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June 12, 2007

software

Missing in action: ZFS (and resolution independence)

Posted Jun. 12, ’07, 10:15 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Software

carzfs.jpgYesterday’s Jobsnote certainly lacked plenty of announcements that we wanted to hear, but notably absent—to my ears, anyway—were a couple of things that I very much expected to hear, especially in a discussion Leopard’s new features: ZFS and resolution independence.

More puzzling is the fact that a search through Apple’s Leopard pages doesn’t seem to make mention of either of these technologies. Now, I’m not advocating that we hop the first train to Paranoiaville (a small town in rural Nebraska), but I do think it’s curious that two of the most touted features of Leopard have dropped off the radar. Searching Apple as a whole yields plenty of results on the Developer side of things for resolution independence but no official information on ZFS.

For ZFS, this oddity is compounded by the fact that the CEO of Sun, the company that developed ZFS, said just last week that ZFS would be in Leopard. But InformationWeek reported yesterday that Apple’s senior director of product marketing for Mac OS, Brian Croll, said “ZFS is not happening” and said that Apple had never claimed ZFS would be in Leopard.

Word is that ZFS has been supported in Leopard developer builds of Disk Utility, so is this a dose of the patented Steve Jobs medicine? Or is it merely an attempt to give other Leopard features their chance to shine? And here I thought we were done with top secret features.

Update: Apple contacted Information Week to clarify Croll’s comments, saying that ZFS would be available as “a limited option” but not as the default file system. End of story?


4 Comments

Jack said:

I knew something else was bothering me. Where the heck did resolution independence go? This is actually important I thinik. I've got a mom ready to buy her first computer. I took her to the apple store and she can't read the screens properly, and, as you know, not using a native resolution makes things blurry, defeating the purpose, and leading to...where did resolution independence go?.

I have a feeling there are some things they have dropped (screen sharing of the remote desktop variety via iChat), some things they are not sure if they can complete on time, but are still working on it (resolution independence), and others dropped for now (zfs). Those first two were important for mom, and the growing population of oldr people who are going to start either getting computers for the first time or getting macs for the first time.

Man yesterday was so Slimey. I really feel like they should have cancelled the whole keynote...the balance of what was said (sweet way to make an iphone app: make a Web Page!), and what was not said ("zfs? resolution independence? huh?), and what was promised (what exactly were the secret features? A transparent menu bar? Stacks? If so, Steve, How about saying

"Secret feature no. 1 is..."
"Secret feature no. 2 is..."

Not I'm going to talk about 10/300 things about leopard and most of thema are still going to manage to be stuff we already showed you a year ago.

I just ranted. So sorry.

June 12, 2007 12:09 PM
ex2bot said:

Yeah, but look at the big picture.

New, redesigned Finder! Finally! That could be BIG.

Time Machine! Who really does automatic backups? Not many people do. I don't. Not automatic.

Mail templates. Cool, unless you hate HTML mail.

Better iCal. I might actually use it.

Etc. Looks like more fun toys for us. Some will actually be useful.

Bot

June 12, 2007 1:09 PM
chris said:

look, zfs was not "dropped" because it was never announced. even so, the beta has read support built in and using it as a system file system wouldnt make much sense atm anyway.

remote control is still there, it's been moved from ichat to the finder specs on apples website.

resolution independence might well be one of the 290 not announced new features..

but keep ranting all the same if it keeps you happy.

June 12, 2007 3:41 PM
MalEbenSo said:

Quartz 2D Extreme turned on by default in Leopard would have been nice, too.

Q2DE - not to be confused with Quartz Extreme - was expected for Tiger but never gained official Apple support.

It should bring significant speed benefits for the GUI.

h t t p : / / arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/14

June 13, 2007 1:12 PM

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