OSNews reviews Apple’s latest OS upgrade. Is it an overpriced, glorified point release or a truly worthy upgrade with major new functionality? Is it a Longhorn killer or just more of the same? We’ll take a look, and try to see what’s on the surface as well as what’s under the hood.
First, a disclosure: I’m a dedicated fan of Mac OS X, though a daily user of a Windows desktop and Linux server. My personal machine, a 1.25 GHz 15″ Powerbook with 1 GB of RAM, is the seventh Powerbook I’ve owned. Just as I have enjoyed the highs (2300c, current 15″ Aluminum) and lows (5300) of the Powerbook line, I’ve done the same with the Mac OS. I was one of the many Mac users who was losing patience with the old Mac OS, which had gone downhill since version 7.6, and was very excited about OS X, only to be a bit disappointed with its real-world quirks. But, just as it’s a really good time to be a long-time Apple stockholder today, it’s a really good time to be a Mac user.
Across the board, today’s crop of Apple hardware is beautifully conceived, well-built, and priced fairly. The Mini and the iBook, in particular, are machines that I would recommend to anyone who needs a new computer and is interested in trying out the Mac. And Tiger, the latest version of the Mac OS, is a very good operating system.
Bloat is a common problem in software today. Software companies only make money if they sell software, and since software doesn’t get used up or wear out, like a tube of toothpaste or a pair of shoes, the only way companies can earn more money from current customers is to make people buy newer versions. Aside from the dirty tricks that some companies use to force upgrades, the most common way to entice users is to add functionality. Sometimes this added functionality is superfluous, even useless, and often its presence only serves to make the software larger, slower, less stable, and less usable. That’s called bloat, and users complain about it all the time. We’ve become accustomed to new versions of software requiring faster hardware to run slower with each new release. With the Mac OS, Apple has been bucking the trend. Each version seems a bit cleaner and runs a bit quicker than the last.
A cynic would say that each version of the Mac OS is cleaner and faster only because the earliest versions were so slow and cobbled-together that there was huge room for improvement. And that cynic would be partially right. Turing the already-aging NeXT OS into Apple’s “modern” OS was a huge task, and I’m sure developers took many shortcuts to make it happen on schedule. But every version since 10.1 has been perfectly serviceable by today’s operating system standards (which are pretty low). Tiger continues this trend, as expected. On my same old Powerbook, everyday tasks happen just a bit quicker, and the dreaded “spinning beachball” that appears when the system is bogged down or even frozen has rarely showed its face in the four days I’ve been using the new OS. I don’t have any scientific benchmarks, just plain old subjective observation, but Tiger is faster and a bit less prone to hiccups than Panther was.
A couple of the areas where Mac OS X 10.3 felt especially slow when compared to other platforms and technologies — web browsing and search — have been improved dramatically. Browsing with Firefox or IE on Windows has been faster for as long as I can remember. For most of my time as a part time Mac/part time Windows user, I have generally liked the functionality of the Mac browsers better, even preferring the Mac version of IE to the Windows one, features-wise, but lamenting the fact that page rendering performance on Windows was generally better. Especially as Mac IE was stagnating and before Safari came out, this was particularly painful. Safari was a great step forward, but I still recognized that Windows was snappier. No more. My non-scientific tests with Safari 2.0, new in Tiger, and Firefox 1.0.3 and IE 6.0 on Windows XP find very little difference in perceivable rendering speeds across the board. Some browsers render some sites a bit more quickly, but there is no clear loser. Safari 1.x was clearly slower on most sites.
Similarly, though the native Windows search feature has never been particularly good, the arrival on the scene of Google Desktop Search and its ilk have raised the bar significantly. Apple’s new Spotlight feature is a fast new indexed search that is perhaps still not as mind-blowingly fast as Google’s appears to be, but is much more useful. A Spotlight search for “business plan” on my hard drive yields up not only the various MS Office documents related to schemes past that are buried on my drive, but also email messages, PDFs, and other files that mention the term. Spotlight also indexes my iCal events, Address Book entries, images, and Safari bookmarks. It’s not only one stop shopping, but its various tools for narrowing searches by date, location, and kind are so intuitive that I predict that within 18 months every desktop operating system will be copying it. Keeping track of 80 Gigs of old crap has never been easier.
Now one thing that I noticed immediately about Spotlight is that it hijacked the command-space key combination that the groundbreaking utility Launchbar originally used. I consider Launchbar, or its work-alike cousin Quicksilver, to be the number one most essential Mac OS utility of all time. I mean that. What these apps do is essentially allow you to bring up any application (or launch a bookmark, compose an email to someone on your list, or perform other tasks) merely by typing in the first few letters of the name. When I want to launch Photoshop, I type command-space, then P-H-O in rapid succession, hit return, and Photoshop launches. It’s such a vastly superior method for an experienced computer user to do perform common tasks, compared to putzing around with the mouse and menus, that I can’t believe I ever lived without it. It’s the marriage of the best qualities of the GUI and CLI.
Apple’s appropriation of Launchbar’s default key combo is no accident. Spotlight, in practice, works the same way as Lanuchbar. Its menu even pops out of the same corner of the screen. Spotlight can be used as an everyday tool to launch applications, bring up sites in your bookmarks, play iTunes songs, etc. But because Spotlight is more ambitious than Launchbar, it’s quite a bit slower, because it’s pulling up a lot more stuff when you search for P-H-O. You can customize Spotlight so it only indexes a few types of items, thus making it work more like Launchbar or Quicksilver, but that makes it less useful for what it’s really good for. I ended up changing the key combo of Spotlight, and keeping Quicksilver set to the old command-space key combo that I originally became accustomed to with Launchbar.
So Apple’s up to its old tricks again, systematically cribbing the cool ideas from essential shareware apps and integrating them into the OS, just as it did with Watson/Sherlock. But just as Sherlock was enough like Watson to kill it off but not enough like it to be a complete replacement, Spotlight is too feature-rich to replace Launchbar or Quicksilver for me.
On the subject of Apple ripping off ideas for shareware apps, one of Apple’s most visible new features is Dashboard, which is nifty, but mostly for eye candy purposes. The push of a button superimposes several handy “widgets” over the desktop: a cute clock, a calendar, a nice weather forecast, and a calculator, with the ability to activate and download others. The coolest part is when you add a new one, it’s “dropped” onto the screen with a ripple like water. Wow! It’s beautifully conceived, and should prove to be handy.
It’s also a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, a shareware app. But Konfabulator costs money, and Dashboard is better-integrated and even more beautiful. So while Apple’s appropriation of ideas from the shareware sphere might be bad news for those developers, overall it’s a big plus for Mac users. And while I’m personally sympathetic for their plight, I don’t fault Apple for doing it. They have to get cool new features from somewhere. Heaven knows that once one person has thought up something cool to do with software, eventually everyone else will copy it. It’s a logical progression: Mac Shareware authors –> Apple –> Microsoft –> Linux. (Just kidding, everyone!) But if we were to try to prevent it, we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by stifling innovation. So, sorry Launchbar and Konfabulator developers. Imitation is the best form of flattery, and your ideas were really cool. Just hope that Apple never gets around to completely replicating your functionality.
On the subject of eye candy, Tiger sports a refined user interface, with somewhat flattened and softened features. I still hate the brushed metal, and it’s still used all over the place for no good reason, but overall the subtle UI changes make Tiger look different enough to be distinctive, and a little better looking, in my subjective opinion.
In addition to the speed increases I mentioned before, Safari 2.0 also has integrated RSS support. I’ve only started playing around with RSS recently, and the way that Safari implements its support is a little different than I’m used to. You can set folders on the bookmarks bar and fill them with RSS feeds on different subjects and view them all together, which is handy, but Safari’s implementation doesn’t lend itself to at-a-glance monitoring of dozens of different feeds as well as NetNewsWire, the most popular RSS aggregator for OS X. Safari does display it very prominently when sites have RSS feeds available, though, so I think this added functionality will do a lot to promote RSS use among Mac users.
One of the nifty features in Tiger that hasn’t generated much buzz yet is Automator. Now, the Mac OS has always had some powerful automation capabilities thanks to the powerful but misunderstood Applescript. But I’m about as experienced a Mac user as you can get and every time I’ve tried to do anything meaningful with Applescript it’s ended in frustration. Automator takes a lot of the capabilities that have been there all along and integrates them into an easy-to-understand drag and drop environment. Not only can you automate file-management and other OS tasks, but also most actions in the standard Apple applications, such as Mail and the iApps. I guess you can say it’s Xcode for non-programmers. While it may not prove to be quite the tool that Perl is to Unix hackers, I’m waiting eagerly for an opportunity to need Automator for something.
iChat AV has some cool enhancements, like audio and video conferences with multiple participants, but I don’t have an iSight, so I didn’t try the multi-screen videoconference. Thanks to Quicktime 7, iChat and other A/V applications have various under-the-hood improvements for higher quality audio and video. iChat also now includes support for Jabber as well as AIM.
Apple touts Tiger’s “200+” new features, and they’re not lying, though many of them are more along the order of small tweaks. There are some useful new network utilities, new functionality for Mail, Address Book, iCal, and other integrated apps, and some under-the-hood improvements like secure WebDAV, improved SMP capabilities, 64 bit VM, and some cross-platform networking improvements, to name a few.
The only problem that I had doing the upgrade from Panther was with one of these “improved” applications. I did an “archive and install” upgrade, preserving my settings, but when I booted into Tiger and launched Mail, not only were my several years of organized messages not properly imported into the new version of Mail, the Mail application was sluggish and refused to quit when asked. I was forced to trash the mail database and re-import my messages manually, from three different repositories, associated with different email accounts. Everything seems to be working well now, and it’s probably a result of my convoluted setup with five years of archived mail that had been imported from Entourage a while back. The new Mail version has a new look, and a bunch of new features, apparently, but none that I need or use.
Since the announcement of Tiger, some have been quick to complain, yet again, that Apple is charging another $129 for a new version that doesn’t seem to be all that much different than the old one. Is Tiger as much of an improvement over 10.3 as Longhorn is supposed to be over XP? Well, we’ll see what features Longhorn actually ends up having before we answer that. Frankly, I think that all of the myriad non-sexy, under-the-hood improvements that result in modest speed and functionality improvements the OS and its included utilities and apps like Safari would qualify Tiger for major-release status by themselves. The nifty new applications like Spotlight and Dashboard are just icing on the cake.
Back on the subject of bloat, why does bloat happen anyway? It’s because consumers become obsessed with receiving flashy new features for their upgrade dollars instead of demanding basic, incremental advancements in the core functionality. I guess it’s the same reason why the redesign of a car’s sheet metal exterior excites much more passion than a 15% increase in efficiency and horsepower and several minor new safety features would.
The new Mac OS has just enough flash to get people’s attention and make you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth, while the real value is in the “200+” minor improvements across the board. I think that Tiger is a lot more like Windows XP was to 2000 than SP2 was to SP1, despite what anti-Apple nay-sayers proclaim. Of course, there are many people who still believe that Windows XP wasn’t that much of an improvement over Windows 2000 (or was a step back), and I think the same could be said for Tiger, but honestly, you’re not going to find people in six months pining for Panther. Tiger is all around better.
On the other hand, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, and Panther is still a pretty good OS, so there’s no reason to rush out and buy it unless you’re like me and have to have the latest and greatest. Are you planning on buying a new Powerbook when the next crop comes out? You might want to save your $129 and just wait to get it for free with your new computer. Likewise, if you’ve been on the fence about buying a new Mac Mini, you might just want to buy one now, and get Tiger thrown in with the deal.
So is Tiger the end-all-be-all perfect OS? Hardly. As I’d mentioned before, the barrier is still set pretty low, so Tiger does look pretty good in comparison, but there is still plenty of room for improvement, in usability, performance, and functionality. Faster as it may be, it’s still not as snappy as the BeOS, or possibly even Windows Server 2003 for that matter.
It also still has some annoying usability quirks and I’m not talking about matters of UI dogma like universal toolbars, but rather some lapses in the Finder’s otherwise excellent usability, such as the dock that’s still too big, too centered, in the wrong place, in the way, that performs too many roles, and fails to differentiate between them properly. It’s all easily solvable by making it smaller, pinning it to the right bottom of the screen using Tinkertool, and only using it as a small visual indicator of open applications, with Launchbar/Quicksilver/Spotlight as the way of opening new ones, but why should I have to fight the defaults and use two or three separate hacks just to make application selection work right? And the Finder is still choked with superfluous functions that I rarely if ever use, file browsing is still a little clunky, and support for previewing multimedia files in the Finder is still a bit weak compared to Windows. And did I mention the ugly brushed metal interface and how it seems to be implemented willy-nilly for no reason?
What I really can’t figure out is why, when Apple has been so eager to pillage the shareware world for nifty eye candy like Konfabulator/Dashboard, why are there still aspects of everyday usability that aren’t build into the OS? How about a good, transparent backup utility, for example? Is that not one of the most important things that a typical computer user never ever does? How about support for more IM protocols in iChat? And why isn’t there more capability to customize the look and feel of the Mac experience? I’d like to remove or move around some of the menu options, get rid of the dreaded brushed metal, and, you know, make the place my own. Right now it’s half mine and half Steve’s. Steve, it’s time for you to move out. And will you just make an Apple-branded two button scrolling mouse, for goodness sakes! It’s already fully supported int he OS! Jeez!
In conclusion, Tiger is a great OS update, precisely because it’s focused on a raft of incremental improvements rather than ambitious, flashy, ultimately useless features. You may not need to run right out and buy it, but if you do, you won’t be disappointed. It doesn’t solve all of my gripes with the Mac OS, but would it ever? You just can’t be all things to all people, but you can try to build something with a commitment to excellence, and that’s what Apple has done here. I give it a 9/10, knowing that the day an OS earns 10/10 the sky will fall.
The new version of mail looks like total crap. Why does apple even bother publishing interface guidelines when they won’t even follow them?
And the idea of melding the titlebar and the toolbars of standard aqua apps visually into one large gradient area is also a bad idea IMO.
Thanks David for this nice review. I am looking forward recieving my copy of Tiger to find out myself.
You forgot to mention CoreImage and CoreVideo. These aren’t very noticable by the user to begin with, but wait a few months when developers start implementing them into their apps. These 2 are THE major technologies that make Tiger ballbouncingly brilliant!
So now if i want to buy a Mac mini now, Tiger will come preinstalled?
or do i have to wait until the release day and then buy it?
If you buy a mac within a month before tiger comes out, upgrade comes for free. I guess that all new macs will switch to tiger in a matter of days after the release.
also mention CoreData. This completes the circle, so to speak, for making data and object persistence easy. Cocoa is such an awesome set of frameworks.
“If you buy a mac within a month before tiger comes out, upgrade comes for free. I guess that all new macs will switch to tiger in a matter of days after the release.”
Actually, unless they do somthing different this time, Macs will likly ship with 10.3 pre-installed and free 10.4 upgrade CDs in the box for several weeks at least. They won’t reimage the systems that are currently in inventory.
Apple’s apps are great, but Finder and the Dock are still really behind – Why cannot I drag a file onto a minimized window and make it appear? Why can I not navigate one-up on a folder when dragging a file?
Explorer is fugly, but it’s still far more quicker to use than Finder.
Tiger is definitely an awesome update worth a Major status because of the inclusion of never-before-there subsystems, CoreImage and CoreVideo. But where is my BackupApp like I have in windows!? Where is my MSPaint? What’s the first thing you do when your kids want to play on the computer? Open MSPaint and let them doodle. Where is my native-FTP client (with uploads)?
Apple need to address the lack of most basic-of-basic utilities, but otherwise OSX is well polished OS.
Apple makes a fairly nice backup app for its .Mac subscribers.
Haven’t read the review yet, but the first paragraph looks bad. I was checking out iRiver’s H10 and I realized, this isn’t an iPod killer. The H10 is the first MP3 player that I would actually consider if I ever replace my iPod.
The term iPod killer is a mark of shame for also rans.
I preordered Tiger, but I fear you are right. Just like the best of the non iPod MP3 players, if Tiger gets a 10th of the market share of Longhorn it will be impressive.
But what do I know. Longhorn looks worse than XP to me. It has all been downhill since NT 4.
On my iBook G3 800MHz, there is no ripple effect when adding new widgets.
But the ripple effect is possible in iPhoto.
So what???
My main gripe with Tiger is the Finder search. You cannot find files beginning with a ‘.’ or files in /usr /etc and so on. Even if you choose “show hidden files”.
This worked in Panther. I hope Apple is going to fix this. In the meantime I have to live with locate in the Terminal.
The new slideshow function in the Finder is quite cool and finally there. XP had this from the beginning I think. But it is hidden: you cannot reach the slideshow via the menu-bar. You have to select pics and right click or use the little gear wheel icon.
The Finder is faster, but still can go into a crawl or beachball session, when slow network volumes are mounted. I wonder what Apple is planning for the 10.5 Finder. This basic application really needs an overhaul.
Dashboard widgets like Weather are only in English, even though it would be no problem to translate it into German, French and all the other OS X languages. The weather widget crashed already twice on me in my first day with tiger.
Mail is ugly. Why do they need to add yet another different theme? Aqua and brushed metal are not enough? You have to add some lick-me plastic interface too?
It is a good update, but not as much an improvement, as 10.3 was over 10.2. Speed improvements are noticable all over the system too. All the Core* technologies will finally be visible, when the apps using them are released.
My recommendation is: Upgrade to Tiger, as soon as you need an app that requires it.
Why do we need to hear again and again how apple ripped off watson and konfabulator? A perfectly good review covering strengths, weaknesses and changes marked by a clamber onto the soapbox to repeat tired rants.
I feel depressed that I even need to post this.
Konfabulator was a re-implementation of previous widget systems including apples own desk accessories.
Watson was a ripoff of Sherlock written after the author was shown a pre-release version as part of a job offer.
This is hardly a review, far more a rant by someone on perceived idea theft by Apple and his inability to recognize that. The similarities between Spotlight and LaunchBar are merely coincidental in my eyes.
So, what’s the minimum requirement for all the eye candy? I was really looking forward to this stuff. (got a 933 MHz iBook G4)
I purchased the family pack of tiger for my 2 Powerbooks, one is an old 12″ 1ghz G4 and the other is the newest 17″ Powerbook. Like a few users, I received it 2 days early, :-). I’ve installed it and I can’t say it is groundbreaking. Spotlight is useful, and I find it easier to launch a program by typing, e.g. Powerp, and quickly launching Powerpoint. I know this will change the way I use my Macintosh.
I have already found 2 bugs, 1 is minor, when I search for an item in a PDF, e.g. I develop using QT and did a test search for QPushButton and it instantly found the document and opened the page, but highlighted nothing on the page. I couldn’t work out what it was doing.
The second bug is completly major to me, the Airport Express card on my 12″ Powerbook crashes the wireless router. The 17″ works fine, but as soon as this one connects, the router crashes. I never had any problems with Panther. This for me is completely unacceptable, as I now cannot use the Internet on this machine until I purchase a more compatible router.
Another thing that annoys me is that the various Dashboard widgets are for the US only, e.g. The yellowpages only works for America. Come on Apple, there are other countries and languages on this planet.
However, I like Mail and think Smart Folders are very useful.
Was it worth it? It will be when they fix the Airport problem.
“If you buy a mac within a month before tiger comes out, upgrade comes for free. I guess that all new macs will switch to tiger in a matter of days after the release.”
Nope — If you ordered it after the 14th . . . so 15 days!
I know because I got a mac mini at the begining of april since everyone told me that they give the upgrade for free and since they said it would be out in April, I bought it.. Then 10 days later I preordered tiger for another $129 . . . I should have waited !
Ever heard of apple.com? There is a whole section dedicated to Tiger, including Quicktime demos of its main features. System requirements are also listed.
And, as far as I can tell, Mail looks pretty damn nice to me.
Fortunately, I don’t need to rely on someone else’s opinion for my purchase decisions.
One man’s point release is another man’s “truly worthy upgrade.”
At least, the new Mail doesn’t have that strangely implemented drawer: the new paned interface is much better, IMHO…
Used win3.11 up to w2k adv server.Abandoned them for UNIX.I must say having seen the screenshots of the coming longhorn,MS has allready lost the best most sexy desktop PC award in my opinion.Can’t suppress a little feeling of envy arising 🙂
>The new slideshow function in the Finder is quite cool and
>finally there.
No it is not.
A good system ( like OPENSTEP) would use services for that…
without bloating all applications.
Not having used Tiger myself, I don’t know how accurate the review is, but it felt balanced and fair to me, lacking fanboyish raves for the author’s chosen platform and disparagement, mud-slinging and derogatory comments towards its competitors. Kudos to David Adams, and keep it up.
Note to OS fanboys: if you want to be taken seriously at all, shed your inner zealot and learn to keep a just, true and accurate perspective on things. Hyping your religi^W, I mean platform to the skies, panning and belittling others and generally acting like a myopic moron will not in any way, shape or form get people to take you or your opinions seriously, and generally only does damage to what you are trying to promote.
I agree. It’s nice to see a balanced review just once in a while.
Thurrott:
“5:50pm
This one’s bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. Yeah, seriously.”
http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=46175&cpag…
I agree. This review is fair. Actually a bit more informative and thoughtful than most of the GNU/Linux reviews I’ve read here. Whereas this review actually pinpoints new features and tweaks and shortcomings, the Linux ones seem to be mostly about the reviewer being happy to be able to complete the installation at all and locate various desktop icons. It is of course nicer to learn about novel features, not about failed installtions of obscure WLAN cards. New Linux desktop features tend to be overlooked in this context.
That said, do you think Tiger is really worth $129? I mean, in the Linux world we get much of this stuff (and its updates) for free. KDE and Gnome come with VERY good email, contact, messaging and transfer clients. Not to mention file managers. Fluxbox provides truly superior window management. Apt-get makes it so easy to manage continous upgrades of virtually ALL your apps. Have a look at Superkaramba for USEFUL widgets. Gimp, digiKam, mplayer, xine, xmms, K3b, alsa, xorg. While I realise that Linux is not for anyone just yet, and must confess that the corresponding features of OSX are nicely integrated on a pretty packaged desktop, isn’t it frustrating to have to pay so much for upgrades and “prittification” (sorry for the spelling there)?
Or is it that you Mac fans really LOVE your systems so that it doesn’t matter? Do you feel like you contribute to Apple and their innovations in a way that justifies this price tag?
I do not intend to flame here. I am just curious.
Another thing that annoys me is that the various Dashboard widgets are for the US only, e.g. The yellowpages only works for America. Come on Apple, there are other countries and languages on this planet.
There are already localized phone book widgets for france and belgium at http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/ .
Let’s see, what Apple releases tomorrow on theri widgets page.
I can confirm the inability of tiger to find invisible (hidden) files with the finder search. this is such a horrible bug, i can’t belive it!
While I realise that Linux is not for anyone just yet, and must confess that the corresponding features of OSX are nicely integrated on a pretty packaged desktop, isn’t it frustrating to have to pay so much for upgrades and “prittification” (sorry for the spelling there)?
You forget the factor of “Just Works”. I admire the efforts of for example the Ubuntu Linux community (I run two PC’s both with Ubuntu), but in no way is Linux near the Just Works factor of OSX.
You never need to mess with sound or video to get it working, or USB/firewire devices. You can switch resolution on the fly, connect multiple monitors without a hitch. No fiddling.
There are way too many holes in the structural design of Gnome, KDE and others and too much micro management to get things working correctly. Hopefully this will be solved over the coming years, but currently OSX is the king in this.
There is also the issue of coherency where OSX ranks very high. Integrated addressbook with mail and calendar, mark up some text and ask OSX to read it out loud, spellchecking everywhere and the window manager which integrates with Quartz Extreme, Core Image and Core Video beautifully.
The X.org guys are still only experimenting with early test software for what OSX has had since 2003.
After starting to use OSX, I still run into little features and details almost a year later (cmd-tab for example does much more than the Windows equivalent of application switching). Litterally hundreds of little things that are only possible due to the strong integration of everything.
I think it’s worth the money. You get a boatload of throughtfully crafted software for 129$.
Or is it that you Mac fans really LOVE your systems so that it doesn’t matter? Do you feel like you contribute to Apple and their innovations in a way that justifies this price tag?
It’s because I feel that the new features in Tiger are really nice and useful. And, as a programmer I know how much hours and effort must have went into them. I believe that all that effort from the engineers, graphic artists, technical writers, translators,.. deserve something in return.
I actually used Linux for quite a long time. 6 years or something like that, started with redhat 4.2. I often bought a boxed distribution, because again, I know how much effort went into it, and that it deserves some form of reward/gratitude. If I had allot of time to spare, I could also have helped with bugfixing, translating, writing new utilities. That is also a form of “paying” for the software you get.
It’s just me, but I don’t feel very comfortable enjoying a piece of software, being allot more productive, without saying thanks to the programmers in one way or another. Paying 90 euros (i’m a student) for increasing my productivity during the next 2 years is worth it in my opinion. That’s like 10 cent a day or 1 cent per hour for benefitting from automator, spotlight, dashboard, improved mail, safari, xcode, core data, ..
I see no reason Apple shouldn’t be free to reclaim ideas that were theirs in the first place.
I would think a dedicated “Mac OS X fan”, as the author claims to be, would also know a little bit more about Mac OS history.
For all those of you pining for an application like MSPAINT, I would suggest Appleworks. The drawing portion is not perfect, but it is at least as good as MSPAINT! I like being able to save a picture as an editable Appleworks file and also as an uneditable picture (jpeg, bmp, pict etc.) that can be inserted into other programs. I suggest you give it a try.
its like the latest and greatest next weeks linux distro.
Just wanted to congratulate you on a professional review. I think current and future reviewers should pay attention to your style.
I had actually pre-ordered OS X for $129.00. I later found out that students can purchase it from Apple for only $69.00. Since I’m a student, I called Apple’s sales line and said that I’m a student and would like to receive the Educational users’ price and they cancelled my previous order and let me purchase it for $69.00 right off of the website. If anyone’s a student and wants the discount, check it out here:
http://www.apple.com/education/
I must admit that I don’t understand how anyone can find mspaint useful. I installed the GIMP on a guys PC at work he uses paint for some silly reason. Anyway he tried it and went back to paint in 5 minutes.
Pixen my be worth a try as a free paint replacement.
DISCLAIMER: Since commentors so far that have claimed Konfabula etc are rip-offs of original Mac ideas have not bothered providing the details…
RANT: I don’t have a problem with Apple implementing their own version of (or ripping off?!?) other people’s ideas. I do have a problem with them implementing their own version of other people’s ideas and, at the same time, suing the pants off anybody they perceive as implementing their own version of Apple’s ideas.
I plan on buying Tiger this weekend (along with a spare drive so I can set my Mac up w/Raid 0 when I reinstall), but I was wondering something:
Have they fixed Finder so that windows in the background update correctly? That’s been the most annoying thing about OSX for me! Specifically, I’m referring to how when a directorys contents change, the updates are only reflected when a window has a focus, not when it’s visible, but in the background.
Any idea if this has been corrected?
Apple did NOT rip off Konfabulator! They had desktop tools many moons ago… Arlo simply reintroduced the idea, which was a good call on his part, and Apple ‘must have’ noticed.
for those who hate the new mail.app titlebars, check out a quick app i whipped together to get rid of those god awful new buttons:
http://otierney.net/files/cagefighter-1.0.dmg
Well, to be honest, when I am with Windows (I develop in Visual Studio.NET) i have to take quick screenshots. Paint is the fastest and lightest app to accomplish that without having to pay shareware nor anything.
Print Screen (or alt-print screen to capture the focused window), open paint (have a quick shorctut) paste, save.
Very “Manual” but for free and quick. It also saves .PNGs. Forget about “editting it”, that’s not possible because it sucks.
One thing that I found missing from OSX when I switched after years of Windows and OS/2, was the ability to browse a folder with pictures quickly. iPhoto may be nice, but it’s not for quick browsing. In windows double click a pic, you’ve got the pic preview which lets you page up/down throughout the whole dir. That’s great. Preview sucks at that, because you have to open the file in ADVANCE (read: select all, open) -> which results in “n” images loaded in memory. Not good. :p
We’ll see how Tiger solves this.
hello,
it happens not often to find a good review here at osnews.
This one is very nice and not so biased, at least the last 3 pages.
Thanks a lot for it
Thanks for your review on Tiger. It seems to be a good user perspective of Tiger. Unfortunately I don’t believe you have given enough credence to how significant an update Tiger is. The areas you definitely don’t give enough significance to are Spotlight and the new ‘Core’ frameworks (Core.Data, Core.Image, etc). Spotlight is a major technology that has taken years to implement and even though you dismiss it, I believe it is a huge feature and changes my computing experience. Also, the Core frameworks will enable a whole new class of applications and therefore provides the foundations for new applications features in the future.
I agree the Dashboard features are not that significant and maybe some more time needs to be spent on the Dock and the Universal Menu Bar problems.
“I must admit that I don’t understand how anyone can find mspaint useful. I installed the GIMP on a guys PC at work he uses paint for some silly reason. Anyway he tried it and went back to paint in 5 minutes.”
It’s like Notepad, some things are just meant to be uterrly simple. Stick a toolbar on notepad, and it’s no longer the notepad sysadmins up and down the contry know and love, it becomes “bloated”
Apple users are sadly missing the beauty of Notepad, not being able to turn OFF wordwrap in TextEdit means they have to go get a third party app to do any HTML editing of any kind.
If you ordered your mac after the 12th of April go here :
http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
On “bloat”:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Lets face it, it is a rip off in the sense not only do they look very much like Konfabulator widgets, they are even called Widgets.
Daring Fireball made the argument:…since they used different underlying technologies, Dashboard cannot be considered as a copy of Konfabulator- Obviously, I don’t agree. From an end user perspective they are not different.
If we accept Daring Fireballs argument, then Windows never copied anything from the Mac since the underlying code is quite different. In that case, Steve Jobs cannot say Windows is copying shamelessly from Apple again. We Mac users cannot complain then that Lphoto and Ltunes in Linspire are blatant copies of iPhoto and iTunes
Apple is a billion dollar company. They could have bought Konfabulator and Watson for borrowing their ideas in toto, instead of putting those creative coders under. That would be right thing to do.
I have heard the arguments in favor of Apple but I don’t buy any of them.
Back to Tiger review: Although well written with a few rants, the information presented is no better than what one gets on Apples website. I like the idea of Apple providing a backup software with the Apple touch (I don’t want to subscribe to .Mac ($99/yr) for the backup software) and improving a few things in Finder. Panther is a mighty fine OS already.
We already know the major features of Tiger, we need to get info on the less well advertised improvements. In this regard, Paul Thurrot has been doing a reasonably good job (I never thought I would say this- Paul being well known as a Windows shill among Mac users) as have the folks at O’Riley.
In any case, my OS is backed up using Carbon Copy Cloner and I am looking forward to playing with Tiger soon (24 hrs to go before my copy arrives!). My favorite feature is likely to be Spotlight since I am already hunting for my files using Finder already. ‘Smart Folders’ here I come!
Cheers
I am not sure what you are looking for in viewing pictures. However, in OSX if you will set the view to “Column” you will get a picture in the column to the right. Using the down arrow you can go through the pictures until you find what you want. Double click the one you found and it will show up in “Preview”.
I hope that this will be helpful.
OS X has had image previewing in the Finder since day 1, and there’s two methods to boot. You can either set the Finder window to “column view” resulting in the rightmost column to display previews and file info, or you can set the window to “icon view”, go to “view options” and set the window to display live previews for image file icons. Can also adjust the size through a slider, up to 128×128.
It’s also a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, a shareware app.
Wrong. Konfabulator was a ripoff of an original Apple program called “Desk Accessories”.
See pictures here for proof:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Desk_O…
So if anything, Apple was just reinventing one of their own ideas in a slightly different form.
Try MWSNap. Its awesome, very small, very fast, very simple. Its also free. Just snap the desktop or any frame or any window or even rectangular window. Can even set a delay. Then instead of pasting into paint just save it to your favourite image format.
Link here http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html
Actually I use notepad all the time.
On windows I use infranview to resize/resample images. Its a light app that does what I want quickly. But using mspaint to edit bitmaps seems dumb. I mean if you are doing anything that requires editing pixels it seems like you should use a real app. Maybe it is just that I have not come across a situation where mspaint has the right feature set.
P.S. I think you could write a cocoa app to mimick notepad in about a minute. Maybe someone should.
Actually I use notepad all the time.
On windows I use infranview to resize/resample images. Its a light app that does what I want quickly. But using mspaint to edit bitmaps seems dumb. I mean if you are doing anything that requires editing pixels it seems like you should use a real app. Maybe it is just that I have not come across a situation where mspaint has the right feature set.
P.S. I think you could write a cocoa app to mimick notepad in about a minute. Maybe someone should.
there are freeware notepad, mspaint and ftp clients fore macosx available, i dont see any problems here
Mac OS X users need no additional software for screen captures, it’s built into the OS:
Copy to a PDF file (Tiger does PNG files):
shift-command-3: screenshot
shift-command-4: screenshot of a selection
shift-command-4, then space: screenshot of a window
Copy to the clipboard:
ctrl-shift-command-3: screenshot
ctrl-shift-command-4: screenshot of a selection
ctrl-shift-command-4, then space: screenshot of a window
One can use the supplied Grab application in Applications/Utilities for timed screenshots, if needed.
TextEdit has a few shortcomings for editing HTML, granted, but one can download BareBones’ TextWrangler for free, which has the basic bells and whistles for code editing…
How come such a developed OS as OSX Tiger does not feature such advanced features as a humble OS as RISC OS? Context-sensitive menu’s with title/dragbars, full UI customisation, ‘inverted’ functionality in windows/buttons/etc via other mouse button, SYSTEM-WIDE drag&drop, etc.? Why don’t people look beyond the usual Microsoft and Linux suspects before proclaiming Apple the grand innovator? Sometimes little known companies, like Acorn (RIP), were really innovating and already having features 10 years ago many would find utterly innovating today.
Beyond this little rant, I do find Tiger a wonderful OS, I just find it baffling how, on the one hand a OS can have such advanced features, and on the other hand be a bit ‘incomplete’ and lacking obvious and straightforward usability.
Other cool free FTP clients for Mac OS X are Cyberduck and Fugu. Both are open-source SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) applications.
Taco HTML Edit is a free WYSIWIG HTML editor.
All the titles I mention can be found at macupdate.com and versiontracker.com. There’s loads of cool applications that can be obtained for free, or used for free in the case of shareware developed by trusting developers.
I couldn’t help but notice some false information OSNews published in that story.
1) You accused apple of ripping off Launchbar and Quicksilver in Spotlight. However, Apple has been working on their implementation of spotlight since 2000. Spotlight was developed ‘first’, but only arrived in the market after Launchbar and Quicksilver, for largely technical reasons. Not to mention, they are all implemented in a aesthetically and functionally very different ways.
2) Sherlock was in development for quite some time before Watson appeared. Watson had some very innovative features, but almost all of them were simple logical progressions from the existing version of sherlock. It is hardly surprising that Apple was working in a similar direction. To Apple’s credit, they noticed this while the new sherlock was in development, so they offered the developer a job at Apple. He declined, and apple went ahead with further sherlock development. it is an unfortunate turn of events, but there was nothing that could have been done to resolve this: Apple should not be required to include a shareware product in their OS when Apple did most of the concept and design work for that product to begin with. And they should not have to abandon their roadmap based on what shareware companies are doing, unless those shareware companies have new innovations that are patented.
3) Dashboard is not a confabulator rip-off. Konfabulator is a rip-off of Desk Accessories, which were a set of mini applets that Apple designed in the early 1980s. These included a calculator and various other applets. Konfabulator was new because it featured widgets that fit in with Apple’s Aqua style, including subtle drop shadows and so on. Hardly surprisingly, when Apple redesigned their Desk Accessories for Tiger, they also fit in with Aqua. Konfabulator’s general widget appearance borrows heavily from Apple GUI design. Rose, the designer of Konfabulator (and many widgets), used to work for Apple’s GUI development.
Konfabulator is a platform for having prettier Aqua-complementary applets called ‘widgets’. The only thing that Konfabulator brings to the table is aesthetics, which borrow heavily from Apple’s GUI anyway. Dashboard does this and more, bringing useful expose functions, controls, making widgets easy to create, and allowing them to fully interoperate with other programs much more intimately. In any case, Apple owns the rights to the original concept of Desk Accessories anyway. So Apple did the brunt of the innovation, and Konfabulator saw an opportunity when Apple was focused elsewhere.
In future, please be more careful before you publish damaging allegations.
I have a G4 866 powerbook with 768 MB RAM and Tiger runs very smoothly
G5 owners can expect a 50% speed increase while G4 owners (like the author will see a mild speed increase.
Konfabulator itself is a ripoff of Desk accessories. As a longtime Mac user you should know that. I own Konfabulator but it is slow and bloated whereas Apples widgets are not. They also have a completly different underlying architecture.
I haven’t read the entire article, because i won’t allow myself to read such crap. I can’t see why people are even thinking of comparing OSX to Longhorn. OSX is a far superior OS thats available “today”, Longhorn might as well be a dream. It will eventually be released, but when it is, would they be comparing it to OSX of the past? Or should it be compared to whatever Apple is offering at that time.
I think that in the end, whether or not Apple invented widgets or not, doesn’t matter. A lot of the eye candy or applications that are in all OSes weren’t necessarily invented by those companies. For example, take automatic software updates. Every major OS implements some form of it now and the underlying principle and behavior is similar across them all. Noone really cares if any one company or distro implemented it first. It’s a good business idea that’s here and here to stay. Remote administration via X-windows was available in Unix long before it showed up in Windows but it still made good business sense to include it into the OS. Zip file creation was possible in Unix long before it was included in XP. Some ideas just make sense to implement but too many folks here have this “my OS is better/bigger/faster than yours” mentality and are really only here to argue.
As for the lack of a backup utility, I have yet to find workstation end-users who need it or have ever used it in this age of zip utilities and cd/dvd burners standard on almost every new machine (which I always see folks using to backup their data). On servers, I’ve seen the Windows backup utility used but just never on an end-user’s workstation. I’m sure someone, somewhere uses it, I just don’t know how it ends up being a con in the article. Maybe the author uses it.
Taco HTML editor is terrible in my opinion. Definitely not for anyone interested in CSS if I remember.
I recommend using SKEdit for HTML, CSS, PHP. Does autocomplete for PHP CSS and HTML. Very nice
“I have yet to find workstation end-users who need it or have ever used it in this age of zip utilities and cd/dvd burners standard on almost every new machine”
You obviously don’t have 40GBs of irreplacable personal data / designs / commercial work on your own computer that you mirror to an iPod everyday; or do you live at work and rely on server backups?
The lack of a backup App on OSX is really, really dense. Although I suspect this should be rectified with Automater in Tiger, I only hope I can set it up to copy only new files and delete orphans on the backup device which the Windows Backup Utility cannot do (I had to write my own)
I have been using Macs since the late 80s. The only desk accessory was the calculator. It never updated itself, never went to WWW to gather real time data such as weather. That came with Konfabulator. Just because Apple is now doing it using html and Java does not mean it did not lift features of Konfabulator.
Similarly Watson was there first before Apple incorporated every pixel of it in Sherlock. Its like MS saying that they had thought of the same things long before Apple showed them off at WWDC.
If it looks like ***, smells like *** and tastes like ***, then it is ***.
I am a dedicated Mac user, but a rip off is a rip off.
Cheers
“Is it a Longhorn killer or just more of the same?”
OF COURSE it’s a Longhorn killer. Longhorn doesn’t exist and won’t for another two years!
I do not get the tech media when it comes to this. Why do they keep comparing Tiger to something that’s not out for at least a year-and-a-half? That’s like comparing a current game console with one that’s coming out two years from now.
Microsoft’s spin machine has convinced everyone to refer to Longhorn in the present tense. You can use Tiger NOW–you don’t have to wait two years.
I happen to really like the brushed metal look!
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion though – great article!
Looking forward to my copy of Tiger from Amazon
Carbon copy cloner does the job just fine. I am waiting for the update to include newer version of ‘psync’ to make it even better.
Compared to Konqueror, the Finder in Panther is just way too simple. E.g. no FSView, no preview functions and no automatic arrangement. Is the Finder in Tiger any better?
I only have about 15GB of data (development work and personal data) that I back-up at home on my Mac using the zip and cd/dvd burn tactic. I’m not saying that no one needs it, I’m saying that I have personally never seen anyone use it in a home/workstation environment. While I’m not discounting your need of such a utility, I’d love for OSNews or Slashdot to run a poll on how many home/worstation users actually request/require such a utility. Before this article, I have not heard any complaints about OS X lacking such a utility.
You’re right though, this sounds like a good area where Automater will bring some needed functionality.
Command spare is used to switch between keyboard layouts in Panther and bellow – what is apple doing with the keyboard shortcut?
.mac is not a backup utility. i have 90 GB of data sitting on my hard drive. please tell me how i can back that up on .mac??
if osX finally supports ext3 / xfs etc. filesystems? sharing files between mac/linux machines via transportable harddisks is a pain and last time i checked UFS was buggy as hell.
Man, people really get their panties in a bunch when you level some complaints about their favorite OS. In my article, I 100% support Apple’s right to look to popular shareware for inspiration, and I suppose I should have mentioned that one of the reasons that I think it’s okay is that it’s a two way street. It’s true that Watson was inspired by Sherlock because Sherlock was a great idea but Apple’s version was never that great. And Konfabulator was certainly inspired a little bit by Desk accessories, but drawing too tight of a correlation smacks of revisionist history. And you can’t deny that Spotlight took Launchar’s key combo and screen position, and that it does acts the same way, though does a lot more, and is much more hooked into the OS.
Everybody wants to get credit for their ideas, but the way that the state of the art is advanced is that someone has an idea, someone else builds on it, and so on and so on. Rigid intellectual property laws that grant monopoly status on ideas is a relatively new development. For a few hundred years you’ve been able to patent an actual physical design, and that’s been good to keep inventors from immediately having their devices ripped off by larger competitors, and copyright law protect software authors from having their code appropriated by competitors, but the notion that an idea belongs to you, and can’t be built-upon by others without paying royalties is a relatively new thing, and I fear that by turning ideas into property we’re going to end up shooting ourselves in the foot. What if the guy who thought up the steam engine had been allowed a fifty year monopoly on the idea? It would have set the industrial revolution back by decades, perhaps even centuries.
Sure, everyone just wants a little recognition for thinking up the idea, but with intellectual property laws the way they are and trigger-happy litigation, your best bet is to just clam up and pretend you invented it yourself instead of crediting and thanking those who gave you inspiration.
If you read the article, I’d actually advocate that Apple appropriate some other ideas from the shareware space, and some commenters have expanded that. Backup, a simple paint app, graphical FTP, and Ui customization are just a few.
—
“I have been using Macs since the late 80s. The only desk accessory was the calculator. It never updated itself, never went to WWW to gather real time data such as weather. That came with Konfabulator. Just because Apple is now doing it using html and Java does not mean it did not lift features of Konfabulator.”
—
C’mon! That’s absurd! First of all, Desk Accessories were not only Calculator – that’s FUD. What about Notepad, Keycaps, Puzzle, Clock, ControlPanel… As you see, the main widgets are the very same that ship w/ Dashboard. And – evidently – Desk Accessories didn’t gather info from the Internet because there just was no Internet to access!!
Konfabulator is a remake of Desk Accessories. But it runs a particular Javascript engine, and is veeeery memory consuming (it leaks memory everywhere) – most widgets use up to 20MB of RAM, as much as Safari. Dashboard is much lighter, cleaner, easier to develop, standard and can be put away in a second. Plus it’s integrated into the system – heard about Thesaurus, Dictionary…?
Dashboard is miles ahead of Konfabulator. Plus it’s an Apple original idea, revisited. Period.
David you need to do some better research before saying “Dashboard is a blantant ripoff of Konfabulator.” I suggest you read these.
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator
http://daringfireball.net/2004/07/konfab_confab
I pretty much agree with your column. I’ve hardly used Spotlight. Dashboard occassionally. What I’m really into is the speed. This thing flies on my dual 2ghz. I think Tiger’s at the point where I wouldn’t notice any further speed increases. Now the disappointments… I am SICK of these UI changes. Pick a look and do it. Damn it Apple. And some bugs are still around since Panther arrived. My external Firewire drive won’t mount unless I reboot with the drive off then power it on. This is what upsets me the most… For a company that pays so much attention to detail, why are there several different UI looks? Brushed Metal needs to go!!!!!!!!!!
it is Open SOurce, free, and is awesome.. it has more features than explorer in windows does for ftp and is certainly better than finder.
1) The new mail app is actually a huge improvement.
2) Tiger adds so much for developers. That half the coolest innovations will only become apparent after Tiger has been out for a while.
3) CoreImage only requires something above a quartz-extreme level graphics card for HW acceleration. The effects still work on lower-end cards. Apple has actually done really well to transparently integrate their speedy software emulation of the GLSL into OpenGL.
I could go one, but that’s all I care to write. 🙂
David Adams, you missed the point – Spotlight was being developed from 2000 onwards! Mockups of the functionality were floating around apple very early on in the project. And using the same key combinations is probably a feature for Launchbar users who are set in their ways, something to help them switch from lucnchbar to Spotlight… you are really grasping for arguments if you are suggesting apple ‘ripped off’ a key combination! There are only so meany ways to impliment searches, and Apple’s approach was a different as it could hve been.
In GUI design, all crucial or much-used functions should be on the edges of the screen, ideally in a corner. In Max OS X, the bottom and side edges are not suitable, and the bottom corners are used for things like expose. So that leaves the top edge – most of which is used for application menus. The top left corner is used for the apple menu and an expose corner. That leaves the tp right corner as the ideal place for a search button: not exactly in the corner, because that is for expose, but as close as possible. Launchbar follows these GUI rules, many of which are outlined in the Human Interface Guidelines written by Apple. As for placing things in corners, that is known as “Fritz” law.
Now, on to Dashboard/Konfabulator… understand that Konfabulator is nothing more than aquified Desk Accessories with new widgets taking advantage of the internet. Dashboard is aquified/Apple GUI style Desk Accessories that are easy to create and control, easy to access, less resource intensive, more useful in terms of integration and outdo Konfabulator’s attractiveness. Apple-style attractiveness is the only thing separating Konfabulator from Desk Accessories. The Konfabulator/dashboard connection is weak considering that (surprise surprise) Apple used Apple’s own GUI style when redesigning their very own Desk Accessories.
Oh, and Desk Accessories included more than just a calculator: it included a puzzle, keycaps, notepad, clock and control panel. Hmmm… these are much the same as the current Dashboard widgets, with a few new widgets like a dictionary and iTunes controller.
Oh, and the Watson develper was receiving advance previews of Sherlock that ‘inspired’ him to progress the design the next level. He was good enough for apple to want him, but his product used too much of Apple’s design for Apple to include it as a shareware product in their OS.
I had my copy of Tiger shipped to my workplace, so I won’t get it ’til later today, unless for some reason it shows up another day! That’d make me sad.
If you need an IM applicationt that support more than AIM and Jabber, check out Adium. It’s an open-source IM app with tons of neat features, great customization options and support for nearly a dozen protocols. I recommend getting the latest beta at http://beta.adiumx.com.
I’m eagerly awaiting 10.4 to see how it improves with speed. I have a 400 MHz G3 iMac (the first DV se (graphite) model). OS X has seemed faster with each subsequent version, even on this old clunker. So, naturally, I can’t wait to see if 10.4 does the same for this 5 years old Mac.
Does anyone know if Mail lets you create, uh, templates (for lack of a better term)? Back in OS 9 I used Eudora and I could set up emails that had the recipients and subject line (if not the body as well) already established. I’ve been whining about not being able to do that in Mail for some time now.
And why does everyone hate the brushed metal look? I want reasons, not just “It is the sux0r” or “it’s ugly” or “you’re dumb, Mac user.” Give me good, sound reasons why you (anyone) thinks the brushed metal theme is so hideous! Seriously! Can you? It’s not used willy-nilly. The original intention was to use it on the iApps. That still holds true. Safari uses it and that allows it to blend in pretty well with the iApps. The Finder and utility apps (which I consider Mail to be) use the same type of interface – which is apparently a flat grey in Tiger. Then there’s the Pro Apps, which you use their own unique interface.
Need to get rid of the brushed metal? You can, with potentially buggy results. Right-click (control-click) the application’s icon and view Package Contents. In the Resources, find the .nib file(s) for that app and open them up. You’ll need the Developer Tools installed. In Interface Builder, get the Inspector palette/windlette open and for every part of the nib that has the brushed metal theme, go to Attributes in the Inspector and uncheck the box for using the brushed metal. Be warned: Brushed metal has slightly different limits and auto-guidelines in accordance with the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. This means toolbars across the tops of windows, scroll bars, and other important elements could potentially look very wrong with brushed metal disabled. If you’re comfortable with it, you can tweak a lot of the UI for any given app.
Now to muster up enough money for a new PowerMac… I just wish they were dual-core…
“1) The new mail app is actually a huge improvement.”
Ho ho ho. Guess you don’t use Secure IMAP, or more specifically, Secure IMAP with sites using invalid/expired Certificates. (I use them because I have a test server that uses my main server’s – valid – certificate; and I also use the same certificate on my home e-mail server, where it also isn’t valid)
The 10.4 Mail.app has *even worse* problems than the 10.3.9 one when it comes to this setup. I can’t even connect to my home e-mail server anymore … the work one drags so badly I had to turn off my requirement in the mail server that the client use SSL or TLS, and connect to it over plain non-Secure IMAP (on port 143) in order for it to work … even with our “regular” mail server with a working/valid Cert, it behaves far worse than the 10.3.8 Mail.app … this thing is a *total* disaster, on a bigger scale than the disaster that is the 10.3.9 Mail.app …
Then there’s the (unknown) setting in my old com.apple.finder.plist file that caused Finder to display all my icons (in either Icon or Columns views) as being “greyed-out” like a disabled choice in a menu … that was fun, too.
I don’t disagree with anything you say, but it is telling that so many people feel they need to jump up and defend Apple. Apple is a “big boy.” It doesn’t need to have its minions out there to jump on anyone who looks askance at it. So much of the buzz out there in the fan community about these appropriation issues smacks of religious apologists who twist and contort and build elaborate justifications for every action that every prophet and church leader has ever done. Just lighten up a bit!
Look, I love Apple. I love the Mac OS. And I think there is room for debate on this issue. Unless someone from Apple comes clean and tells us just how much they were inspired by these other apps, we’ll never know. But this fanatical knee-jerk defense of Apple just smacks of desperation. Hey, Apple is a great company, and OSX is a great OS. Stop getting so defensive!
“Give me good, sound reasons why you (anyone) thinks the brushed metal theme is so hideous!”
That’s kind of a silly question. How can anyone give you a “sound reason” for their subjective opinion about a purely aesthetic issue. People don’t like it because they think it looks dumb or ugly. End of story. Sure, some people note that Apple originally used it for audio/video players that were supposed to look like components, and that metaphor made some sense, but as they expanded its use, it broke the metaphor. But when it comes down to it, I just don’t like the look very much. If I could turn it off without dangerous hacks, I would.
It seems that the academic price will be $69. Pretty good deal if you ask me.
Thanks for this review of OSX. I’m currently a dedicated
GNU/Linux user but I forsee a G5 in my future!
-Dr. Penishead
LaunchBar dates way back to 1995, well before Apple reported started working on Spotlight (apparently 2000).
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/developer/2003/09/25/innovato…
Poor review, lacking structure, clarity, objectivity & information.
I’ll wait for another review from someone else.
Rating: 1/10
MacOS X suceeds as a modern operating system. It is very usable and has a lot going for it. It also has flaws, like everything else in this Universe. If you were looking for nirvana, complete happiness, world peace, or the second coming of Christ in this release, it will disappoint you. If you are looking for something cool in the meanwhile, it will please.
I STRONGLY recommend reading the ArsTechnica review of Tiger:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
Which discusses super things like the new kernel, launchd, metadata, access control lists, etc. Its a very good read if you’ve already heard enough about spotlight and dashboard.
skedit is awesome
I will buy it when the trial is up, however, the fact that in perl and php it does not recognize the ability to do multi line string prints is annoying.
if I make some html markup that I want to have a php control structure print, I do not want to have to have multiple echo or print statements for each line, though I do not php does not care that skedit does not recognize it, the fact that my highlighting is messed up annoys me.
CCC is nice, but it needs to be able to do network backups. I do not want to have to have a frigen internal IDE drive or firewire drive set up just to do backups.
“.mac is not a backup utility. i have 90 GB of data sitting on my hard drive. please tell me how i can back that up on .mac??”
.Mac subscribers can download an Apple made backup application that allows them to perform system backups to any number of locations (including DVD, firewire hardrives or iPod, your iDisk).
try setting up an nfs share and backup over the network.
Forgot about them other desk accessories. But still, to come up with something that resembles almost exactly how Konfabulator looks is not becoming of Apple.
It just pains me to see Apple not doing better.
Just because every one does it does not make it right!
I would advocate Apple to just buy the rights to those software that they like and then give them the features or UI-just as they did with SoundJam when they morphed it into iTunes. As someone commented, Apple is big enough to afford this instead of being a thief-however small the idea that was stolen from its own developers.
The long-term effects of ripping of these small developers is to discourage developers from coming up with zany products. If on the other hand, if a small time developer feels that his/her efforts may be rewarded by Apple buying rights to their software, this would encourage more developers to the Apple fold.
Just my 2¢
Cheers
//I believe that all that effort from the engineers, graphic artists, technical writers, translators,.. deserve something in return.//
Er … they ARE getting something in return. It’s called a PAYCHECK.
Sheesh.
//OF COURSE it’s a Longhorn killer. Longhorn doesn’t exist and won’t for another two years! //
Uhh … if Longhorn doesn’t even exist yet, how can Tiger kill it?
Typical Macinista logic.
Try SilverKeeper. It is a free software from Lacie that can do backups over the network provided a dynamic disk image is first created and then copied over to the network volume. More info provided with downloaded files.
SilverKeeper logs indicated some errors during backup that I could not resolve even after consulting tech support-so I switched to CCC and am doing backups to local Firewire drive.
All set for Tiger!
> You forget the factor of “Just Works”.
No I ignored it on purpose 🙂 I realise that this is VERY important and indeed worth A LOT. I mean, if you are a power Linux guru, you will keep your XF86Config-4, samba, sources.list, profile and ~.somethingsomething files between upgrades and things will “just work” again if you have just gotten them to work once (using various hacks and curses). I respect this point. Although, IF it doesn’t “Just Work” for some reason – say if connecting something strange like a GPS->serial cable->USB-adapter->laptop THEN you might actually have better docs and help around in forums and mail lists for Linux. Ok, a poor touché, but anyway 🙂
> I think it’s worth the money. You get a boatload of throughtfully crafted software for 129$.
Okidoki. I guess Video/Audio recording software will really benefit from the Core stuff. Hmm, still waiting for a decent multi-channel recording app for Linux…
> It’s just me, but I don’t feel very comfortable enjoying a piece of software, being allot more productive, without saying thanks to the programmers in one way or another. Paying 90 euros (i’m a student) for increasing my productivity during the next 2 years is worth it in my opinion.
I agree. Even if you rely on open source software, you should REALLY consider DONATING some bucks to the projects every now and then. It sure makes a difference.
well it does a good unix portion use rsync for backup
MacOS Tiger is a fine upgrade IF you have the required hardware to take advantage of those new features, but with that being said, until application developers take advantage of those new API’s, any added benefit from those API additions will be lost on the customer. As for some of the applications, I would have liked to see saved passwords in Safari like how Firefox has, MSN support in iChat so that I no longer need MSN and iChat open when online etc.
Regarding the comments in reference to how American dashboard is – I’m surprised it took you that long to realise something so basic. If a company is located in America, anycountry external to the US is meaningless to them. Heck, you could have 1.2billion people, but unless you live in the US, American companies see you as nothing more than a irritation (kinda like how SUN has developer offers, but only makes them available to US customers).
That’s just the way things are. People who have only used computers for a few years looks at their favorite software, and if another software includes a similar “innovation” they automatically assume that their software was first.
It’s like all the people who think Mozilla / Firefox invented tabbed browsing, or that Apple invented the GUI.