Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Recently I listed some of the features from Apple's list of new Tiger features that I wanted to talk about. Well, now I can. So here are some followups to that post.

Quartz Composer

I will probably go into more in the future. In the meantime, people interested in cool graphics and animation should install the developer tools and run it, it's /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/Quartz Composer. Also check out "Core Image Fun House", an application that looks like the major basis for Stone Design's iMagininator.

Xcode 2

I've been using this new version for a while, and it's pretty solid. I like being able to keep my development contained to one window per project, though I really do miss the major window customization capability that was around in a previous version of XCode, was that Project Builder?

Fax Logs and Archives

Finally! I don't do faxing a lot, but it's handy to find out whether or not my fax got sent or not!

Spotlight Find

This is gettig a lot of attention, so there's not a lot to say. 'Bout time is all I can say; search within content has been around for a long time, but it just was never integrated into Mac OS X very well until now.

Core Image

I'll have some technical stuff to post about this later. In any case, this is great technology. Try the above-mentioned iMaginator or Core Image Fun House for a tour of what you can do. Starting now, lots of applications are going to have lots more eye candy!

Safari Inline PDF Viewing

Finally! I had been using a plugin, but this is much better integrated. You can open the PDF from Safari into Preview with a contextual menu.

Safari RSS Auto Detection

Does this look kind of like a suggestion I blogged 1-1/2 years ago? Safari's built-in display of RSS is pretty useless, but it's great integration with NetNewsWire and other RSS applications. Now you don't have to hunt all over for a little RSS/XML badge on a site; just click on the RSS badge to add it to your feed. Maybe this will encourage some websites with feeds to actually put the necessary detection markup into their pages.

Automator

I have never been one to swallow the AppleScript Kool-aide (except during and right after a talk by Sal Soghoian. But this makes applescriptability useful for just about anybody. I've used it quite a bit for just odds and ends, like renaming files, batch-converting images, and so forth. Great stuff, and it will be even more useful as more application come on-board.

Programmer Base 10 math Calculator

Apple's desscription didn't really do this feature justice. The built-in Calculator Application now has three personalities: basic, scientific, and programmers. Lots of useful features on the latter! Any of them can use RPN if you want.