Upgraded and mostly happy
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Yesterday I installed Mac OS X “tiger” (insert millions of URLs about it here) and so far I think it is pretty impressive.
Spotlight is exactly the kind of search tool I’ve wanted. On Windows I’ve tried Google Desktop Search — it is good, but the integration of course is far less smooth. We’ll see what Microsoft does in Longhorn. But for now Apple has clearly shown how it should be done.
Safari’s RSS abilities are also just as good as you’ve heard — I have tried various RSS readers and never been totally happy. Safari’s version appeals to the non-geek in me; it automatically finds the RSS feed for most Web sites when you browse there, and simply dragging that into the News folder is all you need to do. (EDIT: Actually, you have to switch to the RSS feed and then you can drag the “feed:” URL; why not do it it one step?) And I like the way you can go back and forth from Web pages to feeds. Firefox is good here too, and IE is looking really old now.
After that I’m still exploring — I’ve tried Automator a little but it seems a little sluggish to me and has hung a couple of times. Seems more work may be needed here, but it is too soon for me to tell.
The Dashboard — I am divided on it. It looks cool and a lot of the widgets are very handy, but I’m not sure I like the way it interacts with the rest of my desktop. I can’t say exactly how it should work either. So far I think it is most useful if you only have a small number of widgets on it. The more there are, the slower it comes up and the more cluttered it seems. I think the killer use for it may be to have the one special tool you use a button click away. But others may differ on that. One thing is for sure: dropping a new widget in creates a cool ripple effect that’s fun all by itself.
Caution: Tiger does break some things, such as Cisco VPN and CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro (which already didn’t work with Firefox and Thunderbird, and the folks there don’t seem to have posted anything about when they plan to fix it). Fortunately most other people seem to be fixing their apps pretty fast if needed.
More later when I get more familiar with Tiger.