First day of Tiger
Tiger arrived yesterday, and I immediately installed it on both my G5 and PowerBook. I had experimented with a developer build of Tiger many months back, but this was my first true experience with the updated OS. With that, a few tips and observations.
Spotlight | In order for Spotlight to work its magic, it must index every file in every nook and cranny on your machine. The more files you have, the longer the indexing. Spotlight searches everything, from your photos to videos, mp3s, word documents, text files, bookmarks, pdfs, mail messages...you name it. And depending on the hardware you're running it on, this can either be a silent, barely noticeable process, or in the case of my PowerBook a hard drive crunching, system resource sucking process. It was a little anti-climatic attempting to work with Automator and Dashboard and constantly receive the spinning beach ball because of all the juice being allocated to Spotlight. But after it finally finished (and it only has to go through this once, after which time it updates with each new file you create), everything returned back to normal. So my advice -- install Tiger, reboot, and leave it alone for a good long while. After that you'll be good to go.
Mail | Like Spotlight, Mail can take a little while to update if you have a lot of accounts and/or messages. For me it took about 30 minutes to (automatically) import all of my older messages and accounts, which I was a bit anxious about, but after finishing it handled everything beautifully. I've already set up a few "Smart Mailboxes," which are just like "Smart Playlists" in iTunes. I have one for "Today's Mail" to show only what I've sent and received today from all my different email accounts (different from a general "Inbox" because it shows sent, deleted, read, unread), plus some work-related ones to show only emails I've received from a particular company domain. It makes sorting email very easy and fast -- much better than the old way of creating Rules and assigning them to folders.
But there's one thing about Mail I can't stand -- the buttons in the toolbar. They're dark, muddy, and unlike anything else in the OS. I first tried turning the icons into text, which worked fine, but because of the spacing of the original icons the textual links have awkward spaces between words that cannot be changed or removed. So I downloaded Cage Fighter which kills the fugly radius boxes and simply presents the icons. Another tip -- open Customize Toolbar and remove the spacer to the left of the Delete icon to left-align your icons instead of the default center alignment.
Flash | Good news for Flash MX 2004 users -- the "Archive and Install" option when installing Tiger didn't hose the application. A dialog box did appear noting that I needed to re-activate the software, so I held my breath and clicked OK. A couple of seconds later I was given a green light, and was back up an running. Nice job Macromedia.
Safari | Speed, speed, speed. On my G5 it's blindingly fast. A number of sites loaded instantly, not progressively, and in general it has the responsiveness I remember when it first came out. It also displays PDFs beautifully, without any extra plug-ins needed. As for the big new feature, RSS...eh. I'm not entirely sure what to think about it just yet, especially considering how well shareware apps like NetNewsWire handle it, but I'll give it more time before passing judgment on it. I was also disappointed to see that Suckerfish dropdowns still don't function properly when Flash content is embedded below, but who knows what the problem is there. Dave? Are you reading this?
Finder | I didn't notice any difference on the G5, but my 867mhz 12" PowerBook is noticeably quicker and more responsive. The new "Find" panel, which looks a lot like Spotlight, is very well done.
Dashboard | I knew that Dashboard was tied into Expose, but I didn't realize how integrated it was. When using Tiger you have a choice -- either display your widgets, or your running applications, but not both. As soon as you click on a running app the widgets disappear. This is either a 'feature' or an annoyance, depending on how you like to work. Me, I'd like to at least have an option whereby a widget could 'stick' and remain visible while I'm working in other apps. What good is an iTunes remote if you can't immediately click on it?
Update: Several people emailed me with this nugget -- you can keep a widget visible after disengaging Dashboard, but only one, and it won't stay there for long. Try this -- engage Dashboard, grab a widget, drag it out of the tray, and while holding the widget disengage Dashboard. Then release the widget. The widget will appear on the desktop outside of Expose. But here's the rub -- next time you engage Dashboard, it'll disappear. It feels like a bug or oversight rather than a true feature, but hey.
Overall refinement | Besides the big stuff, there are plenty of little refinements, tweaks, everywhere you look. Dialog boxes are clearer, communicate better, and I swear they did something to either Lucida Grande or the OS text aliasing engine, for it looks even better than before. OS X overall simply looks amazing, especially when you remember what it looked like back in the public beta days. It's as gorgeous as ever.
