April 30th, 2005

Well, it seems a ton of respected sites are post­ing their thoughts on Tiger, so it’s a given that I should throw my hat into the ring as well.

After using Tiger for a day or so, I have to say that it’s one of the most pol­ished oper­at­ing sys­tems I’ve had the plea­sure of using in quite some time. While the ‘gee whiz’ factor for Spot­light and Dash­board obvi­ously will cap­ture most head­lines, it’s some of the other things that have made my expe­ri­ence so far very pleas­ant. Some random cool things that have made my day a lot brighter:

• Safari 2.0 is FAST. Fastest browser I’ve ever used.
• Safari’s new RSS button (a la firefox’s in a way) will auto­mat­i­cally send the feed to your default aggre­ga­tor if you so choose
• Control+Command+D when select­ing any word brings up a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of the word
• The ‘Grab’ screen­shot app now saves as png, not just pdf.
• Mail has been totally revamped, and now is a bor­der­line “professional” appli­ca­tion. Lots of fea­tures that finally rival Out­look, etc in it’s customizability.
• Spot­light has already sup­planted Quick­sil­ver as my app-​launcher of choice. It’s just so much faster and indexes things imme­di­ately. Speak­ing of Spotlight…
• I searched for the word ‘and’ with Spot­light, and within 1 second I was shown 16,000 exam­ples of the word. Very cool.
• Dash­board is kind of useful, but not some­thing I can see myself using that much. I do plan on writ­ing a nice little app to let me update my blog with­out actu­ally having to use a browser, how­ever. As it’s based on javascript/css/xhtml, it won’t be much of an issue.
• 99.9% of my apps work, and all my ‘mission-critical’ ones do with­out a hiccup.

Over­all, this ver­sion of OS X runs like a dream. It’s notice­ably faster in almost area (startup, shut­down, app launch, window resiz­ing), and a .4.1 release is due out soon to squash any lin­ger­ing bugs. Also, with Dave Hyatt making Safari the first browser to pass the Acid2 test, the next release or two should bring us huge improve­ments to standards-​compliance.

Over­all, I’d have to give Tiger a pretty solid review - it’s only been around a day since I’ve installed it, so I’m sure I will find tons more that I love, and tons more that I hate in a week or two.

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