Apple's new OS: Tiger OSX

I just got done watching the majority of the Apple keynote that Steve Jobs made at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Needless to say, I'm pretty impressed with what they have done with the new Mac OSX Tiger. At first, I thought it was just some minor tweaks here and there, but if you actually watch the demos on the video, the stuff they have done is pretty amazing. Unfortunately it's not available until the first half of 2005, but that will allow for a lot more features to be added.

One of the new features is called Spotlight, where it uses the technology from the iTunes search engine (which is extremely fast) and has incorporated it system-wide to apply to all files, and even a few applications. And as he demonstrated it, he showed us an example of how it picked up meta-data: it picked up some tiny writing on a PDF file of a map of California and brought it up in no time. It's like Google, only for everything on your computer, including some applications, and ANY data held within the file.

The other thing that would make things much, much easier for reading the amount of web content that I do is called RSS, or really simple syndication. Basically, it takes a website and boils everything down into text that can be used by a newsreader program. What this allows you to do is browse the text portion of the most recent updates to many websites in a fast amount of time. It's like reading a newspaper written in book form, without all the funky formatting, the advertisements and photos and bs, it's just text and headers. I think some offer a small degree of photos, depending on the settings. Anyway, they have built it right into Safari instead of having a separate program to do it, like NetNewsWire (they are probably going to be mad about this [on edit: they aren't]). The best part is, it's searchable. Now why is that significant? Because RSS is always the latest (and only the latest, depending on the feed) information put on a website. So you could search for all the most recent (and that means in the last 24 hours up to a week or so, depending on the settings) articles from websites for anything. When Steve Jobs did the demo, he looked up Cheney and tons of stuff came up because of his recent use of the F-word. Not only that, but you can save searches, and every time you check the RSS feeds, you can do a search for Cheney, or whatever you want. This sure would be helpful for my business class because we're doing a big project that requires recent articles to be a part of our presentation. Searching for "international trade" across hundreds of RSS feeds would make life very easy. So since that is something that will advance RSS and Atom even further, I've incorporated both RSS and Atom feeds for my site on the left-hand side menu bar. This is mostly for newsreaders like NetNewsWire (for Mac) and things like PDA's or iPods, things that you would only read text on. Since I'm updating this site more, I figure that putting a link up to it wouldn't hurt. You know, in case someone might need it.