So much for waiting. This afternoon I stopped by the Apple Mini Store at Southcenter and picked up a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” which was released last night at 6 PM. To be honest, I did read the Tiger features over at Macworld before installing things just to be safe.
After backing up my system partition to my external firewire drive and making sure the backup booted correctly, I wiped the system partition and did a clean installation of Tiger. Thanks to the Setup Assistant and the Migration Assistant, I was able to transfer my user account, settings and preferences, and applications to the new system without any major problems. There were a couple of hiccups with the new system that required me to reinstall the Wacom tablet and Logitech mouse drivers and re-authorize Snapz Pro. Otherwise, things have been moving along smoothly.
Overall, everything has been snappier running under Tiger. Web pages load very quickly in Safari. Applications launch faster. The system boots faster. I attribute part of this to the new system and part of this to a clean installation of the OS after reformatting the partition. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect from having a new system. Regardless, I like it.
The new Mail.app is quite nice. All of my accounts and mailboxes were imported seamlessly, so there was zero setup for me. The new UI is a pretty drastic change from previous versions as well as all Apple apps in general, but I do like it. The drawer is gone, and there is now a new column on the left side of the window. Everything feels more integrated and much cleaner. The new gel-tab buttons are nice too. Not quite the Mac look, but a nice change.
Dashboard widgets are entirely too cool. Sure, there have been individual applications that do what all of widgets do, but it very nice not having to actually launch or manage separate applications. Press F12 and all of my widgets show up. Press F12 again and away they go.
Spotlight is also entirely too cool. I’m still using LaunchBar as my application launcher, but Spotlight works incredibly well as the new search tool. It’s fast – even on my aging Powerbook – and easy to use. I like how it is accessible not only from the menubar and a keyboard shortcut but also in individual windows. I can now do iTunes and Address Book style searches all over the place now. Much faster and much easier than Sherlock ever was.
Automator is incredibly fun. Drag and drop, point and click creation of workflows is just way too easy. Within minutes I was able to setup a workflow to take all of the select images in the Finder, copy them to another location, resize all of those images to a maximum size, and then rename all of them. I didn’t even have to look at the help files once. As more applications add support for Automator, I can definitely see this as a huge boost in productivity for everyone.
QuickTime 7 is, you guessed it, cool. The new playback controls are very slick, and the H.264 codec is going to be my new favorite codec for all movies I post online. Even though I couldn’t get smooth playback of the HD content available on in Apple’s HD Gallery, the image quality was simply amazing. Too bad I had to buy a new Pro registration key. $30 isn’t a big deal though. The upgrades are worth it.
Another really cool thing isn’t even advertised at all. Right-clicking (or control-clicking) on a word shows “Search in Spotlight”, “Search in Google”, and “Look Up in Dictionary” in the context menu. The dictionary can be configured to launch the Dictionary application or show a popup panel under the word. This works everywhere that text can be selected. Talk about easy searching.
My first few hours with Tiger have been a joy. The upgrade went smoothly. Migrating my junk to the new OS was clean and easy. And everything seems to be working just fine and, in some case, better than before. As I use Tiger more, I’m sure I’ll stumble upon some new goodies that make will make me even happier that I’m a Mac user.
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