Slashdot Mirror
Detailed Review of Mac OS X Tiger's New Features
sammykrupa writes "I have just posted my detailed review of Mac OS X Tiger's new features. The review covers Dashboard, Spotlight, Grapher (Mac OS X's new graphing calculator), QuickTime Player 7, Automator, Safari RSS (2), that cool RSS visualizer, and all that eye candy (iCandy)."
Who are you and why should I care?
Isn't the ars review canon?
Maybe it's just me, but the article didn't seem to b e too in depth. If you're looking for any real information, look no further than the Ars review.
Especially Grapher. One of the most annoying limitations of the previous graphing calculator was the inability to graph multiple functions at the same time. I was holding off on Tiger, but I may buy it just for that.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
apart from a couple of bugs mentioned, that 'review' was just the usual product descriptions.
here's a few things I've noticed. even with these minor issues, OS X is the most perfect thing associated with computers that I've ever known.
1. iTunes widget playlist support very poor
2. list of dashboard widgets only updated when you change page then change back
3. I can't give my bluetooth keyboard/mouse names as long as under Panther
4. when I use spotlight to search for 'dashboard' it lists a PDF that doesn't contain the word dashboard. not sure what's going on there.
If by detailed, you mean "fanboy", then yes, you are quite correct.
5. New interface sounds. Now when you drop something into a folder you hear a cool new sound! Ding!
I can not think of any reason not to buy Tiger for the $129 it costs. You should just make sure that all the Mac OS X applications you rely on are Tiger compatible.
There's nothing at ALL wrong with it? Nothing he would improve? No reason at all not to buy?
Man. I really wish we could get critical reviews.
As usual, Apple did a stellar job on the visual appearance of everything and on marketing these features.
Functionally, however, there is little there that is new. Desktop search, applets, RSS, and all that have been available on Windows and Linux for much longer than Tiger.
Since when?
Oh, and Spotlight isn't a standard desktop search.
It's amazing, considering all the great features in Apple Core Somethingorother, that he could not have used the built-in spellchecker to proofread his article.
One or two spelling errors is not a big deal, but I proofread my Slashdot posts more carefully than his article was.
One thing he doesn't touch on that I've seen in other sites is that HTML files are not indexed using Spotlight. This was a rude shock to me since most of my documents are written in HTML. (I don't have Tiger yet so that comment is not yet based on experience, but the warning seemed pretty definitive).
I think Tiger looks pretty cool and I'm looking forward to receiving my copy. But this review is not a credible information source.
D
Anyone figured out anything interesting to do with Quartz Composer yet? This seems, to me, to be one of the more interesting new bundled-apps in the OSX package .. really looking forward to seeing what can be done with this app...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The boys at Ars Technica seem to think differently. See what's really changed with Quicktime.
Scaryest bit about it is ,they cant or havnt yet ;)(note that the graphing calculator is one of the decorative bits of OS improvments) and still
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Maybe Slashdot's editors saw how pathetic this review was and decided to post it just to see if they could melt the server. Doesn't seem to have worked yet.
Come on! We can do it! [ctrl-click] . . . [clrl-click] . . . [ctrl-click]
"Quicktime 7 is in Tiger. 7 is one more than 6."
This article promises a deatiled account of the new features .... but I don't even see 200 features mentionned!!
You might want to keep that copy of the XISO release of Tiger sitting on your hard drive and indexed by Spotlight on the down low. (second screenshot)
Anand, the PC guru who has been extremely positive toward Apple products since becoming a dual-user, beta-tested Tiger throughout its development.
This week his lengthy review praises features, but finds the release version to be buggy and rushed. Performance is also a mixed bag. http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2404&p=1
Two quotes:
Other than that -
-While not Tiger-specific, Quicksilver doesn't have a calculator plugin.
-Spotlight icon unremovable from menu bar
And probably my biggest annoyance of all:
-Spotlight does not index hidden folders. I've got this great desktop search app, yet it won't index ~/.xchat2/xchatlogs, even if I sym or hardlink it.
-Mail.app looks like shit, can't mailboxes/folders on the right-hand side like the old Mail.app, and didn't import any of my old mailboxes/accounts.
-The neat-looking RSS visualizer screensaver has to pull from Safari, and not NetNewsWire
Hardware-wise, no issues with anything I pluggged in.
Other than that, everything else seems snappier. Dashboard's pretty badass too, despite being a memory hog. 20-40MB per widget seems a bit much.
A better one is in Encarta Student.
Now beat that Paperweight!
The new version of Safari now works with my Linksys BEFW11S4 router. That is the setup web screens now work. Previously in Panther I had to use Firefox or Mozilla to change things in the router since Safari would try to display the pages and take minutes to do it. Now works just as well as Firefox. Also seems a little snappier for the NOAA weather site I use for radar displays.
Microsoft just announced that they are integrating a graphing calculator into Longhorn, along with several other "new" features, including a widget generator and a task switcher code-named XPose.
Shameless copying, indeed.
My other Sig is
Surely you meant [command-click] . . . [command-click] . . . [command-click] . . .
News Flash!
Yet another nobody who bought the newest version of OS X has jotted down his opinions on the new features and published them on a World Wide Web which is already brimming over with thousands of nobodies expressing thousands of reactions on thousands of web sites and blogs about the very same topic.
No word yet on why his opinion is any more worth scrutiny than any other.
More on this shocking news as the story develops...
The treatment of Automator is particularly disappointing: the author basically says he doesn't understand the feature. Ouch.
There's little mention of Tiger's under-the-hood improvements, and the author doesn't seem familiar with the complete overhaul of Quicktime.
Other posters have cited Ars Technica's Tiger overview by way of comparison. I think the folks at Ars have shown us how an OS review is to be done. We don't see much of that quality at Slashdot or over at the hapless OS News.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Surely, that's the only reason I can think of for why they would post such rubbish. :) This review was fucking horrible and anything BUT detailed. I mean if the Ars Technica review didn't exist, then maybe it would be ok (but still not detailed), but COME ON PEOPLE, there's just no way you can follow up to the Ars review, whether or not you claim yours is detailed.
Joseph?
A better one is in Encarta Student.
+1, Funny!
Unless you were serious. Then there needs to be a "-1, Ignorant" mod category, just for you.
I have just posted my detailed review of Mac OS X Tiger's new features.
And I've just posted my report of your piracy to Apple's Piracy Address.
Next time you want to show off a search tool make sure it isn't returning results showing illegal activity.
Even better: Programmer view in Calculator.app. I always hated having to switch to Windows just to convert between binary and decimal. Now I don't have to. Tiger's new Calculator not only does that conversion, but it has tons of other useful features for programmers, like AND, OR, NOR, XOR, <<, >>, Byte Flip, Word Flip, ASCII, Unicode, RoL, RoR, etc. Very nice. The bad thing is that I got my first Tiger kernel panic in about 3 hours of use while originally typing up this reply. Bleh. Maybe those reports of continuing instability in late builds were not so far fetched? The nice thing about it was that after restarting and logging in, there was a dialog asking if I wanted to report the incident to Apple. Good deal - hopefully my data was useful!
Say hello to zMac.
I get the impression as others do this is just a fanboy page about Tiger. That said, although the Ars page was good and well written it lost the plot when guy started being an apologist for Apple's shocking, and in my view shameful robbery of Konfabulator.
It doesn't matter which way you look at it; whatever excuses you may hear about Desk Accessories and what not; the fact that in the eyes of the Law Konfabulator devs have no real recourse, really you have to ask if it had been the other way round what would Apple's reaction be ? And is what Apple did right?
Anyway, back to the topic, I don't so much go on what tech articles or fanboy articles say but what actual users say. It's interesting that if you actually read many of the Mac specific forums when people got their copies of Tiger early they were distinctly underwhelmed by the experience.
And why shouldn't they be ? Tiger has been the most overhyped, overcooked OS in the history of computing. Sure it's got some nice stuff, some old, some 'borrowed', some new but overall it's just not that exciting.
Additionally, for every positive thing there is probably a negative and there is no doubt that Tiger exposes the underlying weaknesses of Apple in recent years as well as it's strengths.
Notably Apple's once proud reputation for Human User Interface design has got badly badly lost in a sea of half baked chrome and inconsistent window widgets which is a shame.
This just a symptom of modern day internet, each has his/her own site/blog/mailing-list/developers/whatever-page, and a dispersion of effort will make no-one read what anyone else wrote eventually (I know i didn't in this case ;)).
...
Just look at the ridiculuous amount of Tiger reviews on http://www.macsurfer.com/
There was indeed a multiple-curve grapher before Grapher: its name was Curvus Pro (last version 1.3.2); its developper sold it to Apple by end 2004, ...to become Grapher.
;-)
I think I mentioned this here at the time, but presumably as a rank-epsilon anonymous coward
Curvus was already excellent at the time (I am a registered user), and it seems Apple has added some honest improvements, at least a couple of extra buttons that are really useful in the GUI and other features that I didn't try in detail yet (for instance, Curvus handled copying -to export- in a variety of formats, of which vectorial pdf, but this had the effect of turning it uncompatible with old apple SW like Appleworks, maybe Grapher solves this)
Herve S.
Don't tear the guy a new one :) It's still interesting to recent switchers like me.
Cute minigolf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
As Tiger coverage, this is definitely not in-depth. If it is anything, it's the sort of review you can expect after having worked with Tiger for one day. For real in-depth coverage, take a look at Ars Technica's 20+ page review. Other worthwhile information can be found on XLR8YourMac.com. And yet another that isn't too bad: the IT-Enquirer. That site even has a free downloadable eBooklet on Tiger.
Since the HTML comment is wrong in the parent, and the rest is fluff, why is this +5 Insightful.
Read my not so thorough, but more subjective review here if you are interested in another user's perspective before you upgrade.
Also, Dashboard is great!
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
I don't think that it counts as a review if all you do is heap praise on something. That's more like advertising, or stupidity. I usually read reviews for what's wrong with a product moreso than what's right.
Sorry if this is off topic but I have to know. Several of the comments on the article pointed out that the reviewer is using a pirated copy of Tiger. I was just wondering how they came to this conclusion.
You guys better hope no one points out the second screenshot to Apple's legal department.
What kind of idiot posts a shallow review which clearly shows they prirated the OS?
What is there in the screenshot that gives this away? I'm confused.
What a shock, he took that page down.
Google cache, anyone?
... this one's decent as the perspective of someone who's just installed it and not used it. I'm finding the Apple Discussions forum to be a much better representation of the reactions thus far. From what I've read, a lot of people really like the upgrade, but it's not without its share of bugs here and there. Thankfully none of them are showstoppers, I'm sure Apple will release a 10.4.1 patch soon, but there are a few features that don't work precisely as advertised.
One of the weirdest that I've noticed, is with the Spotlight search function. Regardless of how I've annotated the thousands of photos I've put into iPhoto, Spotlight will not search them based on that metadata. iPhoto lets you put comments and keywords on any photo, which is what most people have done. That information is useless when using Spotlight to find the files.
Anyway, I've only had the new version since Friday and I've noticed a few things, but so far I can say with certainty that it's worth the upgrade.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Is it me or did Apple really leave a fundamental widget out of the Dashboard like
-- SYSTEM PERFORMANCE INFORMATION
I mean WTF! What is a dashboard if it doesn't tell you how well the engine is running. I was amazed that it was not included as a default widget.
This should come with Tiger. What a shame.
I agree...this article is not even close to being Slashdot worthy.
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither do I - get Mac OS
updating the imac!
apparently
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Tiger fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of Tiger on a dual 2.5 Ghz G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Performa 600 running OS 8.5, which by all standards should be a lot slower than the dual G5, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even TextWrangler is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on Tiger, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen Spotlight run faster than Sherlock, despite Tiger's modern kernel. My Fat Mac with 512K of ram runs faster than this dual G5 machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Tiger is a superior OS.
Tiger addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Tiger over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
(For those of you who are new here, please see the original before you get your panties in a wad.)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
but it comes with a Mac :)