Mac OS X

Highlights of the Ars Technica review of MacOS X 10.5, also called "Leopard":

• The random mix of window styles is now resolved;
• Horrible 3d Dock;
• Kernel improvements: better scheduling and a debugging service called "dtrace";
• Filesystem notifications;
• Objective-C 2.0 with automatic garbage collection;
• CoverFlow and QuickLook: spiffy GUI stuff;
• "Stacks" finally implemented, but in an inconvenient fashion in the Dock;
• Time Machine: inviting enough to maybe finally get users to back up, but wastes space by failing to store deltas of large files.

A wide ranging review of Panther (10.3) at Ars Technica.

Ars Technica review of Jaguar.

Quick overview of Panther (OS X 10.3)

Journalistic discussion of the use of Macs in large supercomputing clusters.

When a Linux user buys Apple's Mac mini: An interesting critical perspective on OS X by Thomas Driemeyer. He points out several problems with the GUI that have been covered by writers concentrating on the Mac, such as the click-through inconsistency.

The Problems With Click-Through: John Gruber's exhaustive analysis of the inconsistencies of click-through in OS X, from May 2003, followed-up in the sequel, "Much Ado About Click-Through".

The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor: Technical explanation and innovative applications.

The Register on Tiger: A pretty tough review of OS X 10.4.

Tiger Details

Leopard Finder Bug: Another way to lose your data in OS X, this time in the new 10.5 (Leopard) Finder (but related bugs go back perhaps to OS X 10.1). This doesn't affect me, because I've not used the Finder for years: I use the command line to manipulate files.

Phillip J. Windley's diary of OS X experiences.

MacOsXHints.

From Apple.

Working with Spotlight:

Although the desperately hip advertising-speak ("And by optimized, we don't mean that it's a little bit faster. No way.") is nearly intolerable, this article from Apple is a rare substantive description of the search technology to be included in the next major release of OS X, and includes examples of the use of the programming interface, and this:

Just as traditional Unix ls command will list all of the files in a directory, mdls will list all of the meta-data attributes for a file.