Tiger (so far)
Tiger’s installed, everything went well, and I’ve spent a few hours poking and prodding. My overall impression is that it’s an elegant refinement of Panther, with enough new features to be well-worth the price.
Dashboard is nice, though I can’t get Delicious Library 1.5’s widget to work. In the weather widget, I’ve discovered that you can enter cities not included in the preset list (like Moncton), and that you can display the temperature in degrees Celcius.
Safari RSS is very nice. Having it built-in to a piece of software I’m already using constantly is nicer than adding another tool to the daily line-up. The RSS Visualizer screen-saver is very cool (TUAW.com shows how to add feeds to its list by bookmarking them in Safari; if only CBC’s feeds weren’t verging on monosyllabic…).
Logging back in from the screen-saver would often need to be done twice in Panther. While only a minor annoyance, this has been fixed.
Smart folders look like something The Disorganized will love (you know who you are), but I can see myself using them, too, especially in Mail.
Speaking of Mail, John Siracusa raked Apple over the coals on ArsTechnica for its redesign job on Mail, but I’m one of those people that he can ‘imagine’ liking it. Plus, you can now jump from the folders to the messages list to individual messages with the tab key, eliminating dozens of trips to the mouse every hour. A very welcome touch.
Missing in mail is the ability to sort or search the hundreds of filters than any moderately-heavy Mail user will have. Editing them is a chore, especially where the ideal technology (Spotlight) is such a highly-touted new feature. Mail needed this as much as System Preferences did (not that I mind it there).
QuickTime Player is effectively a new application. As a QuickTime VR developer, I spend a lot of time there, and the changes are all good. They’re more along the lines of improved convenience than new features, but the underlying improvements to QuickTime are all good.
I’m still waiting for it not to cost $30 US, though — not because I mind paying it (it was the first thing I did post-install), but because regular users of QuickTime resent the nag screen. Why Apple can’t find a better way around this…
My version happens to have two (identical) Help menus. Weird.
More later.
Update (April 30): Tiger has killed Classic. It won’t progress beyond the “Mac OS 9.2/Welcome To Mac OS” title screen. I haven’t tried to boot my PowerBook into OS 9 since upgrading, so I don’t yet know if it’s totally hosed or not.
When upgrading, I chose to do a custom install, leaving out the non-English language options and printer drivers; this reduced it from 3.7GB to just over 900MB. That’s a lot of printer drivers (1.6GB if memory serves).
Contrary to other reports, my Macromedia apps (Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004 Professional) haven’t required re-registration.
LittleSnitch required re-installation, but now works fine.
While I don’t rely on accessibility-enhancements to use a computer, it looks as though Apple has made great strides in this area. Universal Access now provides some welcome additions like VoiceOver, Zoom, Enhanced Contrast, scaleable cursors, and more. This is an area where Windows has long out-performed Mac OS.
The built-in Dictionary application has already proven more useful than I’d have guessed.
Spotlight, when used to find a PDF via a text-string located within it, highlights the search term when the PDF is opened in Preview. Very, very cool. Jakob Nielson will be geeking out over this.
Adobe Illustrator 10.0.3 seems to have lost its ability to anti-alias vector artwork under Tiger. It also fails to draw its preferences dialog. Hitting Enter, Return or Cancel safely returns me to the app. Photoshop 7 has no such issues.
May 2nd update: today Dreamweaver crashed. Hard. Wouldn’t relaunch; decided to restart, after which Dreamweaver required re-authentication with Macromedia. Why am I not surprised?
May 9th update: A post on Apple’s discussion forums pointed to /Library/QuickTime/DivX 5 as the cause of Classic’s failure to boot. This is a happy thing.
QuickTime Player.app has a couple of shortcomings which affect QuickTime VR authoring and playback; it’s not currently possible to change the Movie Controller Type in the Pro version of the app, and multinode panoramas have lost the ability to display hotspot cursors on mouseOver (I’ve filed these as bug IDs 4110672 & 4110664 with Apple). Hopefully these will be addressed before QT7 is released on Windows.
