Finally installed Tiger (or 10.4, or build 8A428, whichever naming convention you prefer). I must say I’m impressed. Not so much so to be raving about it. While spotlight, and all the other new features are beautiful additions. I’m more inclined to be on the it’s-not-a-breakthrough-since-it should’ve-been-done-from-the-start mentality.
There is something positive to be said however out of all of this. Tiger simply proves that Apple takes its user interface designs seriously. We can see that while all OS manufacturers claim to be in constant pursuit of the best OS experience, it is very telling that Apple actually delivers.
Sure, even Tiger still has a few irritations here and there – but as far as the competition is concerned (Windows, Linux, etc.) I’d have to say that OS X is on the right track.
What I’ve noticed
Spotlight
For starters, I don’t need QuickSilver anymore. Apparently Spotlight uses the custom trigger I set for QuickSilver in the past (command+space, the default of QuickSilver was different). This again proves how particular Apple is with their interface design: implement a workflow which is intuitive. Sure enough: Spotlight,* which can be considered as the most useful/productive feature, can now be accessed with minimal hand-movement.
For those who don’t know Spotlight is basically a systemwide “search-engine.” We all know how information nowadays is so great that merely sorting them won’t do much good anymore, so might as well do stuff a-la-Google (the semantic approach). Spotlight gives you quick access to virtually anything in your system – wether it be a application, document, email, image, etc. wherever in your hard disk they may be! And all of this happens really quick.
However, I would warn you that it’s not quick as marketing would play it up to be. Considering the scope of what it’s actually indexing, it is truly extremely fast for what it does, but its not instantaneous like we initially thought.
A real example is if I launch an application: I type in “ecto” to launch ecto of course, it starts listing all hits for ecto… metadata in PDFs, images, etc. and neatly displays them as they come in… and as soon as it hits the actual application, then I could launch it – this takes about 4 seconds (since the applications folder is probably indexed last) You can change the order of what you can display in the results, but cannot set where it should look first (I’d prefer to access the Applications before searching for any other type file).
Right now, I’ve prevented Spotlight from displaying anything other than Applications, Preferences, and Folders in general – which dramatically improved the response time. It is to be noted that I can’t even use the bookmark indexing service since I think it only works with Safari’s bookmarks.
For normal searching (documents, et all), since the Spotlight engine has been incorporated to the whole system, then your normal search function (command-F) is basically still Spotlight – now with rule/filtering support. Obviously this is where I do most of my “detailed” searching.
As I said, it ain’t perfect. But while being far from perfect, it still is one of the most amazing features ever to be implemented in an Operating System by far.
Dashboard
This I sense to be a love-hate feature, either people really like it, or consider it a waste of memory. You can’t disable it, and the Widgets are slow to refresh. Like the analog clock for example, you could swear that on occasion it needs a full second just to update from a blank state. I intended to kill the clock on my menubar to save some real estate, and just use the analog clock – but then after seeing how poorly it had performed, I re-enabled the menubar clock.
Like, Konfabulator I never really had a use for “Widgets” to pretty up my machine (and suck the life out of my RAM), but I heavily rely on “notes”… or “stickeys” if you will. Before I used Stickybrain, I relied on Apple’s built-in Stickeys, or Digital Post-its as I would call them. But I had to keep on hiding them (not close – as I wanted fast access to the notes I needed) since they kept on cluttering the desktop when I’m not using them.
Stickybrain worked a lot like Spotlight, but only for notes, which wasn’t a problem. Now however, it seems that the Stickeys* app has now got it’s own widget! And considering how Dashboard operates, it is the perfect solution to my note-taking problem.
I can also think of a couple of stuff that can be put in Dashboard – like an Instant Messaging client.
Other stuff are already there, which are extremely useful, calculator, calendar, addressbook, unit/currency converter etc. etc. Which are all very useful widgets to have in the background – but the main problem is the speed at which they perform. The iTunes remote control is dismal and close to useless because of how slow it operates, you can’t even set the volume via the remote easily.
I’m just hoping that future builds optimize how the system handles these widgets – so we can make the most out of them.
Apple Mail
I’ve now ditched Entourage (Outlook for Mac hehehe) in favor for Mail (as per Juan‘s suggestion) The thing that did it for me was the smart-mailbox feature Mail had, where you can put a rule like “all files containing this subject” and it would automatically display them – which now eliminated the need to make separate folders to sort.
This is certainly the way to go, since a lot of mail crosses “borders” in terms of sorting: one mail can be applicable to two or more “folders,” which is why GMail implemented their “tagging” system.
Smart-mailbox is again something that should’ve been done way before… and while I’m at it, it would be great if they could also implement a “tagging” system too. I mean, if you could label your stuff in OSX, why not just extend that function to Mail right?
Smart-mailboxes, while useful – are still limited. As an example, I set one smart folder to group all of emails in one of the mailing lists I frequent (soul-search@…). I naturally set the Smart-mailbox to take any email with soul-search included in the recipient list, or subject line. Now what if our group (from that mailing list), had a singing engagement – and that the organizer (not part of our group) sends an email with information. I would naturally want to include that in the soul-search smart folder.
But what if his/her email doesn’t have any traces of information that you would use for the “condition”? He/she sent it to me (recipient, which isn’t soul-search@… and subject too wouldn’t contain the standard header that had the mailing list’s name).
Support for a tagging or labeling system would solve that… and that’s why Google is where it is right now hehehehe, they certainly know the best way to sort stuff.
Yet again, while the new features of Mail are far from perfect – it still is top-notch compared to the rest of the competition.
Smart-Folders
Not to be confused with what I’ve just discussed. Smart-folders are for sorting stuff in your hard disk itself. This I haven’t tried, but I already can imagine using it. I’m sure it would be promising to be able to consolidate files for viewing while not actually touching the physical directory structure (for the obsessive compulsive types). So I’m looking forward to that.
Automator
I made my first Automator script/plugin in conjunction with DropDMG, I can simply select a file/files and it will do the rest. This is useful for multiple files, since when you drag multiple files to DropDMG, it will create multiple DMGs too. Now with my Automator plugin, I select, then run it, it will copy the files to a folder before DropDMG processes them… hence it sees one folder (with the files inside) and creates one DMG 🙂 Happy-happy-joy-joy!
Next I’ll try to figure out how to upload stuff to my site and copy the address to the clipboard… sorta like what filechute does (I wan’t to get rid of any app that can be replaced by Automator)
Other things I noticed
- I dunno if it’s a setting you could change somehwere, but Tiger seems to be pretty anal about extensions when you set it to show all file extensions. Even when you rename folders which happen to have periods in them – Tiger will think you’re changing an extension.
- There are less visible folders in the root directory – I like! Very neat and orderly – or maybe just because it installs less now? I don’t see OS9 Classic anywhere… but I never really cared for it.
- Sidebar items now have contextual menu’s bummer that if you rename the sidebar item, it also renames the physical file/folder it represents. I wish it could act as an Alias. Even dragging an Alias resolves it the original file/folder (just like before)
- Dictionary – there’s now a built in dictionary! And if you’re used to the services menu, then you know that you can plug almost all selectable texts into a dictionary query! Pretty neat!
- Mac IE is gone – none, nada, zilch. Finally.
- I’m a religious
command-I(Get Info), surprisingly, when I do that on multiple selected items (to see how big they are as a group) it now shows separate Get Info windows… bummer, more math to do! But pressingctrloroptionalong with still does the method which I prefer. - Login – I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, but there are no more “text messages” in the login screen (the one with the progress indicator) telling what is being done at startup. While it isn’t a big deal, I specifically remember it to be the reason why I knew I still had traces of Norton services when I was still on 10.3. Now I’ll never know – but then I also don’t intend to use any Symantec products anyway.
- Passwords – in authentication dialogs, you cannot paste passwords anymore… this really sucks. I understand that it’s good for security, but what if your password is really complicated? Or if you saved it in an email? I wish there was an option to toggle this limit.
Speed
Contrary to popular belief, system performance isn’t drasically increased. The “performance” gain you really get from Tiger is the indexing Spotlight gives you, which can literally save you minutes of productivity.
Of course I can’t speak for those using older machines… one thing people say about Apple is that every OS upgrade usually improves performance for the older systems. But as for the already fast processors, I can’t seem to notice that much of a speed gain.
I also can’t attest to “stability” yet, since it’s my second day of actually using Tiger.
Conclusion
Overall, things are looking pretty good for the new feline. It seems to have delivered on it’s promise of being better operating system. Spotlight alone ensured Apple of that.