Hopeful to find a reason to want to upgrade to Tiger, I scan-read
through the article. By page:
1 - Introduction
Waffle
2 - Background
More waffle
3 - Tiger's new look
Look and feel tweaking. Mail is apparantly
much changed.
4 - Kernel updates
Yay! I don't care.
5 - Out to launch
Interesting to see if launchd replaces
crond one day. Mainly don't care.
6 - Metadata revisited
Apple still pusing this concept. Nice idea,
never affected me.
7 - Extended attributes
Interesting, but unlikely to affect the user.
8 - Access control lists
Nice to see, slightly more likely to affect
a user, but not by much.
9 - Spotlight
The darling child of Tiger. I suspect it'll
affect me as much as Expose, ie) I'll use it once every now and then,
but all it'll do is save a tiny bit of time.
10 - Spotlight analysis and potential
More of the same.
11 - File types revisited
File types need improvement, lots of talk
on this page but it mostly seems unrealised in Tiger. Something for
the future.
12 - Metadata summary
Waffle.
13 - Quartz
14 - Quartz 2D Extreme
15 - Core Image
Three pages about deep graphics stuff.
Probably means we'll see some nice apps in 6 months to a year. Didn't
notice what types of gfx cards would support it etc.
16 - Video in Tiger
More of the same.
17 - Dashboard
Probably the most interesting part from
the group's point of view. Tiny apps that we can share online, easy
for a coder to knock-up and simple for a user to install.
18 - The Finder (not really) revisited
Waffle. It's better.
19 - Performance
Takes a long time to do the
post-ugprade setup, but then Tiger will be faster than Panther on the
same machine, allegedly. Wonder what it'll think of my 400mhz laptop
:)
20 - Grab bag
Lots of bits. Highlights are Automator
which everybody seems to like but will probably be relatively unused
by the sounds of it. Safari does RSS. iChat/Mail are changed.
21 - Conclusion
Waffle.
Conclusion for me is:
I'll see Tiger whenever I order another Mac Mini. I'm still an Apple
fan, but I'm tired of the hype marketing and post-hype
dissatisfaction, so for my primary machine I'll be unswitching.
I first switched 4 years ago in the same month that Apple released OS
X by getting a Titanium Powerbook G4. It's served me well, drained 2
batteries of their life and is still good enough to keep up if I dared
serve it another battery.
The problem is that Linux has caught up with respect to laptops. I
installed it the other night on a cheap Dell laptop and the only
issues I hit were making the wireless card work (download one file and
put in a directory to fix) and that it doesn't handle one of the three
power-management sleeping options.
Big advantages for Linux over OS X:
* Java. Not a biggy for the group, but a lot of Java developers
switched in 2001/2002, and there's now a movement to switch away
again. Apple hasn't been able to support us, we haven't written Java
apps for OS X in droves and Apple's customer service style has been a
shock (we were used to knowing what was going on).
* Keyboard support. OS X seems unusable without a mouse. Probably
possible as I assume disabled/accessibility laws require an OS to work
without a mouse, but I've never found it easy to do something as
simple as restart the machine without a mouse (press power-button,
then struggle to move the highlight from Shutdown to Restart).
* Not an advantage, but a complaint. Safari is still a weak browser
for JavaScript.
* Choice. So many more options to choose from in the Linux world. It
does mean exploring, which puts many off, but if you choose to explore
it is often very enjoyable.
* Price. The Apple development community seem to love trying to sell a
relatively basic applications for 30 dollars. Some are gems
(OmniGraffle), but others are just because people have the shareware
attitude.
Provided I'm happy using my Dell dual-boot XP/Linux laptop, I'll
probably hunt down a laptop for the quality of a powerbook.
Just thought I'd share. Sorry for the noise, but I figure negative as
well as positive views are worth hearing. Especially when it's not
just the usual "Longhorn will rock, just you wait" windows crap :)
Hen
On 5/4/05, Bill Holt <billholt at iglou.com> wrote:
> Sorry about the previous send. I was confused. The sequence is
> supposed to be finish and proof-read before sending.
>
> The review:
>
> Well, it was as "in depth" as a mere 21 pages permit. I didn't know
> what the guy was talking about 3/4 the time. The other 1/4 was
> interesting. Although Tiger is apparently a strong improvement, I
> think I'll wait for 10.4.1.
>
> http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/1
>
>
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