MacOS X Tiger: ROARRR!
Written: May 22 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Tiger roars into action with some really fun features.
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: A lot of fun new features make Tiger a fantastic upgrade. Dashboard and Automator cater to your geeky side, and Spotlight finds things you never even thought you had.
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| daviddennis's Full Review: Apple Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Full Version (M9639Z/A) |
Tiger is one sleek cat. Unlike previous versions of MacOS X, emphasis is more on innovative new features than improvements in basic operation. If you love new toys to play with, your new Tiger will definitely keep you amused.
What is Tiger?
Epinions reviewers always hate it when I review something and don't say what it is, even though anyone who seeks out a review of Tiger is going to know. So I shall say that Tiger is, of course, Apple's new operating system, replacing the older Panther.
Installation
Easy hardly even describes it, as long as your startup disk is in good shape. Mine was not and I had to use Diskwarrior to fix it before I could install Tiger.
Tiger's message when it runs into a disk problem is a bit cryptic. It simply says that it cannot be installed, and tells you to try again later. You should not; you have to fix your disk. Diskwarrior did it for me just fine.
After I got that squared away, the installation was simple, clean, easy and was over almost before I knew it. (It helped that I had a book to read while it was going on).
Spotlight
I have a wonderful, brilliant, beautiful woman in my life, but unfortunately she's not here with me right now. I can type her name into Spotlight, and our most recent email conversations come up, together with a list of her artwork and even some videos we did together. (No, sorry, not that kind!) I had forgotten about the videos and it was very nice to see them again.
Unfortunately, it doesn't find the pictures I took of her because they are all named by the camera. Spotlight needs her name to be somewhere in the folder name, file name or document text. So I can find all the photos I took at a certain f/stop, but not all the photos I took of her. I guess they'll have to do face recognition in the next version.
It's pretty fast but not extremely so. You still have to wait a little while for the results, but it's a lot faster and more comprehensive than the search in Panther.
It can produce a huge pile of results, especially for a common name. Fortunately, my girlfriend's isn't that common, but my boss happens to have the same first name as I do, so searching for "David" would give me chaos.
(It's worse than I thought. My enormous spam collection is searched as well as the email, so right now my top match is "David c.um fiesta has been updated", which is not something I asked for at all!*) However, it did find pictures of me, which I'd also forgot I had. Not bad.
(*) Since I have had my email address since 1994, I get so much spam that it's too much effort to delete it all.
Spotlight takes several hours before it works on your computer. It might be best to install Tiger right before you go to sleep and let it do its thing overnight. Remember to turn off your energy saving features in System Preferences so it can do its work; otherwise it will work for a while and take a nap. See "Speed", below, for more on this.
Mail
New User Interface. Unlike other reviewers, I actually prefer the new user interface, although since my hand memorized the location of the "Junk" icon, there were a few embarassing moments where I almost replied to a junk email message instead of throwing it away.
Junk Email. For some reason, my junk email filter stopped working sometime around Panther, but now it works great. I get about ten junk emails appearing a day instead of 300. A big win for amazing.com!
Smart Folders. Remember my girlfriend? Okay, I want to see all my conversations with her, including my own messages to her. Easy! You just make a smart folder, label it with her name and select all email with her email address, or with her email address as a recipient. Be sure to select "any" of the conditions instead of "all", because of course none of them are going to be both to and from her. If you forget to do that, nothing will come up and you'll sit there wondering why it's so sluggish, when you actually gave it a mutually contradictory search!
Dashboard
Dashboard is a quick way to show some cute applications that tell you important but trivial things. Its highest and best use appears to be the weather. Click on the Dashboard icon in the dock (there are about a million ways to activate it, but that's the one I prefer), and you'll see a bunch of cute little programs, including the weather.
I live in a small town right now, and I was puzzled as to how to change the weather widget to reflect my proper location. It took the information from my time zone, which I had as a faraway city. It turns out that you click on the tiny "I" icon on the lower right and the widget flips over with a very nice animation to request the zip code. Very cool.
Automator
You can automate a lot of your life with Unix-based scripting, but it takes work to put together and it's way too easy to make disasterous mistakes, like deleting all the files of your directory instead of renaming them.
Automator has a beautifully clear user interface that makes scripting a snap, and holds your hand in a very cool, reassuring way. I've already put together Automator scripts to cure some very boring problems and I'm confident that I will do a lot more.
Speed
When you first get Tiger, you are going to be unhappy with its speed. You will see a visible slowdown everywhere.
This is not Tiger's fault. It's indexing all your hard drives so that Spotlight will find what you're looking for. Once it finishes indexing, you'll get your computer back.
While Tiger was indexing, I was working on Final Cut Pro project. The computer was usable but it took a little while for it to play video, although once it started it played fine. This was extremely annoying while I was editing, since you often have to start and stop several times a minute. However, today I'm working on that project again, and it's flawless. So please have patience with your baby Tiger; it just needs a little training before it's in full fighting trim.
Reliable sources have told me Tiger's significantly faster than Panther. I haven't noticed any significant differences. I have a PowerMac G5 dual 2ghz machine with 5GB RAM and it's always been pretty fast.
Downsides
It's a little thing, but I think I like Panther's overall appearance slightly more. The shade of blue used changed from pleasantly muted to something verging on loud. This was for a good cause, to promote Spotlight, but still it's a little annoying.
People always complain about the price of Apple's operating system upgrades. I suppose I can be a little smug since I now work for an educational institution and got the educational price of $69. That being said, I have never complained about the price of these upgrades, probably because, as a programmer, I understand some of the enormous amount of effort that goes into them. It costs money to put together a better user experience, and Apple definitely delivers.
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: David Dennis
Location: Woodland Hills, CA
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