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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.
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.
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.
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.
So can it search for relationships between files? Not just metadata, content of filename, but stuff like "show me the emails with the picture of the dog that I sent to members of my family"?
SpotLight is not just metadata plus content. It's also about relationships between objects. You can create relationships by dragging objects about (say a picture of a dog onto an email to family members) and SpotLight remembers them in detail (the dog metadata in the image is then in a relationship with the people in the email address fields, as well as the email itself and any objects inside it).
This seems like a new thing to me.
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.)