Leopard features
What with all the kerfuffle of moving and so on, I missed most of the buzz around Apple’s announcement of some of the features to be introduced in Leopard: the next version of MacOS X. I’ve had a little time to read the information now, and some of the features look pretty spiffy. Time Machine in particular looks interesting. The idea is that the system keeps an automatic, incremental backup of your entire system. If you want to retrieve something from an earlier system state (perhaps because you’ve mistakenly deleted a file), you can use the Time Machine interface to ‘go back in time’ and retrieve your deleted file.
It’s fair to say that Apple has received a bit of gentle (and not so gentle) ribbing about the interface. The perspective display of windows receding into the distance is very cool, but they chose to show an image of a star field behind the windows. I quite like it, but it is a tad literal. Still, it could be worse. They could have gone 80’s Sci-Fi-tastic and had some kind of swirly vortex together with calendar pages fluttering away into the void.
I’m interested in the technology behind this feature. Constant incremental backups could obviously consume even the biggest of hard drives in no time, so there must (we hope) be some kind of clever compression involved, or perhaps the system just stores the changes in files rather than the whole file after a complete initial backup has been made (something like Subversion). There has been a lot of speculation suggesting that Time Machine might be based on ZFS—-the file system all the geeks are raving about. However, it seems that’s not the case, and it’s probably just plain old journalled HFS+, which is a bit of a shame. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how it performs.
I’m also pleased to see that Apple has finally adopted virtual desktops (available in just about every Linux implementation) in the form of Spaces. I’ve used a number of virtual desktop applications on MacOS X, but currently use Codetek’s VirtualDesktop Pro. I must say that Apple’s implementation looks very slick, but if you can’t have more than four desktops (it’s not clear from the information available), I’ll probably stick with my 8 desktops on VirtualDesktop Pro. I’ve got so used to the layout of my desktops that it’s practically muscle memory now.
Some of the other features don’t excite me quite as much, but I think it will still be a pretty good OS upgrade, particularly the tantalising ‘secret features’ that Apple is keeping under wraps until later.
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Oh dear! The bane of Window's users lives is the amount of disc space & loading time generic in their version of the "Incremental BackUp". For every file the user generates, the Windows XP "Restore to previous good setup" program multiplies by about 100 - hence my desktop now has about 250,000 files, very few of which are ours. As ones Windows XP gets older it gets slower and slower to load.....
by Jonathan Briggs @ 16/08/2006 6:09 pm • Permalink •
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From the screenshots I've seen, Spaces allows at least 16 desktops.
by John Y @ 17/08/2006 4:09 am • Permalink •
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Just to clarify, Time Machine uses an external hard disc for the backups, not the system disc. HTH
by Marcus @ 17/08/2006 1:08 pm • Permalink •
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Hi bsag
I'm pretty sure it won't violate my NDA with Apple (Yay, I was at WWDC) if I tell you that Time Machine does indeed use journaled HFS+, and the interface is not final : ) It is designed for use on an external drive or server and is nothing like Windows restore.
Spaces is by far the slickest workspace manager I have seen on OS X and respects the separate application spaces very nicely. Spaces allows for a user configurable number of workspaces (I've not tested the maximum) but you can specify additional rows and columns of 'spaces' to build up a custom grid.
by Nick @ 17/08/2006 11:09 pm • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: as Marcus and Nick said, it's not really intended to back up on the startup volume.
John Y: Nice!
Marcus: Yes, I saw that, but my point was that if it backs up frequently and doesn't use some smart compression of some kind, it will fill any drive pretty quickly.
Nick: I'm glad that Spaces has a fair amount of configurability. Can you set a hotkey to go directly to each space, do you know (rather than going to the next or previous space)?
by bsag @ 18/08/2006 4:09 pm • Permalink •
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Hi bsag - thought you might like to check out Stargate SG1 S10E06 - a little treat for the FarScaper within - 1/2 to 3/4 through
cheers.
by AikenDrum @ 20/08/2006 10:09 am • Permalink •
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>Apple has finally adopted virtual desktops (available in just about every Linux implementation)
and MacOS 4+
by Saltation @ 21/08/2006 9:09 am • Permalink •
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