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This article is from August 19, 2004, and is no longer current.

Under the Desktop: Mulling Mac OS Tiger

In bygone days, system hardware and software vendors would take advantage of trade shows for content creation professionals to pitch the relative merits of their respective platforms: Mac, Windows, whatever. Nowadays, capturing the pulse of the market from the show floor is more difficult as vendors target the needs of commodity products, business computing, or the consumer segment instead of graphics pros.
This is a somewhat miserable state of affairs since vendors really have a story to tell content creators with the arrival of affordable 64-bit desktop machines and the slowly rising tide of operating systems and applications that can take advantage of the increased memory and processing power.
For example, no computer system vendor has taken a booth at the annual Seybold San Francisco expo this week (except for Hewlett-Packard and its booth is for printers and scanners). This has been the case for a number of years.
Instead, vendors such as Apple Computer or Microsoft often put much of their communication efforts for content-creation customers into developer conferences. The resulting message, however, can be less-than focused, or the back-story may be needed for proper interpretation.
This was the case earlier this summer, when at its annual developer conference Apple offered a peek at Mac OS X 10.4, given the “Tiger” name. Due about a year from now, the update will build on the graphics-savvy technology base found in the current version of the operating system.
A Tony Tiger
From the keynote stage, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the update will offer 150 new features. Some of the new features he demonstrated apply directly to content creation workflows: greater support for 64-bit computing, improvements to OS X’s graphics engine; beefier support for graphics coprocessors; a new video codec; and a new scripting architecture called Automator, code-named Pipeline.
(A thought: Could there be a threshold for features in an Apple OS update, or perhaps a “magic” number? I recall that Jobs in 2003 declared there were 140 new improvements in the current “Panther” version. So we will be receiving a bonus 10 extra features this time around.)
However, other features Jobs showed were of less import to creative workflows, although of interest to most users, such as: the Seachlight local search technology; multi-person video conferencing; support for RSS news feeds; and Dashboard, a new interface to small utility applications (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: There’s really not much interesting about these little applications called Widgets in Tiger. It’s how they appear and disappear from the desktop that’s the thing, much as the Expose feature of the current Panther interface reveals open windows. (Image from eWEEK.com.

And then there was the unveiling of the updated line of Cinema flat-panel displays, including a giant 30-inch model. Longtime readers may recall that I’m a bit diffident about LCD technology in creative workflows. But the huge screen is impressive, although it carries an equally significant price tag of $3,299, requires an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL AGP 8X card, and only works with the Power Macintosh G5 models.
A slide show of Tiger screen images can be found here.
Tiger’s Content-centric Side
One compelling demonstration for content creators at the WWDC keynote was Tiger’s Core Image technology, which will extend Mac OS X’s graphics engine.
With Apple’s previous Power Mac G4 line, many high-performance-minded Mac owners would gripe about the model’s lackluster support for top-level graphics cards. The graphics processing unit of the cards keep gaining in speed and vendors keep improving the routines for crunching 2D and 3D images. First off, the G4 line couldn’t even hold the highest-performing cards.
Now, the current G5 models provide a full-size 8X Pro slot, a big improvement, but that’s only half of the equation. Any device needs support from secret sauce in the device driver and from the operating system.
The Core Image layer of the operating system makes sure that the graphics coprocessor in the display card will be used for image processing and rendering, instead of in main memory. These processors are optimized for such tasks, after all. The layer also provides an easy way for programmers (or the operating system itself) to take advantage of other image processing routines located on the card. This is much more robust and extensible than the Quartz Extreme OpenGL support supplied in the current Panther OS.
This new technology also provides what Apple calls “Image Units,” or a new system-wide plug-in architecture for effects and transitions as well as a standard user interface for dealing with them. A demonstration showed the effects being applied to images in layers as well as to a moving video stream in real time (Apple also introduced a Core Video architecture, as well, for streaming media).
The interface in a demonstration application provided easy access to each layer. As each effect was applied to the image, the list would grow. It was very simple and understandable.
The Image Unit filter architecture can cover almost all areas of graphics manipulation. Apple will ship about 100 filters in Tiger and developers can provide their own sets to customers. While we might expect that set would include filters for distortion, focus, and halftoning (and it will) but it also encompasses color controls and compositing.
Now, anyone who’s edited an image in Adobe Photoshop knows about layers, of course, on Mac or Windows. So that’s not the story. With Tiger, Apple will provide these extensible capabilities to any application. Developers can add their own effects libraries without being tied to a particular application plug-in architecture (other than it only works on the Mac and then only for the Tiger version of the OS).
Apple said it will include about 100 or so basic Image Units with Tiger when it ships. A subject list of the Image Units is at the bottom of this linked page.
We Interrupt This Message
To my ears, however, the keynote’s message to developers and integrators as well as to the Mac multitudes watching along online, sounded a bit more complex. While presenting an upbeat note about the capabilities in its next version of OS X, Apple was particularly addressing the present market situation of content professionals in the 2D design markets.
As I’ve mentioned before in this column, the print publishing industry has been very slow to shift off of the so-called Classic Mac platform and onto OS X. While vendors in the video market brought out OS X-native software quickly, it has taken a long while for major applications to address all the workflow needs of print-market pros with OS X solutions. (Hence the equally scant surprise that Apple took out booth space at the recent Digital Video East expo in New York rather than the Macworld Boston show held in the same week.)
That large print production would be conservative when moving off of a well-tested hardware and software platform is understandable. And Apple sustained these users for a while with G4 models that could boot into Mac OS 9.x. However, the new G5 machines only run Mac OS X.
In addition, OS X-driver support for older high-end scanners and expensive imaging hardware was slow to arrive (or non-existent for the most part). For the most part, this problem has been corrected by improved vendor-driver support, developers with custom drivers, or obsolescence of older, unsupported hardware.
Still, Apple’s mission at its developer conference was to keep creatives on the Mac platform and to keep the thoughts of transition focused on OS X — initially Panther and then Tiger — rather than on Microsoft Windows.
According to Tom Goguen, director of server software in Apple’s Worldwide Product Marketing group, this transition of the “design and print base” will happen this year and into next. “They are really ready to make a migration [to the G5] and we expect a significant uptake in that market,” he said.
I recently spoke to IT managers in two large content houses that are making the move from Mac OS 9-based workflows over to OS X. The companies considered moving to Windows, and this was even the recommendation of high-level managers, who pointed to Windows versions with the same features and mostly the same interface. However, the pull of the Mac installed base (and Mac-centric consultants) proved strong enough to overcome the internal Windows backers in both shops.
Goguen said Apple’s spring move to add dual PowerPC G5 processors across its entire desktop line will help make the platform more attractive to content pros with migration on their minds. The new lineup, all with two processors, now cost the same or less than the initial batch that that had either one or two processors (and some of the new models are faster).
At WWDC Apple also sounded a bold note on Windows migration, but towards the future. The company pointed to the next-generation of Windows called “Longhorn,” which is due in 2006. Banners hung around San Francisco’s Moscone West venue proclaiming slogans such as “Redmond, we have a problem,” “This should keep Redmond busy” and “Redmond, start your photocopiers”(see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Apple continues its sassy promotion of Tiger here, saying that Tiger is Longhorn. Of course, Windows Longhorn has already had a number of similar advance introductions to its own programming crowd; so while the joke is that Tiger will be out way earlier than Longhorn, is it still right to say that Tiger is comparable? Maybe Tiger is already better? Certainly some of the materials that I’ve seen about Longhorn’s color architecture make me worry for professional workflows (but that’s a discussion for a different column).

The Longhorn message to Classic Mac sites considering a migration to Windows is clear: If you move to Windows, you will be moving again in a few years, to an untested, unknown platform called Longhorn.
With OS X, customers will move once but to an operating system designed for content creation. Panther (or Tiger) will maintain much of their investment in tools and even more important, it keeps compatibility with custom workflow elements such as AppleScript, which has been expanded and enhanced in OS X.
Most likely, Tiger will not go up against Longhorn, since Microsoft keeps falling behind. And I expect that Apple hasn’t told us half of the features it will fold into Tiger anyway. Instead, Longhorn will face the version after-next of OS X, perhaps something with a code name like “Cougar” or “Tigon.”
There’s a rabbinic saying: “When one blind man leads another, both fall into the pit.” Creative pros considering platform migration should keep their eyes on current Mac and Windows operating systems and hardware before looking to future versions.

  • anonymous says:

    Oh David,

    as much as I enjoy your articles, but that’s one in the bum.
    Dashboard as an evolution of the old “Desktop Tools” (name correct?) but this time little “websites” with web and system access. And fairly easy to code, too. So all the stuff that was screwed up in Konfabulator is now “mostly” set right with system integration. I never liked Konfabulator much, but I already did some Dashboard gadgets that check on RSS feeds and display them, get current articles from blogs and foremost, display what titles I should buy from iTunes today(!), well it displays the top ten.

    So David, I think that Dashboard is certainly worth mentioning, if you would’ve had a chance to play with it instead of just assuming, you would agree.

    Frank

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