New Tiger builds reveal smart font collections, security additions, more
Sources uncover new eye candy, smart font collections, a security certificate assistant, and more in some of the latest development builds of Apple next-generation operating system.
Smart Font Collections
Along with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" will come the first major update to Apple's font management application, labeled Font Book 2.0. In addition to more flexible validation features, recent builds of the application feature smart font collections.
Much like the smart mailboxes technology coming to Mail 2.0, smart font collections will allow users to automatically generate groups of fonts based on their attributes. Some of the attributes available for use are font name, family, style, kind, languages, and Postscript name. Similarly, Font Book searches can also be based off the same set of attributes in the new version.
Screenshots: Font Collection; Font Validation Manager; Font Search; Character Palette
Additional Font Book improvements are said include a font validation manager, and the ability to create separate font libraries and export font selections, sources said.
Added Security Options
Continuing to focus on one of the strengths of Mac OS X?security?Apple has developed a "Certificate Assistant" that will likely find its way into the shipping version of Tiger.
"This assistant will help you create a 'digital certificate,' which keeps your information secure by verifying your identity when you transfer over a network or the internet," reads one of the application's info panels.
Screenshots: Certificate Assistant; Assistant Intro; FontBook menu; Startup Disk
Identities will be stored in a user's keychain. The assistant can also be used to evaluate existing certificates, request a certificate from the Certificate Authority (CA), or issue certificates to other users.
More Default Screen Savers
Screen savers remain a popular and handy feature of Mac OS X, and Tiger will reportedly include at least two new offerings in this area. One of the new screen savers, Apple News, extracts Apple's Hot News content from an XML document and displays it amongst an array of colors and trademark Apple images. As second addition, called iTunes artwork, will gather a user's iTunes album art collection and and display it as animated tiles that alternate with the help of flip-motion effects.
Screenshots: iTunes Screen Saver; Hot News Screen Saver; Mic Calibration; Keychain Access
All the Rest
With each new seed of Tiger, Apple has continued to add and refine features. Some other notable changes to the system include a Startup Disk control panel that can set volumes to boot in target disk mode, a microphone calibration assistant, and an ever evolving Keychain application interface.
Apple has said that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger will ship within the first half of 2005. And while several rumors have hinted at a release as early as January, it's extremely unlikely that Apple could wrap up the development of the new system within the next two months, considering a large majority of its features are still seeing modifications.
Earlier this week, AppleInsider reported on QuickTime and Family Control enhancements in Tiger.
Smart Font Collections
Along with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" will come the first major update to Apple's font management application, labeled Font Book 2.0. In addition to more flexible validation features, recent builds of the application feature smart font collections.
Much like the smart mailboxes technology coming to Mail 2.0, smart font collections will allow users to automatically generate groups of fonts based on their attributes. Some of the attributes available for use are font name, family, style, kind, languages, and Postscript name. Similarly, Font Book searches can also be based off the same set of attributes in the new version.
Screenshots: Font Collection; Font Validation Manager; Font Search; Character Palette
Additional Font Book improvements are said include a font validation manager, and the ability to create separate font libraries and export font selections, sources said.
Added Security Options
Continuing to focus on one of the strengths of Mac OS X?security?Apple has developed a "Certificate Assistant" that will likely find its way into the shipping version of Tiger.
"This assistant will help you create a 'digital certificate,' which keeps your information secure by verifying your identity when you transfer over a network or the internet," reads one of the application's info panels.
Screenshots: Certificate Assistant; Assistant Intro; FontBook menu; Startup Disk
Identities will be stored in a user's keychain. The assistant can also be used to evaluate existing certificates, request a certificate from the Certificate Authority (CA), or issue certificates to other users.
More Default Screen Savers
Screen savers remain a popular and handy feature of Mac OS X, and Tiger will reportedly include at least two new offerings in this area. One of the new screen savers, Apple News, extracts Apple's Hot News content from an XML document and displays it amongst an array of colors and trademark Apple images. As second addition, called iTunes artwork, will gather a user's iTunes album art collection and and display it as animated tiles that alternate with the help of flip-motion effects.
Screenshots: iTunes Screen Saver; Hot News Screen Saver; Mic Calibration; Keychain Access
All the Rest
With each new seed of Tiger, Apple has continued to add and refine features. Some other notable changes to the system include a Startup Disk control panel that can set volumes to boot in target disk mode, a microphone calibration assistant, and an ever evolving Keychain application interface.
Apple has said that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger will ship within the first half of 2005. And while several rumors have hinted at a release as early as January, it's extremely unlikely that Apple could wrap up the development of the new system within the next two months, considering a large majority of its features are still seeing modifications.
Earlier this week, AppleInsider reported on QuickTime and Family Control enhancements in Tiger.
Comments
Originally posted by Matt C.
How is it that Apple keep adding more and more features in a litle over a year and Mircosoft can't even say the year longhorn will be released?
Because that is why we are Mac users?
Also not mentioned (AFAIK) is the fact that Quicktime windows now "live resize", instead of dragging boxes like OS 9.
Ink is being updated for Tiger with shorthand gestures. Currently untested by me.
Originally posted by grabberslasher
FYI the Microphone Calibration feature was present in the WWDC build of Tiger.
Erm, I seem to have it in Panther as well... Sys Prefs > Speech Pane > Recognition Tab > Listening Tab > Volume button at the bottom. It's worded slightly differently, but otherwise identical!
Neil.
a.k.a. Arnel
-Heady
Originally posted by AppleInsider
new eye candy
Was that even mentioned in the article?
Or do screen savers count as eye candy now?
Originally posted by grabberslasher
FYI the Microphone Calibration feature was present in the WWDC build of Tiger.
That looks exactly like the "Microphone Volume" window in the Listening panel of the Speech Preferences window, except for the text. Does it actually function differently? I find the whole speech thing (both speaking and listening) very disappointing since I've seen very little improvement since 1997 (System 7.5-8.0). My Dual 2GHz G5 doesn't seem to be much more accurate at recognizing my spoken commands than my Performa 6400/200 was.
And don't get me started with the voices! It's almost the exact same set from 1997 (and before for all I know) and most of them are jokes. Can you imagine listening to a page of text read by Bubbles? Bad news? Hysterical? There should be a wide range of normal voices and I wish you could add third-party ones like you can get everything from fonts to icons elsewhere.
What really gets me is the fact that we still can't overlay screensavers. After Dark used to be able to do this... and with OpenGL you'd think it'd be so much easier. What am I missing? why doesn't Apple do this? Lame.
Only having "remove selected" instead of "repair" = bad.
Looks like 3rd party utilities will still be mandatory.
Originally posted by curiousuburb
Font Validation = good.
Only having "remove selected" instead of "repair" = bad.
Looks like 3rd party utilities will still be mandatory.
Do what I do whenever I feel Apple should fix something...
Leave feedback and then get a bunch of users who agree with your points to do the same.
Mike
Originally posted by 5150
is it me or isn't it strange to see the beatles' "revolver" album cover artwork as one of the screensavers alongside U2's artwork. last time i checked, the artwork only came from music available through itunes. this seems odd for a company in material litigation with the beatles, IMO.
Beatles album art can be found on the web then dragged and dropped into iTunes. I've done it with the 17 Beatles CDs that I've imported into iTunes.
Hopefully Finder is next.
Originally posted by grabberslasher
I don't know how I missed this before - Quicktime in Tiger is now a Cocoa app. It's been totally rewritten. Very cool!!!
Hopefully Finder is next.
Even more exciting than the QT Player being Cocoa, this points to *QUICKTIME* being ever closer to being a Cocoa API. Woot!
I've only been waiting for this for what, two years??
Yeah, yeah, I know that QTKit was in the WWDC build, but it was pretty sparse. (Although with CoreImage/Video/Audio, it was an intriguing combo.)