Apple Preps Tiger for June Conference
This is one OS that appears to be ready for primetime. Betas have been released to testers with more and more frequency and the June Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will center on Tiger and allow the participants hands-on experience using and developing for it. Some of the new features are talked about in the article linked above.
The main new features of Tiger that Apple has targeted for developers are Spotlight and Dashboard. Spotlight is the new search technology baked into Mac OS X that utilizes an indexed database, which contains the contents and meta-data of every file on the system. Apple has designed Spotlight to instantly pull up search results from any location, be it e-mail, music or iChat logs.Tiger is also set to include special “Widgets,” or mini-applications that perform simple tasks, such as displaying weather or controlling Apple’s iTunes. They reside in a layer atop the Mac OS X desktop called the Dashboard. Dashboard appears with the press of a button and disappears just as easily.