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Rave Reviews for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
druid_getafix writes "The first mass market reviews of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger are trickling in with a big thumbs up for the release. Walt Mossberg of the WSJ says 'Tiger Leaps Out in Front' but complains about slowness of some applications - notably Mail. David Pogue of NYT says 'But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.' In related news Mossberg also covers the rising incidence of spam/virii in the Windows world and says '...consider dumping Windows altogether and switching to Apple's Macintosh...'. Previous reviews of Tiger were covered on /. earlier."
Java 5 is not included with the operating system, but 1.4.2 is included.
Java 5 will be provided as a separate installer, so that folks can upgrade when they're ready.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I've had Tiger on my 17" powerbook for a few days now - it's actually installed on my iPod so I can dual boot.
One thing I have noticed so far is that Expose seems a lot less fluid than in Panther. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I going mad? The difference is noticable even with only a couple of windows on the desktop.
Other than that it seems nice. My Vodafone 3G card works, and most apps that I have tried. The only thing I can't get working yet is OpenVPN - as the TUN/TAP driver isn't ported yet.
No news as to when Java 1.5 (I refuse to call it Java 5 - see more) will be out. However, Apple has said that Tiger will be required for Java 1.5 (ie they're not gonna make it compatible with Panther) Early reviews of 10.4 Beta have said that a beta version of Java 1.5 is there, but seeing as apple hasn't mentioned anything, I'd be surprised to see it on an actual 10.4 disk. Summary: Java Tiger on Mac Tiger? If not now then soon. More: As for the name Java 5... Java 1.0 was Java 1.0. When they came out with Java 1.2, they called it Java 2 Then they had Java 2 versions 1.3, 1.4, etc. Now they have Java 5. Come on people! I don't care what your versioning conventions are, I just care that you have some.
I'm always amazed how people seem to be able to judge the quality of an operating system within just a couple of hours.
Journalists, especially high-profile ones like Mossberg, get preview versions of new gear long before the rest of us specifically so they can review it. They sign non-disclosure agreements to make sure the technology doesn't get into The Wrong Hands, and the vendors generally know the journalists will behave because the journalists have their entire career invested in it. If Mossberg tried to distribute pirated versions of Tiger ahead of the release date, Apple would stop giving him advance copies, and he'd lose prestige as a journalist.
What's your damage, Heather?
David Pogue should disclose that he is a popular author of Apple books. I don't disagree with what he says, and I am an Apple fan, but if you have a major interest in Apple you should probably disclose it when writing neutral articles for the NYT.
Initially, you'd be less productive (say one week, tops) and afterwards you'll probably be a lot more productive.
/. they'll bog you down with arguments that have nothing to do with your reality ;-)
That's the top one reason I always keep hearing from multimedia professionals who've switched. What makes them more productive? Workflow management, which seems to be easier in OS X, better handling of files and more freedom and consistency in setting up the perfect work environment. This includes scanning, printing and all color-proofing issues.
For some things it's the difference between one click versus four. For some things it's simply features not available on Windows.
And today it's a lot easier to set keyboard shortcuts just the way you want them and adapt your workflow to your taste. So switching has for the most part become trivial.
I'd say coupled with the cross platform apps you use, there's at least not a compelling reason not to switch. If you personally would gain a lot by switching is another issue.
I know, a pretty wooly answer. In the end it's down to your preferences and way of working. Best talk with fellow designers, see what they think about it, and see if what they say applies to your situation.
DON'T ask the geeks here at
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Spotlight is not "locate", is a combination of locate, grep and Firefox search-as-you-type.
The main innovation in Spotlight is incremental searching, not waiting until pressing enter. This allows the user to refine the search on-the-fly, which is a big usability improvement. OK, incremental search is not new. But system-wide incremental search? Now this is a new feature.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Somehow my preorder showed up yesterday, so I backed up all my stuff last night to an external firewire hd. Then I booted off my Tiger cd, formatted my hard drive, and did a fresh install of Tiger.
Once Tiger was running I still had to install a few drivers, such as my Unitor 8, and Delta 410.
After that, I reinstalled all my necessary apps like Logic Pro 7 and various soft-synths (Vanguard, Atmosphere, Stylus RMX, etc.) and started beating the hell out of this system.
After a few hours without any problems I concluded that, for my purposes, Tiger kicks ass.
Common sense is not so common.
Currently APPL is trading at $36.35 +0.40 (1.11%) a share and the stock has gone up consistenty since 2003 when it was around $10 a share.
It should be mentioned that these prices are not comparable directly since Apple split their stock. The current pre-split price is over $70, so its a 7 times gain, not just a 3 times.
Want meta-data search (spotlight) on GNU/Linux? Try installing Beagle.
...and much more
From Beagle's webpage; "Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains:
documents
emails
web history
IM/IRC conversations
source code
images
music files
applications
Have a look at uber hacker Nat Friedman's videos of hot Beagle Action.
In short, beware teh Gnome.
It runs Oracle.
Java 1.5 isn't available yet, but will be soon.
64-bit memory addressing is available for 64-bit backend processes. As the PowerPC can handle 32-bit and 64-bit at the same time, there's no performance cut at all.
I wasn't able to test the final GCC 4.0 yet.
I don't know what you mean by performance problems, outdated hardware and expensive prices.
You're wrong. CoreImage will use a capable GPU if you have one, otherwise it will run on the CPU. Same deal if you're running a firebreathing dual-G5 with an FX5200 graphics card - Core Image will take the fastest route to getting the job done.
And for finding content, according to the article "Spotlight even finds words inside Adobe's PDF files" and inside e-mail.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I don't think the limit is on the video memory - I think what Core Image needs to be hardware accelerated by the GPU is a card with programmable hardware shaders (which most likely coincides with the video RAM level you mentioned). I believe this is on par with "DirectX 9 compatible" cards on XP.
;-)
The other thing to note is that even if hardware acceleration isn't possible, Apple has optimized their low-level system libraries to provide a suitable (though not as high-performance) substitute. I have the last non-white/non-silver powerbook, and upgraded it to a G4 550, from a G3 500. The speed increase in things that were purely floating point were about 10%, as you'd expect from the bump in CPU speed. But for things that used Altivec (ripping in iTunes and some image processing stuf), the speed increase was anywhere from 25-33%.
I'm curious to see how Tiger will run on this machine. I suspect that it will probably be the last release that officially supports this machine, but heck, it's 5 years old already, and by the time the next release rolls out, I SHOULD get a new PB
well you're wrong. A lot of Vj's (including me) are interested in
using the mac mini for onstage use for realtime video software because it's so small.
Stuff like Grid, Arkaos and Modul8 will run fine on a mini.
And for a home user a mac mini should be fine for editing and rendering home videos with DV. New versions of those will have core image filters which we want to use.
The mini handles it all absolutely fine. It can render every single effect, but some of them are a little slow - the ripple effect has been manually turned off by apple because it runs at about 10fps. Two effects are slower than that, others are much much faster, but the mini can render every one of them fine.
I have a dual 1 ghz power mac. I have a lot of ram 1.5 gig, and manipulate images in photoshop 7. Without core image acceleration its very good, especially with some of my larger images which can by 100 megs each. The only time the wait is anoying is when i'm using genuin fractals "degrain" filters which are slow (20-30 seconds) but work very well.
It even edits video ok. All without the core image.
My understanding of core image api is if the machine can't send the operations to the unsupported video card it just uses the main processor. minis have 1.2-1.4 ghz so they should work prety well for any image task thrown at it.
A g5 would improve things for anyone really into hardcore editing..
The question is, just how accurate is the speech recognition? I work for a company that sells many different text-to-speech and speech recognition packages, of which Scansoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the most popular. It's a ~£400 product though (for Windows) and with good reason; after training (and assuming you have a PC up to spec and a decent microphone/headset) it has a very high accuracy rate for recognition; essential if you're dictating a 500,000 word essay and don't want to correct 10,000 incorrectly interpreted words.
The sort of speech recognition software bundled with operating systems in the past have traditionally been of a very substandard quality, and with limited scope for training to improve (the idea that you can use it immediately without *any* speech rec training worries me immensely, as people have sufficient variety in accents that regional differences could mean the product works or doesn't - maybe it works best if you're from South California?).
Still, like I say, I'd be very interested to see how good Tiger's support is. Apple has been making leaps and bounds with its accessibility support (which SR is essentially a component of, even if they're not marketing it as such) so an SR component of the OS with OS-level integration and commercial quality accuracy would make Tiger *the* killer accessible OS. If it isn't already, that is.
It's built in at the filesystem level, and as a result files are indexed immediately when they are modified, rather than at the next search pass.
Spotlight also has a plugin architecture so that developers can add new file format parsers.
It's more than that. I've kinda given up on explaining why, though. Let me explain with an example.
A year ago, my friend George e-mailed me a funny picture of an elephant walking through snow. (It had snowed at a zoo. The picture was funny.) The other day, I wanted to see that picture, but I couldn't remember where I'd put it, or even if I'd put it anywhere at all.
I tried Spotlighting "elephant" and "snow," but the photo was probably named DCS1003 or something, and I never got around to annotating it with a caption or anything. So that didn't help.
Then I tried searching for George's e-mail address. That didn't help either, because George has sent me thousands of e-mails.
So I typed the following query into Spotlight: "George kind:image".
Poof. There was the picture. Spotlight knew to associate the picture with George because he's the one who e-mailed it to me. So it found it.
(This whole example was totally made up. But I just tested it on my Mac, and it really does what I said it does. George is not his real name, but part about the elephant is true.)
I hate to tell you this, but both of y'all got it wrong. We're learning a lot about our marketing here, and one of the things we're learning is that while ordinary people get Automator instantly, computer nerds don't. They tend to overthink it.
The fundamental object in Automator is the action. Think of an action like an old-fashioned Unix command-line utility like "sort" or "uniq." Each one has an input and an output, kind of like "stdin" and "stdout" but more discriminating.
Using Automator, you string together actions to create workflows. Workflows are kind of like pipelines. You start with one that generates some kind of output, then pass that output to another action, then to another, then to another.
Example: Let's say you have ten pictures on your desktop, and you want to resize them all and add metadata like a copyright notice, something that's common to all 10. You go to Automator and start with the "Get selected Finder items" action, then click on the "Scale images" action, then click in the "Add Spotlight comments to Finder items" action. When you select the files and run the workflow, it does what you want.
A more complex, real-world example. I use InCopy a lot. One of the things I always have to do is take an InCopy document, map styles to XML tags, export the document as XML, then run the resulting XML file through a little utility to strip out some InCopy weirdness that Adobe inserts. This is a fairly manually intensive process. I automated a chunk of it with an AppleScript about eighteen months ago when InCopy 3 first came out, but I still had to do the fiddly stuff by hand. Last fall, I created an Automator workflow that would let me call that AppleScript ("Run AppleScript" is an Automator action), then pass the output on to a pipeline of actions that processed it in just the way I needed. I now use that workflow several times every day.
Like I said, normal people get it pretty quickly. Geeks seem to try to overthink it, to think about it in terms of object models and scripting.
It will be a lot easier to just add the project information into the metadata than rely on a fixed directory structure.
Um. I really don't want you to buy Tiger and then be disappointed.
Spotlight isn't a general-purpose annotation system. In order for you to apply metadata to files, you have to have three things. First, a file format that supports metadata. (Metadata is actually stored inside files.) Two, an application that supports adding metadata. And finally, you have to have a Spotlight importer that extracts the metadata.
Example: Adobe has not yet shipped (for some bafflingly reason) their importers for their file formats. These importers will be able to read XMP metadata and store it in Spotlight. But right now, they're not available. So if you want to add Spotlight-savvy metadata to an InDesign file, you are completely out of luck. It can't be done, no way, no how.
Spotlight is great. I love Spotlight. Spotlight has changed the way I work. But if you go into it hoping that Spotlight is gonna do a whole bunch of things that it's just not equipped to do right now, you're going to be pissed. And I don't want you to be pissed.
Now, that said, you can group all JPEG files together based on width and height criteria. That works fine. And you can use Spotlight comments to store free-form, unstructured metadata. But don't hope that Spotlight is a general-purpose file annotation system. It's not. At least not in this release.