Tiger Install: Step 2

Tiger is installed, and these are my first impressions. Tiger seems to be truly fantastic! There is a very noticeable jump in speed with the new OS. Perhaps it’s just me, but things respond much quicker and programs seem to be starting up faster. I figure this has to do with the 64-bit technology that Tiger utilizes.

Spotlight is fantastic! Spotlight does turn up results pretty much instantly, and it is very useful. While it might not be completely smart, turning up files that have nothing to do the search query, for the most part, it turns up files that are very relevant to the overall search. I would expect this to improve over time with subsequent upgrades. I like how one can access Spotlight in the top left-hand corner and then have the results appear in a box and not just the pull-down menu that is populated with the search results.

It’s important to note that Tiger does not come with any of the iLife programs installed. I find this rather annoying, as it will force many people to spend the $79 to get these wonderful programs. This also goes for Stuffit Expander. However, since I had these programs on the G5 disk/Panther that came with the computer, I custom installed those programs after installing Tiger and then ran a software update, bringing the iLife programs up to date. I don’t know why Apple changed this policy, as I remember iLife being installed with Panther. Correct me if I’m wrong.

When seeing the updated Apple Mail program in screenshots, I wasn’t so sure I liked the new look and feel of the program. But after using it for a day now, I have to say that I do like it, as it looks slick and has that cool glassy feel to it. I haven’t gotten into the features yet, but it seems to work just fine. Upcoming blog entries will show my reactions to the various mail features as I try them out.

After playing around with Dashboard, I find many of the widgets very useful and others just candy. The really useful widgets are the dictionary, translator, address book, flight tracker, and weather, as I will find myself using those often. However, I’m not sure I’ll use the iTunes widget so often, as the number of steps to access that and use the limited controls are about the same as it takes me to open up iTunes itself and initiate a wider range of commands from there. If I could run the widget when iTunes itself is turned off, that would be useful, but since iTunes has to be launched in order for the widget to work, I find it a bit redundant. I know it’s early, and I’m sure more widgets will be coming out over time that will be very useful. Despite this, I really do enjoy Dashboard, especially the cool water effect that happens when adding a new widget to the desktop!

One final note, it seems that Apple has changed the file format of its screenshots. When pressing shift-cmd-3, it used to be in Panther that the file that ended up on the desktop after taking a screenshot was a PDF file. Now a PNG file shows up. I think this is smarter, as PNG more appropriate than PDF was in taking screenshots. I don’t see this listed in the list of Tiger features, but it seems to be part of the 3.0 release of Preview. There is something here about it, but it seems that the default setting is PNG, whereas it used to be PDF.

Well, those are my initial reactions to Tiger. I definitely give it a thumbs up!