Today, Apple has previewed Mac OS X v10.4 codename “Tiger”. Many of these features were supposed to be included in Microsoft’s next version of Windows codenamed “Longhorn” due in 2007, but unfortunately Microsoft has withdrawn plans for some of the most salient features. To my surprise, Apple has managed to conquer the goal that Microsoft declared as too tough to make it even by 2007 – this was the searchable File System (also known as WinFS). Apple touts its new Search backbone as “Spotlight” and like Exposé was for Panther, Spotlight will be for Tiger. I shall not mention much more than what you can find out from Apple’s Tiger Website. However, it should be duly noted that Spotlight will be using metadata as one of its many criteria for searching.

Other important improvements in Tiger are Dashboard and Automator. Do check out Apple’s website for more information if you so desire. In other important announcements, the most important is the announcement of a 30″ LCD screen by Apple which would run at a resolution of 2560 by 1600 (very very very very big) and would need not only the most powerful graphics card available for the Mac platform but also two DVI connectors instead of one to feed it with the graphical data it so hungers for. Notice that it towers above the Power Mac G5 (which is much bigger than a normal tower PC itself).

–Karan