I went to a seminar yesterday regarding the Apple’s new Tiger operating system and the relationships of that to Unix. I must say, I am very impressed by the progress apple is making. The new operating system is truely Unix/FreeBSD on drugs, in a good way.

Personally I am not a apple person, but I have always considered them OK, since both the apple community people and I share a common interest which is not microsoft. The one thing that kept me away from apple is them putting forward usability and eye candy before stability and core operations. After listning through this seminar I got a clear idea about the new director of Apple, and I am extremly happy about it. One of the main things that caught my eye was that it was really easy to use, maybe to too easy. The command line resembles almost identical to the *nix terminals, and the commands are the same, afterall it is based on FreeBSD. I like how they are releasing some of the components originally intended for their operating system back to the open source community.

One of the main things they released back to the open source community which caught my eye was launchd. Pretty much instead of having a hundreds of startup scripts everywhere in the file system launching the daemons, this was a centralized system for it. I like to think of it as a replacement of init by a augmented init. Theoretically this should make it easier to fine tune the order and what daemons are started, hopefully making it faster, really freaking fast, to boot (although I hardly ever reboot, it will come in handy for the laptop).

The other thing was their really augmented indexing system for the file system. It pretty much just scans every single file on the given file systems, and indexes them into huge indexes with ridicoulus amounts of meta data (ex. for a picture the date, time, camera model, exposure settings if available, and anything else possible to dig up), and unlike older indexing systems this is real time and dynamic. So you don’t have to wait over night until it goes thorugh and indexes, the instance a file is made the index updates. The searching is quite fast too, I was very impressed. Also another addition was these things called smart folders, where it simply is a virtual folder simulating a search (example is that folder will display all jpeg pictures created from 2003-2004 from a sony camera on the home drive).

There were much more, but I am not really interested in blabering on, most of the other stuff were eye candy and more user friendly. launchd is open sourced so I am still waiting until they make a few new linux distro’s using that system, should be fascinating and really fast. Looks like the *nix community is influencing the apple’s, and apple’s are influencing the *nix guys back by open sourcing their projects, good for both groups. One more step ahead for the alternative OS people.