Tiger arrives (officially)
Although I’ve had it in previous developer incarnations, the official release arrived today.
Update
Mac: Power Macintosh G5 Dual 1.8 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Hard drive: 120GB
Since I can’t replace my 10.3 partition due to the need to be in sync with other developers at work, I had to install 10.4 on a separate partition. Installation was very smooth. Booting into 10.4 is much faster than previous OS’s. Tiger gives you the option to copy your environment from a separate hard drive or partition. I chose not to for this installation, but I did do it at home and it worked fine.
When installing previous versions of OS X, you were given the options to run Disk Utility so that you could repartition disks before you install OS X, or change the password. Along with those options, you now have Startup Disk, Terminal, System Profiler, and Network Utility.
Right off the bat, there’s nothing that jumps out at you to say “hey look, I’m new!” unless you’re the kind of person that notices little details. If you are, you’d notice the Apple Menu lost its glassy look and is now a flat blue.
You’ll also notice the Spotlight icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Spotlight is Apple’s newest engine for searching for items on your system. It’s blazingly fast. It found references to items much faster than previous search tools on OS X, or even Windows XP ever could. No more walking away from your computer when you want to find that one word in that one document you wrote a few months back.
iChat has been improved. Now you can doing voice and video chat with multiple people. There are some limitations due to the horsepower needed; the user with the fastest Mac should be the host. iChat now puts the iTunes song you’re currently listening to in the message area. A very nice touch! There are also some new buddy icons, but I found them to be dull and uninspiring.
Dashboard is a new addition to Mac OS X. When you press F12, your screen is filled with little widgets – small mini applications designed to do very small tasks like watch stocks or check the weather in your area. The widgets are easily built using the same tools used to make web pages (HTML, Javascript, CSS). Love it or hate it, it’s a nice way to clean the clutter off your desktop. I wouldn’t necessarily want to have yet even more windows on my already cluttered desktop.
Automator is cool. It’s an application designed to help alleviate some of the tedious tasks that we may have to deal with from time to time. The way it works is a script works on one or more objects. The output from that script feeds into the input of the next script.
An example would be resizing images. If you want to shrink 8 megapixel images for a web site, you’d have to do each one by hand. Now, you just drag-and-drop the steps used to do the work into an Automator Workflow, and Automator does it all the work for you. I found that there are some limitations. In one automated task I wanted to create a proof sheet PDF of selected images. I could create a new folder for the images in step 2, but I couldn’t figure out how to put the final PDF file, created in step 4, in the same folder that was created in step 2. A minor issue, but one I hope that Apple will address later on.
One nice thing I found with Automator was the ability to manage PDF documents better than I found before. You can encrypt, merge, rename, watermark, and extract even and odd pages. Since I work with PDFs, I find these to be very handy tools.
Quicktime has been updated to version 7 with H.264 support, which means it supports HDTV. Although I don’t have a 5.1 audio card in my Mac, watching an HDTV video was a treat. I do have an optical output port on my Mac which should send the 5.1 stream to my Dolby Digital receiver in the next room, but that’s difficult to do with an optical cable. I’m looking forward to playing with QT7.
Other misc. items include:
Safari’s RSS reader
An RSS screen saver (which looks excellent)
Better Windows network integration
More Bluetooth device support (in my case, Tiger works with my Nokia 6620)
Dashboard dictionary and thesaurus
The complete list of 200+ improvements to Tiger can be found here.
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