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)."

Comments

Not very in depth..

[aikon29]

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.

Are you sure about Quicktime??

[dFaust]

From the article: "QuickTime Player 7 is in Tiger and basically it just adds support for H.264."

The boys at Ars Technica seem to think differently. See what's really changed with Quicktime.

Re:If by detailed...

[revscat]

Man. I really wish we could get critical reviews.

Try this one from ars technica, if you haven't already. It's fairly detailed, and not as amateurish, nor is it worshipful.

Meaty goodness.

Re:I was hoping for a better review.

[adam mcmaster]

HTML files are indexed by spotlight, I'm not sure where you could have heard otherwise (just searching for "html" finds several thousand HTML files on my iBook).

Experiences...

[Richard_at_work]

My main experience was that the upgrade broke stuff. irssi no longer works, and it looks to be due to two bugs in the OS itself - sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX) returns -1 rather than the correct value, and poll() changing subtly in a way that isnt yet documented (its possibly now a syscall).

Other than that -

• Dashboard - love it, got lots of widgets and the best thing is, theres info widgets for places outside the US!
• Spotlight - As someone said to me earlier today, Spotlight is fantastic for browsing sourcecode and source documentation, as well as all the mundane stuff.
• Xcode2 - Brilliant, and finally we have a datepicker!

Re:If by detailed...

[mikedaisey]

There's no review you need for a new OS X release except for John Siracusa's work--I don't know how this joke of a review got recommended on the front page instead. There should have just been another article on Siracusa's review, even if it was a dupe--it's that good.

Re:If by detailed...

[aftk2]

In addition to the Ars review (already posted in this thread and elsewhere), I would recommend the feature list at Daring Fireball. They're collaborating a list of the small details that have been changed, improved or screwed up.

It's not all completely positive, either. This is my favorite:

If you turn on the Finder's "Show all file extensions" preference, this now includes the ".app" extension on application bundles. [...] can't stand seeing these insipid ".app" extensions everywhere, but I don't want to turn off the "Show all file extensions" preferences because I do want to see the rest of them. What I want is the old behavior, "Show all file extensions, except for the insipid '.app' ones that completely booger up the names of every single application".

Re:Graphing Calculator

[Van Halen]

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!

Re:Looks nicer than I expected

[demondawn]

PacificT's graphing calculator (the full version of the old one you got with the Mac OS) is $100. $30 extra for all the OTHER great features you get with Tiger seems well worth it to me.

Grapher was Curvus Pro before

[Herve5]

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)

Re:Quartz Composer?

[jcr]

Anyone figured out anything interesting to do with Quartz Composer yet?

So far, we're just scratching the surface of what can be done with Quartz Composer. The RSS screen saver is done in QC, for example. Have a look at the Interface Builder compositions in /Developer/Library/Quartz Composer/ for some ideas of how to use QC views in your own apps.

There's a new mailing list for Quartz Composer users, quartzcomposer-dev, and you can subscribe to it at lists.apple.com.

-jcr

Re:Looks nicer than I expected

[Kadin2048]

The old original "Graphing Calculator" which started life back in OS9 (or was it 8? I forget) offered multiple-curve graphing as an upgrade to the paid version, as opposed to the freebie that came with the OS which would only do one function at a time.

I went to their website a few months ago and they have a Carbonized version -- looks pretty much the same as it always did. I didn't buy the commercial one, just played around with the free one. But it still exists if you're in the market.