You can’t blame the Mac users in the net flooding their blogs with Tiger stuff, I for one am one of them. As each day passes, one cannot help but be pleased with how Apple is shaping their OS. I’ll be discussing the other nice little surprises I’ve found while on the new OS.
But before that, lemme get the other kwentos out of the way:
I just got a new 200GB hard drive and nice aluminum enclosure to boot. The enclosure was a great deal, considering it was the last display stock. It was aluminum, with grilles on the side (for ventilation) and can connect to a USB or FireWire port. Another bonus was a secondary FW port which allows you to put another FW device should you decide to (like an iPod for example).
I already migrated my whole music library there which freed up about 51GB in the laptop. I also set it as a scratch disk for Photoshop.
More OS X discoveries
I think these are already listed at http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html. But I thought I’d discuss why they’re cool in detail hehehe.
Also, Daring fireball has made an mini-rss feed dedicated to a listing of new discoveries with tiger… I guess no one really cared to read the Apple page and would rather discover the new stuff themselves hehehe.
Screen Capture
SHIFT-CMD-3 and 4 are built in screen capture commands that are very flexible (even in the days of Panther). However, not many people used it because it always outputted to a PDF. Not that a PDF is impractical mind you – in fact PDFs are arguably one of the most used documents out there that retain basically every visual restriction of any particular document. Wether it be an image, text document, magazine layout, etc. PDFs guarantee that any user viewing the same PDF in any platform will see the documents in the creators intended visual representation.
Obviously Apple must’ve been thinking this when they decided to use this as a default capture output. But everyone hated that approach. It was an image file, and it should be easily manipulated by any imaging software. While the heavyweights like Photoshop et all CAN open PDF files embedded with images with no problem, how about the other more-obscure-imaging-software-used-by-those-who-are-too-geeky-to-use-what-everybody-else-is-using?
Simply put, [during the Panther days] even if I myself used Photoshop – I also longed for a real image format as an output. Obviously the conditions would be that it was a lossless format (no compression or indexed color palettes, so JPEG and GIF are out). TIFF was too big, etc. etc. the list of pros and cons go on. So I ended up considering PNG. It wasn’t recognized as an image “standard” yet, but it certainly held a lot of promise.
Well now with Tiger, Apple seemed to have listened to reason and went with PNG! Imagine how glad I was when I took a screenshot and suddenly saw a .PNG extension on the file!
So now all you users who forgot about the screen capture shortcuts (all you Drag or SnapZ users) you can now come back home 🙂
Font Book
I’ve discussed being a user of Extensis’ Suitcase X1 – a font management utility.
Here’s the lowdown on fonts. The more fonts you have the slower your system gets, because these are loaded to memory. The plus side of course as a designer, you have a lot of choices (duh).
Panther’s FontBook solved that problem by allowing users to enable/disable fonts loaded to memory. So this made dumping a shitload of fonts into the system now feasible as you can simply disable them when you don’t need them… all you need to do is organize them neatly… there’s the rub! you can’t organize them! All your fonts are installed (meaning moved or copied) to certain folders by the system. There was no way to make subfolders and have the system recognize the fonts inside.
Enter SuitCase X1, which basically gave the users the freedom to choose any folder… in fact load fonts from anywhere, and X1 would simply act as middleman to load and unload fonts to memory.
Now with the improved FontBook in Tiger, though still limited, you can pretty much do the same: reference/load/unload fonts from external folders. This is achieved through the “Font Library” feature.