On Friday, FedEx delivered my copy of Mac OS X
Tiger (the family pack since I have a few
computers to upgrade). I spent most of Saturday backing up all of our
photos, music and data to DVDs. It ended up being a total 5 DVD-Rs and 1
CD-R — it’s amazing the amount of stuff you accumulate in only 18
months! On Sunday morning I installed Tiger then restored our files. So
far, no issues to report of. The 15” Powerbook neither feels slower or
faster than with Panther installed.
Spotlight is quite
nice, though now I’m waiting for the next revision (hopefully, as this
guy says,
we’ll see GPS enabled Powerbooks and automatic tagging of our files with
location-aware meta-data).
Dashboard is neat,
though it seems to me to be mostly a gimic. Though I definitely
appreciate the built-in dictionary/thesaurus. I’ve only briefly played
with Automator, but
it appears to be a powerful tool for scripting actions (and much easier
to use than AppleScript). Unfortunately, I hate the look of the new
version of Mail. And it
appears a bit slower for some reason — I’m not entirely sure why,
perhaps it’s just my perception because I hate the UI so much. But
Quicktime 7 is sweet,
the new H.264 codec is amazing — the quality, the smart bandwidth
usage, what else can I say other than it’s great! I haven’t used the new
features of iChat yet
(though one reason is that I don’t have a G5 to host video conferencing
even though I do have an iSight). In particular, I was looking forward
to some of the new developer tools like
CoreData,
CoreImage and
CoreVideo.
Unfortunately, due to work and home improvement tasks, I’ve not yet had
a chance to check them out. Overall, I think Tiger is an excellent OS
upgrade and well worth the money. Apple is definitely leading the way
here — I wish KDE/GNOME would ‘borrow’ some of the ideas from
Apple instead of waiting for them to by
synthesized through Microsoft first.