. Apple created a Dashboard Widget to search the new Oxford American Dictionary. Not wanting to stop there, they also created a desktop application called Dictionary to accomplish the same task.
Dictionary lets you search the New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford American Writers Thesaurus. It supports multiple pronunciation types as well: US English (Diacritical), US English (IPA), and British English (IPA). Unlike the Dashboard Widget, Dictionary has a customizable font size. Dictionary makes extensive use of OS X’s built in Quartz and PDF technology. That is why the fonts look so great even at large and small sizes.
Dictionary is also embedded into certain applications. If you control-click on a word in Safari, for example, a Look Up in Dictionary command is visible. This will launch Dictionary and find the definition for the word. This is great if you are reading a story on a website and don’t understand some of the verbage.
There isn’t much more to say about Dictionary. It works and it works well. I love the integration with applications. Being able to look up words that easy is a great enhancement.
Conclusion
In all, Tiger’s new features are well worth the $129 to me. In the short time that I have been using them, Dashboard and Spotlight have changed the way I work. I don’t anticipate using Automator or Grapher much at all. Automator needs some speed optimizations and bug fixes before I can stand it. Grapher is just not anything I will ever have to use.
If you are still clammoring for more Mac OS X Tiger coverage, maybe you should check out our other articles on the subject.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (5)
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#1) On May 2, 2005 10:33 AM
I would love the Dashboard far more if I was able to have it refresh in the background. It irritates me that i have to wait a few seconds for it to pull an up-to-date weather forecast.
#2) On May 5, 2005 6:28 PM
Richard Jenkins:
Open /Library/Widgets/ then control-click on Weather.wdgt and Show Package Contents. Open Weather.js in a text editor. Find the line that reads “function onhide () {“. Change the line below it that reads “if (timer != null) {” to “if (0) {“. This should cause the Weather widget to continue updating while Dashboard is hidden. Do note, however, that according to developer guidelines, widgets aren’t supposed to update while hidden in order to save computing resources.
You should be able to do something similar for other widgets.
#3) On May 8, 2005 3:44 AM
Grapher seems nice, but the original graphing calculator made by Pacific Tech that was bundled with the classic mac os and still available for download for OSX is much better. Compared to that original graphing calculator, Apple’s version is very slow, and incorrectly draws some complex 3d curves. At this point, the only thing it has over Pacific Tech’s version is that the full apple branded version is free, whereas you have to pay a hefty sum to get a version of Pacific Tech’s calculator that you can graph in 3d with. But considering that Apple’s graphing calculator is currently at version 1.0, I assume that it will get much better in the future.
#4) On May 16, 2005 11:55 AM
I’ve got lots of pix on iomega zip100’s which were used with an old MAC Power PC. When I view them now they require classic OS. Is there a way ft convert them to OS X?
#5) On June 10, 2005 2:39 PM
I see how to do a Spotlight search in Terminal but what I can’t figure out is how to do one in AppleScript. The following code returns an empty finder window:
tell application “Finder” activate find “text to find” end tell