“Since the public unveiling of Mac OS X 10.3, codenamed Panther, during June’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple has provided developers with a pair of updates for the forthcoming OS that remains under active development. The latest distribution, dubbed Panther 7B21, was frozen last week and was briefly distributed to developers over Panther’s Software Update module. Soon after, the release was made available via a 3 CD image set on Apple’s Developer Connection servers. Coupled with the 7A202 build released a few weeks earlier, the two seedings provide a number of speed and user experience enhancements over what was already made public in June,” reports AppleInsider.com.
Of particular interest in this report of Panther 7B21 (besides the “Quartz engine is said to be almost 40 percent faster than Jaguar’s on desktop machines”) is the mention that “the fate of Aladdin System’s StuffIt suite may be up in the air with Apple’s embodiment of Zip compression functionality built directly into the Finder’s contextual menu system,” AppleInsider reports.
The full article, with screenshots and small quicktime movies of new features, is here.
ha ha ha
windows has had this for yeeaaaarrrrsssss….
keep playin’ catch up Apple!
Mac has had this for years, too. It’s been supplied pre-installed on all Macs, from Aladdin systems. The question now, is whether that will still be the case. (If not, Aladdin loses a gateway for people to upgrade to their paid versions.) Having it be part of the Finder in future, instead of StuffIt sounds fine to me. There will still be those who need to buy StuffIt for its more advanced features. (And I’ve been using the handy freeware DropCompress anyway.)
Not to mention, for some reason my Windows clients often have trouble figuring out how to open .zips, while my Mac clients can always just double-click.
I don’t think zip decompression HAS been standard in Windows for too many years at all. But it has been on Mac, thanks to StuffIt Expander (not just for .sits) being pre-installed… since Mac OS 8 if not before.
I agree Nagromme, I think it’s a great idea. I too have already been using the free DropCompress… and I’ve been using it to make .gzip files!
And zippy, you are incorrect. Only the recent Windows XP has built-in contextual menu zip functionality.
-Zack
http://www.macpulse.com
Aladdin has been getting by on too little for too long. They are on the right track by making use of the unix subsystem (what’s with this .sitx???). Let’s see some creative use of the existing underpinnings provided with OS X.
Alladin have really let this product go. The current OSX version is not multi-threaded and ties up OSX Finder completely. I’ve already moved to using compressed dmg;s for archiving and now try to avoid stuffit.
I think they’re going the way of Cassidy & Greene. Oh well, that’s EVOLUTION.
Hey, zippy…
This site is called MAC daily news, not WINDOZE daily news. I guess you just got lost. I mean, more lost than when you bought that Wintel piece of crap (which you know is just a half-assed cobbling together of rip-offs from Apple).
But if you do a search on Google for Windoze, if you know how, you’ll probably find a buttload of sites devoted to talking about all the pathetic problems you guys have with your colorless boxes. Enjoy. Why you hang out here is beyond me. I mean, I understand you’re jealous and all, but your little jabs only underscore the transparency of your presence here.
From what I have heard, the only thing being included is “ZIP compression”. If I’m not mistaken, and this is per Aladdin’s DropZip, “The Zip format can not handle Macintosh resource forks correctly.” That is why DropZip has the additional options like pre-encoding archives as MacBinary. So unless Apple’s Zip routines account for resource forks in a similar fashion, people are likely to be unpleasantly surprised… However, since Apple has tried to maximize cross-platform functionality (cf. DiscBurner burns CDs as HFS+/ISO-9660 Hybrids), this is a not-unreasonable expectation.
Without the support for MacBinary, I don’t see this as a major attack on StuffIt, whose products provide MUCH more functionality (like self-extracting archives), and the StuffIt .sit format(s) are still the Mac standard for compression…
It is not wise to double-click anything you recieve from outside you’re own environment. The .zip suffix doesn’t mean it’s a zip file.
It’s better to drag compressed archives onto the opening apps icon (in the Dock for example). That way you won’t run the risk running harmful software.
Usage: Whither ,Where . Whither properly implies motion to place, and where rest in a place. Whither is now, however, to a great extent, obsolete, except in poetry, or in compositions of a grave and serious character and in language where precision is required. Where has taken its place, as in the question, “Where are you going?”
Hey zippy,
Windows has had a spell checker for years too. Try using it once in a while.
> ha ha ha
> windows has had this for yeeaaaarrrrsssss….
> keep playin’ catch up Apple!
zippy,
You’ll have to troll much better than that to reel in any diehard Mac users. There’s a reason why we’re crazy about the Mac, made the switch and never looked back.
zippy the pin-head.
I like .sit better than .zip anyways; so I’ll continue to support the company
This development only stands to reason. A modern operating system should integrate all fundamental file management functions — compression being one. Leaving this to third parties was fine for personal computers 10 to 15 years ago, but it’s more an OS function to mind the file system. Thus such functions as disk maintenance, optimization, diag/repair, file recovery and journaling, archival and compression, batch renaming, browsing and navigation, search and retrieval, secure deletion, encoding/conversion, encryption, ownership and permissions, attributes and properties, syncrhonization, back-up, file sharing, file comparing tools, etc. ALL should be the province of a modern, robust operating system.
Third party developers are certainly at liberty to offer products which do the OS one better. But these functions are basic, and no customer today should have to go to a third party to purchase each of these things as separate products. So Apple is definitely on the right track here.
On Win 95, MS had PKzip, basic decompress tool, freeware. No archive, had to use utility from Norton for example. Users usually, on MS recommendation, used either free or paid WinZip to decompress. Later, WinZip added archive functions at least to the paid version. I have the paid version.
Sometime after WinSE was out, MS provided MS self-installer to developers, royalty or free, depending, which both decompressed and installed. This is a very good piece of software.
WIN XP has archival functions, I understand, but if zipped doc files are received, WinZip is still used. I do not have XP, switched and still have 98SE on my PC.
IMO, don’t like the current sit Stuffit situation, just want to get installed without fooling around with it. Hopeful that Panther will simplify the decompress, install, perhaps with a self-installer.
Just installed GIMP and ABIword from OpenOSX,com and they have a really nifty self-installer, so one is available from open source.
“.ZIP” capability was never a part of the Windows OS. Matter of fact it was a third party just like Aladdin is to Apple for the “.SIT” compression. It was called WinZip from WinZip Computing. Until XP put it in. They have not been doing it for “yeeaaaarrrrsssss” as one says.
What *has* been standard functionality on Windows for some time, is automatic “below the hood” compression of any file. I think it was called DoubleSpace or something and was added in the mid-nineties. Caused a law suit from a company that claimed copyright violation. Anyway, I don’t think Windows has that feature anymore, don’t know why.
NTFS has file compression built into the file system, and has since the 3.5/3.51 timeframe (mid 90’s).
This is different from compression utilities. The utilities create a new container file, inside of which are one or more compressed files.
The NTFS compression is transparent to the user – the file looks like a normal file, but occupies less space on disk. The file system automatically compresses new files, and decompresses the file whenever it is read.
“DoubleSpace” was a Windows 3.1 utility which had some of the same features. It was the target of a successful lawsuit from the Stacker company, the courts ruling that Microsoft infringed some patents, although not willfully.
XP’s finder will automatically display contents of zip files, and extract files. You need a utility to create zips, though.
Wrong. ZIP file compression has been a standard part of Windows since Windows 98 SE in 1999. It’s called “Compressed Folders.” And NT has had file compression capabilities ever since it debuted. In other words: Another feature Apple is stealing fromm Windows. Eat it.
Paul,
We all have Stuffit, so we really don’t care. Just as I had WinZip for years before Microsoft offered its very shotty version of zip support.
Tell ya what. Visit the Microsoft Technet site (link below) that mentions the new features of XP Pro:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/evaluate/xptechov.asp
Let’s see, what did Mac already have from this list that Windows “innovated” into XP Pro?
Oh boy, what a list! Here they are (in Microsoft terminology):
1. Integrated CD Burning
2. DualView
3. Troubleshooters
4. Credential Manager
5. Improved Power Management
6. Hibernate
7. Hot Docking
8. Wireless Network Support
9. Network Location Awareness
10. Internet Connection Firewall
11. Internet Connection Sharing
12. Peer-to-peer Networking
13. Automatic Updates
14. Unattended Installation
15. Multilingual Support
16. Group Policy
17. Preemptive Multitasking
18. Scalable Memory and Processor Support
…etcetera, etcetera, etc…
You get the picture. Congratulations on your ZIP support. Whoo-hoo! Keep up that renowned Windows “innovation”!
To the user, “Atomic Bomb,” you are mistaken in some of your claims (in regard to Apple firsts). For example, Apple was not the first to offer pre-emptive multitasking in a desktop/PC operating system, nor was Windows XP the first Microsoft implementation of this. Instead, it arrived with Windows NT in 1992 (or 93) which was appropriated from DEC as the Mica project. Mica had been under development at DEC for four years prior to that time — and the plan was for it to be the successor to the VMS operating system. But a myopic VP cancelled the project and Gates hired away 16 DEC consulting engineers (led by Dave Cutler) to create the NT kernel (based on their work on Mica).
DEC threatened to file a lawsuit for theft of intellectual property and by way of settlement Microsoft agreed to port Windows NT to DEC’s Alpha chip (though such support ended with Windows 2000).
In any case, this was a full multitasking kernel with hardware abstraction, SMP support, clustering, etc. It has since been corrupted and worsened under the poor stewardship of Microsoft (such as, for instance, when it placed video drivers into the kernel itself, thereby sacrificing stability for performance. But Apple was not the first with pre-emptive multitasking.
Apple had a much more ambitious OS project even than DEC’s Mica — namely Taligent — but mismangement and conflict among the coalition partners for Taligent doomed the project.
I’m not sure what you mean by “scalable memory and processor support,” but Windows NT was likewise ahead of Apple in its support of protective memory. It also supported SMP before the Mac OS did. Some of your other examples are erroneous as well. But I’ll leave it here for now.
As an addendum to my post below (in which I detail some things at which Microsoft was ahead of Apple), let me say that for all its missteps over the years, Apple is indeed a true technology company and it does innovate a number of the technologies it uses. It also is frequently the first to adopt or integrate technologies developed by others. Apple is clearly a leader. Examples are ZeroConf/Rendezvous, Firewire, TrueType font technology, 24-bit color implementation (many years ago), built-in SCSI (in early 1986), OpenDoc, etc. There are many other examples.
In contrast, Microsoft originates very little of its own — but instead either buys (or steals) code from others. Below is a list of that which Microsoft did NOT originate:
1.DOS
2. Windows NT
3. Visio
4. Great Plains accounting
5. FoxPro (database manager)
6. SQL Server (database manager)
7. Internet Explorer
8. Powerpoint
9. C# Language (appropriated from Sun’s Java)
Microsoft would also own Quicken were it not for the Justice Dept which prohibited it. It also appropriated QuickTime code from Apple a number of years ago. This is an utterly abysmal record for the world’s largest software company. What does it have to show for “innovation” — Word and Excel? That’s it?
I don’t begrudge a company’s making the most of third-party technology — of course not. No company invents EVERYTHING it uses. But Microsoft seems to invent very little of its own.
Neither Apple nor M$ created file compression. Such software has been around for many years in different operating system environments.
File compression on the Mac OS has been around for over a decade. Longtime mac OS users might remember a very excellent program/extension called Disk Doubler/Auto Doubler, which enabled Finder-level integration of compression functions. It debuted sometime between 1989 and 1992. I think it was bought by Symantech and later died…
Apple has been content to let 3rd parties provide compression. But, the fact that MS offers this at the system level does kind of force Apple to be competitive… sorry, Aladdin.
Concerning Apple innovation vs Windows innovation: There’s no question to me, that Apple has been more innovative over time than MS. And it’s not really a matter of “inventing” stuff. (I think NIH – Not Invented Here – had been a stumbling block for Apple; the current Apple regime has fully embraced open source stuff, much to the benefit of users.)
For example, Apple didn’t invent the GUI – but it implemented the GUI before anyone else, and now it’s a standard.
The thing is: Apple has taken a lot of chances, even to the point of almost gambling, on technologies that the DOS/Windows world ignored/initially failed to embrace because they weren’t “standard” or were costly or were new or were “proprietary.”
Such innovations include:
– GUI
– Mice
– QuickDraw
– Control Panels
– Appletalk – easy to use peer-to-peer networking
– Desktop digital video (QT)
– Standard use of CD ROM
– Postscript Laser Printer
– Standard use of SCSI/chainable, multi purpose external connectivity
– Firewire
– Standard use of wireless networking
– One of the first commercial digital cameras (lest we forget)
– Dual monitor capability
RE: Standard use of CD ROM: I remember reading a news report many years ago where Apple was having trouble convincing software developers to put their programs on CD ROM, back in the early 90s, because at the time it was expensive to make CDs (relative to the cost of using floppy disks). How times change…
Apple’s had some bombs too – OpenDoc, Cyberdog, Newton, QuickDraw 3D, and QuickTime Conferencing come to mind.
But overall, it’s a been a plus. The key is: Apple has never been content to stick to “standards.” And while the Wintel critics complains that Apple doesn’t always follow industry standards, the fact is, much of the technology used in the Wintel space has Apple technology as its ancestor… and this irony is not lost on the legion of Mac diehards…
To all of the lame uninformed people here… .zip used to be called PKZIP, a program written by Phillip Katz in 1986. It was made for DOS, MacOS, and Unix. More important, the compression that Phillip Katz used was based on an algorithm that was distributed by Richard Stallman’s GNU ‘Compress’ program. (step forward if you know details about this) Compress was based on proprietary Unisys code called the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm (LZW). So one might say that compression was first invented for UNIX. MacOS X is a UNIX flavor. Oh who cares…its all water under the bridge. PCs still cant unstuff a .sit file out of the box, contextual menu or otherwise.