OS X Tiger Observations
Last night I went down to Carbon Computing to pick up OS X Tiger with all of the other Apple geeks in Toronto. The place was mobbed.
Installation takes about 30 minutes. Once installed you have to give the system another 30 minutes for Spotlight to index your system.
Dashboard
Dashboard is awesome. You’ll need a fast machine to see all of the cool animation and effects. If your friends thought the Genie Effect or Exposé were cool, then Dashboard will certainly impress them.
When setting up the widget for Weather, you’ll need to enter “Toronto, Ontario” to get the proper forecast for Toronto in Canada. I was getting the forecast for Toronto, Ohio, which is a little further south.
Safari 2.0
Safari is much faster. Built-in RSS support is a nice feature that I’ll use a lot. I was never a fan of any of the RSS shareware apps that are out there.
Safari is the fastest web browser on the Mac but it still has some Javascript problems. I’m still unable to access the formatting tools in the latest version of Movable Type. Firefox for OS X and Internet Explorer for Windows doesn’t have this problem.
Screen Saver
The RSS Visualizer screen saver is possibly the biggest surprise. It allows you to view a realtime display of any RSS feed from Safari RSS. You have to see this in action. I haven’t watched a screen saver since After Dark came out with those flying toasters.
Automater
Automater is one of those new features that will take a little work to figure out but save you loads of time down the road. If you build websites and CD-ROMs then you’re often having to rename large groups of files. Automater can do repetitive tasks like this for you, saving you time and boredom.
Preview
Big improvements here. Preview finally recognizes annotations. I often receive client changes to my design work as annotated PDF files. In the past I would have to use Adobe Reader to view annotations. Now I don’t have to.
RAW Camera Image Support. Awesome! Now I can quickly view RAW images from my Canon Digital Rebel XT quickly in Preview. No Photoshop plug-ins required.
Screen captures are now saved as PNG files instead of PDF. Not sure why. They open up fine in Preview.
QuickTime 7
Time to upgrade to the Pro version again. If you want to get the most out of QuickTime 7, you’ll have to purchase QuickTime 7 Pro for $29.99. If you’re doing any kind of video work then this is a must.
Posted in OS X Software at 1:45 PM
