This is the first installment of ThinkSecret's "Inside Tiger" series, covering Mac OS X Version 10.4. Today, they begin looking at one of Tiger's most touted features, Spotlight, a new suite of systemwide search tools. Elsewhere, SMH in Australia has a Tiger article. Update: Appleinsider has more Tiger articles with screenshots: 1, 2, 3, 4.

I have written up an article about a bunch of ideas for 3D desktop development now Project Looking Glass is Open Source. A number of the Looking Glass owners have an interest in the document and it might prove interesting to get an insight into the potential desktop of the future.

One glaring issue I've had since my transition to Linux is video games. Being a Nintendo (consoles) and Sierra (PC) kid, I've gravitated to consoles more lately, but the occasional PC game has kept my interest solidly enough to keep Windows around on a spare drive. I tried WineX (CVS) in the past, and had great success with Diablo II, but didn't bother to try any 'new' games with it.

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 1. As another step towards the aKademy in late August, this release is named Klassroom.

Marcel Moolenaar has been very busy with GDB code as of late, having imported gdb version 6.1.1 in late June and now supplying a patch to freebsd-arch@ that adds kernel debugging and helpful features to FreeBSD's gdb and ddb code, including thread awareness. Other interesting additions include optimizations for the 64-bit platforms, compression for remote gdb, and improved symbol handling.

This is an interview with Ed Bugnion, CTO and Co-founder of VMware, conducted by IT-Director.com. It offers an insight into VMware past, present and future.

While corporate users are worried about security holes, they often rely on internal apps and Web sites that only work within Microsoft's dominant browser.

Jan Schaumann announced that the second NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004 is now available online. It covers the major recent developments within the NetBSD project during April, May, June.

Stephen Walther looks at the new caching features included in ASP.NET 2.0, and how you can use them to improve the performance and scalability of your ASP.NET applications.

Forrester senior analyst Simon Yates told MacNewsWorld that Apple and Microsoft are attempting to offer a multipronged approach to user searches in Tiger & Longhorn, in an attempt simplify finding data.

I recently blogged on a disconcerting trend that I see at USENIX, and for OS research more generally.

There is a certain thing about skinning. It's just relaxing. Changing skins, browsing for skins, adding icons, trying out different color schemes in order to find the best match. The skinning community is quite large, ranging from people who change only their WinAmp skin, to people who use different DE's on Unix-like systems. In fact, you are also skinning when you don't use a DE; since the command line is in fact a type of 'skin' as well.

"SkyOS 5.0 Beta 7 has been released for beta testers. The biggest changes in beta 7 are of course the addition of multi-user support and BASH, but many, many small and large bugs have also been fixed as well." Read other news at SkyOS homepage.

Microsoft is developing a version of its Windows Server 2003 operating system that is designed to handle applications running across dozens of single- or dual-processor computers working in parallel.