Real Kato Blog: Apple Watch: Last Minute

Just before the WWDC, some last minute stuff.

A few supposedly-leaked photos from Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" have been floating around the net. Of course, most folks are dismissing them as Photoshop'ed hoaxes, but some are believable.

One is something folks are calling "Dashboard", which looks remarkably like the the third-party application "Konfabulator". It would allow a hot-key press to bring up a set of mini-applications. (Can anyone say "Desk Accessory"? It's Mac OS 6 all over again!) I give this one just a 20% chance of being real.

Next is something called "Pipeline", which graphic and video studios would call "workflow management". It's apparently a way of stringing together multiple applications and tasks into a repeatable script. Unix gurus will quickly recognize the concept of pipes, where the output of one program can be used as the input to another; it's one of the great advantages of the Unix command line. If Apple can harness that concept into something that doesn't require a cryptic string of awk/sed/regexp commands, they might really have something. I hope this one is real; I give it a 75% chance.

There's something called "Stealth Mode", which I would guess to be a simple setting not to respond to ICMP and TCP messages on any external firewall port. It's ever-so-simple to do, but leave it to Apple to be the first to market such functionality in a user-understandable way. I give this one a 75% chance as well.

Only a few hours to go, and all the speculation will be over!

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