Re: In the Shallow End
- From: "Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 05:25:09 -0700
"ZnU" <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:znu-C41E3F.11432410082006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <12dm2g4bofm3436@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The reports so far indicate that it only backs up files. I have
not heard of any apps that "don't only store regular files" and work
with Time Machine.
We saw a demo of one during the keynote: iPhoto. iPhoto stores files on
the disk, but also has a database which has to be kept in sync with
those files.
If the database is not too large, they can back it up as a unit;
restoring a photo just means re-importing it in the db.
Alternately they can break that DB up into files, so they
can do partial restores. This is what they did to make
Mail and iCal support Spotlight, so I wouldn't be
surprised to see them do that again.
Now, of course, those database files are also ultimately files on the
disk... but when you get right down to it, everything is at some point.
Yes. This mainly affects the granularity of restoration, and
space usage.
[snip]
There's not much info about CoreAnimation out yet, but from the
tidbits there are, I think that what this is, is an API to manipulate
the Quartz Compositor, thereby allowing 3rd party developers to build
stuff like Expose. This is the tool tha tmakes the Whizzy UI possible
for 3rd parties.
But the 'deep' part was done a couple of versions ago.
Your definition of "deep" frankly seems entirely arbitrary. This is like
me saying, well, everything Microsoft is doing with .NET now isn't
interesting, because they implemented the CLI years ago.
Hmmm. I'm drawing a line between "shallow" UI and
"deep" infrastructure. Is that so arbitrary?
[snip]
I see no evidence of basic rethinking. Putting Spotlight on the
network needs only some way to access a server's spotlight
implementation remotely. This is no great trick.
It's something Microsoft wasn't sure they could manage for the first
release of WinFS.
WinFS is not spotlight, and they haven't been able to
get WinFS out the door *at all*; even cutting the network
part of it was not enough.
I'm not sure why, if you're willing to accept
Spotlight's local file system changes as "deep", you're not willing to
do the same for the changes it requires for network file systems.
I do not think there is any "network file system"; I think
there's a "Spotlight Server" which a remote computer can
use to submit Spotlight queries. This server can use the
normal Spotlight APIs to do its business.
Then there's Objective-C 2.0. With garbage collection, among other
things.
They've released no details about this yet.
[snip]
Probably soon, since I'd assume this is in the developer previews Apple
started dealing out on Monday.
Indeed. So far the rumors I am reading make it sound
minor; a few bits of syntactic sugar. But the GC remains
unclear, and there may well be more than I know.
[snip]
I notice the Steve did not try to promise this; I infer there's
still doubt about whether Q2DE will be there. One way
this could be is that after all this time they *have* finished it-
and found it doesn't really make things any faster.
Except it does, even on systems with fairly fast CPUs and fairly slow
video. I posted benchmarks the last time we had this discussion.
Apple also had benchmarks, at the WWDC two years ago.
That doesn't mean it panned out in the end. Maybe they finished
it and it didn't benefit typical user patterns, however good the
benchmark numbers were.
Or maybe they couldn't finish it for some reason. Or maybe
they had to pull the team off it to work on the Intel Switch.
But it's hard to believe they'd not pad the Leopard Preview
with something this cool, if they could demo it or even
promise it. They really needed to have something.
More surprising is that resolution independance was not
promised. Maybe they feel the app vendors are not ready;
maybe something went wrong with development and it is
still not demoable. But it would have been a spiffy, visually
attractive demo for the keynote, and I was surprised not to
see it.
The feature itself has worked fine since Tiger; my guess is Apple is
still waiting on the apps.
No; this feature is *most certainly* not working in Tiger. Not
even for stuff like the Finder; visual glitches everywhere.
I expected it to be ready for Leopard, and a very welcome
enhancement it would be (even if Windows XP does have
it already).
I also guess that by now, the basic thing works but the apps
aren't there yet.
[snip]
I would have thought that if they were going to fix the kernel,
Steve would have boasted of the performance gains they were
seeing.
OTOH, I see no compelling reason why Apple *should* fix
the kernel, and I expect they aren't.
Apple has overhauled the kernel is basically every version of OS X. They
just don't talk about it so much.
I think "overhauled" is too strong here; they have sometimes made
incremental improvements to it. Perhaps they will do so again;
the Steve never talks about this stuff, so we can't take his silence
this time as indicative of anything.
But there's no real need to fix it, and I'd expect that any such
work be one of the first things to go, when there is schedule
pressure.
.
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