Tiger Beat

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

As you can tell from my ridiculous Tiger-themed-pun of a headline, I’ve upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger.

I’m not usually such an early-adopter of the OS, but I was feeling techy and wanted to get my hands dirty with Spotlight and Dashboard.  Dashboard has already become an intuitive and regular part of my computing experience, even if only to watch those little widgets zoom in and out of the screen.  That’s really the most immediately noticable thing about Tiger: the little graphic touches.  Image slideshows, fancy transitions, resizable video windows… it all makes for a very pretty operating system.

I haven’t had a chance to fully take advantage of the meatier applications of Spotlight, Automator, Smart Folders, etc., but I can see them coming in handy. I’ve already ditched LaunchBar in favour of Spotlight, even though it seems to run a bit slower so far.

And the built-in dictionary look-up is very, very cool, even if this definition of “blog” does seem like a sort of a challenge: 

blog |bl�g|
noun
a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.

It’s like it’s saying, “Blog, THIS, nerd!”…


Comments

5-3-05 · 8:34 pm

Jason says:

Glad you’re enjoying Tiger.  I’m stuck on Windows, so I’m upgrading vicariously through you and a bunch of other blogs. I seem to have developed a Tiger obssession and I’m fighting the urge to go buy a Mac.

Must...payoff...credit...card…

5-3-05 · 9:31 pm

LJ says:

just found your blog… lovin’ it.  Hopefully you’ll visit mine sometime.
http://mooalex.blogspot.com

5-3-05 · 11:12 pm

jan says:

Glad you’re enjoying tiger - its always fun to be one of the first.  i always enjoy your headings and how they switch - and the way you’ve designed them.  anyway just wanted to tell you i visit here every once in a while to see whats new and admire the talent.

5-4-05 · 9:46 am

Nico says:

I’ve been lucky enough to have Tiger for two and a half weeks now.

I was initially impressed with dashboard. Until I saw that huge spike in the activity monitor. Make sure you have Lot’s of RAM, It tends to hog every so often.

Example, the world clock at one point was using 286 Megs… and it’s a clock…

As far as Spotlight, I’ve disabled it in favour of QuickSilver. QS is leaps and bounds faster. And far more accurate. Also, spotlight doesn’t “learn”. So everytime that you type in “F O N” you have to wait for it to sift through “laser printer fonts” “Font lab” and finally “font book”.

What’s wikit about it? Keychain. It is finally fixed with regards to network access. My job just got ten times happier now that Keychain remembers my network shares/passwords.

Oh, and I want my Mail 1.0 back :(

I hear that the big improvements came with regards to security and MetaData management. Speaking of MetaData management, I’ve had to update a lot of drivers and programs, and preferences as a result of metadata changing. Have you?

5-4-05 · 11:58 am

Robot Johnny says:

Quicksilver and Launchbar are both incredibly faster than Spotlight, which to me seems ridiculous since they don’t even take advantage of the new hyped technology of Spotlight.  I’ve noticed that Spotlight seems to get faster with time, but that could just be my imagination.  I’ll give it some time, but I may, like you, discontinue using it as an application-launcher.  Makes a mighty fine replacemant for the old Finder search, tho.  And Spotlight in open-and-save dialogue boxes is very handy.

5-4-05 · 5:38 pm

Eva says:

1) In Windows, you just always know where your applications are. You don’t have to go looking for them. It’s like when you get up in the morning, and you know that your clothes are in the closet, or on the floor. You don’t (usually) first have to run around naked looking for them, or call people to ask where your clothes are. Windows users always know where their clothes are.
Or their towels, for that matter.

2) I can see from the post-slug that in its draft form this post didn’t always have the Tiger pun title. =)

5-5-05 · 8:48 am

Fink says:

Ah yes, the old Windows is better than Apple argument.

I suppose you have strong feelings as to why Picard was better than Kirk too, eh?

5-5-05 · 1:37 pm

D says:

I wasn’t super-excited about the main features, although spotlight is nice and I think automator will become very handy. But what I’ve been finding is that there are tons of nice little details. The DVD app interface is improved, and you can assign bookmarks & video clips. You can add little stickies to PDFs in preview. The slideshow-everywhere stuff is great.

And am I the only one who actually likes the new mail.app?

5-5-05 · 2:06 pm

Robot Johnny says:

I like it the new mail.app, too, D.  But I DID have to change the buttons with Cage Fighter

5-9-05 · 10:53 am

MrBlank says:

CAUTION Tiger users:

There is a terrible widget exploit out there! Be sure to go into Safari’s preferences and turn off auto-install. See below:

“The easiest way to turn off auto-installing of widgets is the disable the “Automatically open safe files” preference in Safari (which should probably be off for security reasons anyway).”

If you don’t a web site can auto install a widget. Widgets are handy but can also do really bad things!

This site explains: (Don’t click this if you are in Safari and running Tiger!)

http://stephan.com/widgets/zaptastic/

I hope Apple releases a security update that fixes this really soon. :(

5-12-05 · 10:47 pm

Simeon says:

I love Tiger!  i have been having tons of fun using spotlight, as well as playing with widgets.

I just wanted to note that I have 3 world clocks on my dashboard, and each one uses 5.8 mb or ram.  Not a small number, but much less than that of nico.  Just a heads up that its not all bad smile Plus translating dirty sentences on the dashboard is so much fun.