Siracusa on Tiger

Really? That's distressing. 64-bit Cocoa/QuickTime/Carbon are not inevitable and would be a huge waste of resources, arbitrary metadata does not make the file system into a database, complex nested boolean queries are too confusing for way more people than he theorizes, the Finder has a low CPU use requirement that makes it strain when you drag 4000 files around and he's never understood that, I don't think the "kernel" is as involved in Spotlight as he insists, Path Finder is for geeks and not real people, and every technology does not have to be overgeneralized and made generic to the point that everything is everything else because no one but total geeks could use it then.

If I had more time...

Matt,

He's pretty clear about why 64-bit frameworks aren't really needed right now. I don't think you can be any more certain that the frameworks will be 32-bit *forever* than he is that they will be 64-bit at some time in the future. The developer release notes make it sound like Apple will eventually make some of the frameworks 64-bit.

I didn't see him claim in the article that arbitrary metadata makes the filesystem a database. But who cares, because nobody can agree on what a database is, anyway. Do you disagree that metadata is good?

About the boolean queries, neither of you have real data. Even if he's wrong, isn't it still worth pointing out that support for complex queries is there, but unexposed? Third party opportunity.

I don't understand your point about the Finder's CPU use. If I open a folder with thousands of files on my dual G5, the Finder uses about 130% CPU and it freezes for a while. Path Finder stays under 50% CPU and remains responsive.

I think he's simply claiming that Spotlight (like the Finder) uses kqueue. Any I/O that goes through the kernel triggers a kevent. He's not saying that Spotlight itself is in the kernel.

I don't use many of Path Finder's geeky features. Mainly, I like it because the basic list and column views work better than the Finder's. Their behavior is more predictable, the scrolling works better, and it's more responsive.

The Finder uses kqueue but Spotlight doesn't. Spotlight uses /dev/fsevents which is a new feature in Darwin 8.0 (Tiger). Both kqueue and fsevents necessarily involve kernel hooks because that is where all file i/o actually takes place.

While I don't have a comprehensive survey on nested boolean searches, I do have my own mother who wanted to make such a search even though she has no idea what the formal name for it is. It's just a question of providing a UI that my mother can understand.

All libraries in Mac OS X will be 64-bit if the OS lives long enough. The 32-bit versions of the libraries will still be around for a long time afterwards, of course.

[...] great Mac OS X review from John Siracusa, though it’s not as long as the Tiger one. Here are some [...]