Tiger Review (MacOS X.4)

[foogledricks]

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/macosx_tiger.asp

 

Interesting little history of MacOS X. It is interesting to see how Apple continually gets money for their OS by charging for upgrades, while Microsoft makes there money by license fees tied to all the shipping PCs.

 

I just read a Longhorn article that talks about the same search features that Tiger is doing. Between that, and the graphics engine (also like MacOSX), these competitors continue to converge.

[rustyjaw]

This probably belongs in PC and Mac discussion.

 

Overall this is a decent review, although I advise anyone who really wants to know what the OS offers to wait for John Siracusa's forthcoming review at arstechnica.com. Siracusa is far more thorough, while being very balanced in his criticism or praise. He's no Apple fanboy, often being their harshest critic.

 

I think Thurrott is a freak if he doesn't understand the utility of Expos?. Here's what Siracusa had to say about it when he reviewed Panther:

 

In its effort to add new window management functionality to Mac OS X, Apple could have very easily piled on the floating palettes, pop-up menus, and window lists that have traditionally defined the world of window management aids. Instead, Apple's designers appear to have taken a step back and reconsidered the problem domain. By expanding the ability to manage windows based on appearance rather just a text title, Expos? plays to the strengths of the dominant variable in the window management equation: the user. Shored up by existing "traditional" window management features from earlier OSes, Mac OS X now stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries when it comes time to, as Apple puts it, "Find the window you need. Now."

 

Given Thurrott's inability to see why Expos? kicks so much ass, I question his assessment of Dashboard, which works a bit like Expos?, but instead of instantly showing you all of your open windows it shows you a customizable set of 'widgets' for quick access and then hides them just as quickly when you're done.

 

I haven't used Dashboard, but I've seen it demoed and ever since then I've been wanting it. Maybe it will turn out to be less useful than it looks, but when I saw it in action, I immediately knew it would solve a problem that I run into at least once a week. Needing a calculator app for a quick math problem and having to stop what I'm doing to find it, open it, do the math, then close it. With Dashboard the calculator (along with a lot of other widgets) is one key or mouse button away, it flies in and when you're done flies away again.

 

Conversely, I think Thurrott's high praise of Safari is misplaced. Safari is quick, small and capable, but it's totally outclassed by OmniWeb and is lacking features in FireFox.

 

Thurrott is wrong when he says that iChat AV requires a G5 for a 4-way video chat. It requires a dual processor G4.

 

His complaints about the new UI for Mail have been absolutely beaten to death on various Mac forums, so he's not alone, but he acts like he is when he says "It's astonishing to me that Mac fanatics let the company get away with that"

 

He's absolutely right about Apple charging $30 for QT Pro, it's cheap and dumb.

 

Finally, I have to take issue with his complaint that Tiger is only a minor upgrade akin to a service pack. For one thing, he didn't even mention some of the most major enhancements. The graphics system has been seriously reworked to offload more of the UI to the graphics card GPU. Here's a very breif rundown of what the new system is doing (copied from another forum):

 

Drawing a window in Quartz 2D Extreme (10.4+):

 

- Each view in the window is rendered into an offscreen OpenGL context (done on the GPU). The CPU no longer has to do any rasterizing, which is something it's not very good at in the first place.

- The offscreen contexts are all converted to textures (this is done on the GPU, and much faster than uploading back buffers from main memory as Quartz Extreme did).

- The screen is rendered on the GPU.

 

The entire render pipeline is now on the GPU, so the CPU is freed up for everything else. That Apple was able to shove all this into the graphics system without breaking any existing apps is due to the multilayered, object-oriented design of Quartz from the beginning.

 

Benchmarks I've seen show that UI operations in Tiger are 50% faster, with no software recompilation. That's big.

 

Also Tiger introduces two major new APIs to OSX. Core Image and Core Video. Using the work Apple has done making the UI os OSX run on the GPU, they have extended that to a set of real-time image/video manipulation operations that developers can add to their applications. Everyone but Adobe is happy about this.

 

Another big feature that went unmentioned in Thurrott's review is Automator. It's a visual scripting tool for the OS. It leverages the already powerful AppleScript and makes it available to the average user. I can think of many repetitive tasks that I can put Automator to use for on a daily basis.

 

Along with this there are new APIs for developing applications called Core Data, which I don't understand but developers are ecstatic about. I can understand Thurrott not mentioning this since end-users will never see it, but the changes are supposed to make coding for OSX much simpler than it was before...again pointing to the major nature of this upgrade.

[Spike]

I haven't used Dashboard, but I've seen it demoed and ever since then I've been wanting it. Maybe it will turn out to be less useful than it looks, but when I saw it in action, I immediately knew it would solve a problem that I run into at least once a week. Needing a calculator app for a quick math problem and having to stop what I'm doing to find it, open it, do the math, then close it. With Dashboard the calculator (along with a lot of other widgets) is one key or mouse button away, it flies in and when you're done flies away again.

 

If you want to play with a very similar program before April 29th, get Konfabulator. I've been using it for a few months now and I love it, I will be getting 10.4 for Dashboard alone. For Konfabulator, there are 50 useless Widgets for every great one but hopefully the fact that Dashboard is a component of the OS will mean more people try to make Widgets for it (and it uses html, so it should be easy to create them). I can't wait to see what people come up with. I am keeping my fingers crossed for an Xbox Live friends list Widget.

[rustyjaw]

If you want to play with a very similar program before April 29th, get Konfabulator[/url']. I've been using it for a few months now and I love it, I will be getting 10.4 for Dashboard alone. For Konfabulator, there are 50 useless Widgets for every great one but hopefully the fact that Dashboard is a component of the OS will mean more people try to make Widgets for it (and it uses html, so it should be easy to create them). I can't wait to see what people come up with. I am keeping my fingers crossed for an Xbox Live friends list Widget.

 

I know about Konfabulator, but for some reason have never felt compelled to try it. I was even skeptical about Dashboard until I saw it demoed at MWSF last January.

 

I'm interested not only for the calculator, but for the weather widgets, the yellow pages, and the real-time translator for geeky reasons. I'm looking forward to a flood of off-the-wall widgets.

 

I also am very interested to see what shareware developers do with Core Image and Core Video, which should enable some very high-end effects to be done with very little code...for example, it should be fairly easy to create a real-time video effects mixer for distorting and compositing multiple video streams (in a manner similar to how Apple's Motion works). I also anticipate some eye-popping iTunes visualizers that use CI/CV, which is something iTunes desperately needs...the current visualizer is boring now.

[rustyjaw]

John Siracusa's review of Tiger is up at arstechnica. Like all his reviews, it's lengthy, well-written, and very thorough. And he's not an Apple apologist.

 

If you are wondering what OS X is about, this is probably the best place to find out.

[foogledricks]

When the Mac mini came out, I got an urge to buy one. Then I realized, I had no specific reason for wanting to buy one. Someone give me a reason! And acknowledge that I already have a solid PC and am not looking to replace it. I have a Tivo2 with HMO, and I have a laptop. Is there any advantage to using it as some sort of always-on media server? Maybe with a wireless mouse, and a hookup to my TV? My Tivo requires a server to serve photos/music. My wife has an ipod and could maybe use it sync with, though the PC is just fine for that. It would be neat to be able to access our photos and music from all these different machines from a server. Someone convince me that this would be a good investment!

 

Oh, and could I get the MAC mini to output to 1080i? Looking at computer text in 640x480 has got to suck. What are my options there? Probably would need a vga-HD converter? Suddenly the idea is expensive.

[rustyjaw]

Well, I made the leap. I not only installed Tiger, but I wiped my HD clean just to get a fresh start.

 

I was an idiot, though, because I managed to delete the catalog of my CD/DVD backups...doh! So I spent a good bit of yesterday evening rebuilding that catalog so that I knew which backups discs had what I needed to install.

 

Now that I'm mostly settled into Tiger my impression is very positive. It's very fast. All of that under-the-hood work Apple did shows. The speed improvements are across the board, in every app I've tried. Some are more speedy than others. Mail 2.0 has seen a significant boost. It lists a mailbox with 12,000+ messages in an instant, and search it in about 1 second.

 

Spotlight is nearly as fast, although it does have a more noticeable lag. I think this is due to the number of HDs I have (4) that it's searching across (I can hear them access). It also depends on whether the results are coming from inside files (like the contents of a PDF) or from a file name, the former taking longer to return results.

 

I made a movie of me searching for the "word" 'LCVG' (never searched for before, so it's not cached):

 

Spotlight Search (MPEG4, 165 KB) - note all these movies are 10FPS.

 

It immediately returns results, but fills in the last results at 7 seconds. I have 4 HDs, and the machine is also busy taking the movie, which likely slows it down a little.

 

Those returns are right under the search bar, but you an opt for more detailed results. Here's a screenshot of the detail window after searching for the word "Qee." Note the nice image previews. You can set the number of items listed in each area in the preferences.

 

Click for full-sized image.

 

Dashboard is better than I hoped for, I really like it. The instant access to the various tools is really nice. I've already downloaded a few 3rd party widgets, including one that functions as an FTP drop-box (for the FTP app Transmit). Here's a movie of this in action:

 

Dashboard FTP upload (MPEG4, 2.1 MB)

The steps are; grab a file, drag it to the lower left to activate Dashboard, then drop it onto the FTP drop-box (I have two set up), the FTP app opens, logs in and uploads the file.

 

Here's a movie where I add a tile-puzzle game widget to Dashboard, ooh gratuitous ripples

 

Dashboard Widget (MPEG4, 3.4 MB)

 

Here's a screen of all my current Dashboard widgets:

click for full-sized image

 

From left to right; 4 weather widgets for various cities; clock and calculator; calendar; wikipedia interface (I looked up Xbox); unit convertor utility set for currency; itunes controller, language translator; stock ticker (those are the default stocks); back to the left next to the weather widgets is a FedEx package tracker; a dictionary (Oxford American); a flight tracker (watching a flight from SFO to JFK); and at the bottom are the FTP uploaders. I've heard there's a penny-arcade strip downloader, but I haven't seen it yet.

 

I also played with Smart Folders a bit. Here's a movie where I set up a folder that 'contains' all PDF files viewed within the last 90 days. Note that the actual PDFs can reside on any of the 4 HDs.

 

Smart Folder (MPEG4, 450 KB)

 

And I haven't even talked about Automator, which I've looked into a little. It's a very powerful front-end for Applescript which I will get a ton of use out of at work (less so at home) where I perform repetitive tasks all the time.

 

All in all, I'm extremely happy with Tiger. It's very quick, so far my software is compatible, and Dashboard is already very useful.

[Josh]

Well, I made the leap. I not only installed Tiger, but I wiped my HD clean just to get a fresh start.

 

Nice, Ed. I can't wait for my copy to arrive from Amazon. Those movies just made the wait that much harder. Looks like it's loving your x800.

[Robot Monkey]

That dictionary/thesaurus thingamabob is pretty -- very nicely formatted.

 

-j

[kelley]

After spending the better part of today messing around with Tiger.......it is the BEST Operating System on the market, no ifs, ands, or buts.

[Ryan FB]

John Gruber is keeping an updated list of Tiger details, most of which are not in the ars article.

[Angry the Clown]

How long will it take for Apple to advertise Tiger being included with ibooks and powerbooks? I notice they're still stating Panther as included on both the US and UK stores.

 

Daniel

[kelley]

How long will it take for Apple to advertise Tiger being included with ibooks and powerbooks? I notice they're still stating Panther as included on both the US and UK stores.

 

Daniel

Not sure, but all new machines should have Tiger DVDs at minimum in the box.

[xPieter]

I'm in the I Love Tiger camp as well. A couple of widgets no one has mentioned that I'm enjoying are:

 

Show Off : displays uptime or record uptime.

 

and

 

Dash Monitors : displays cpu, network, memory, & disk usage.

 

In case anyone doesn't know, Command-R will refresh the currently selected widget. Ran across that yesterday.

 

Pieter

 

Edit: Forgot to add my props for the iTunes Artwork screensaver. Yeah, it's just a screensaver, but it hypnotizes me every time I see it!

[rustyjaw]

Edit: Forgot to add my props for the iTunes Artwork screensaver. Yeah, it's just a screensaver, but it hypnotizes me every time I see it!

 

I've been using that one too. But it's hard to tear myself away from the RSS saver, not the most practical screensaver, but it's mesmerizing to watch.

[Angry the Clown]

Not sure, but all new machines should have Tiger DVDs at minimum in the box.

 

There does seem to be a wait of a few days on ordering models at the UK store. Perhaps that is why.

 

I'm trying to decide whether to get an ibook or a powerbook. My focus has shifted quite dramatically recently just to writing work, which may render the enhanced power of the powerbook useless for a period of I don?t know how long, which is making me consider a 14" ibook with super drive, 512mb ram and Bluetooth for writing, ipod shenanigans, some photography work and so on (I'm unsure how well Photoshop CS would fare on a 512mb ibook though)... By the time I may require the powerbooks strengths the models existing today may have been superseded and I may be more comfortable with a G5 desktop editing suite for that kind of work.

 

I?ve been desperate to switch to Apple for so many years I want to be sure my first decision is a good one

 

Daniel

[rustyjaw]

Heh, someone has discovered a way to make Dashboard widgets live outside of Dashboard:

 

It's dead simple. You're basically going to be enabling "Development Mode" on dashboard. Just go to the terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.Dashboard devmode YES

Before it'll work, you'll need to logout and then log back into your machine. Now whenever you activate dashboard (however you have it setup) you can click and hold on a widget as if you were going to drag it and then hit F12 again. You should now be holding your widget over your normal desktop. Feel free to drop it wherever you like!

[Angry the Clown]

Apple store is down.... updated iMacs incoming no doubt. Maybe now they'll finally note Tiger to be inclusive with the other hardware too. ibook update seems too much to ask despite the fact they're due for one.

 

Daniel

[iainl]

It would make sense to do at least a minor update to the iBooks. The most obvious problem with them now is that they've only got Radeon 9200s for their graphics, which don't have the necessary bits to accelerate Quartz 2D Extreme. The Titanium models have a 9700, so they're already fine.

[Josh]

I should be getting Tiger this afternoon - but - holy crap - look at the steps this package went through to get to me - I don't think I've ever seen a tracking page like this:

 

May 03, 2005 07:55:00 AM NEW YORK NY US OUT FOR DELIVERY

May 03, 2005 06:25:00 AM NEW YORK NY US ARRIVAL SCAN

May 03, 2005 06:06:00 AM NEW YORK NY US DEPARTURE SCAN

May 03, 2005 03:42:29 AM NEW YORK NY US LOCATION SCAN

May 03, 2005 02:52:17 AM NEW YORK NY US LOCATION SCAN

May 03, 2005 12:52:00 AM NEW YORK NY US UNLOAD SCAN

May 02, 2005 09:43:00 PM NEW YORK NY US ARRIVAL SCAN

May 02, 2005 08:46:00 PM SECAUCUS NJ US DEPARTURE SCAN

May 02, 2005 07:45:00 PM SECAUCUS NJ US ARRIVAL SCAN

May 02, 2005 05:32:00 PM PHILADELPHIA PA US DEPARTURE SCAN

May 02, 2005 01:39:48 PM PHILADELPHIA PA US LOCATION SCAN

May 02, 2005 01:08:00 PM PHILADELPHIA PA US UNLOAD SCAN

May 01, 2005 11:53:00 PM PHILADELPHIA PA US ARRIVAL SCAN

May 01, 2005 10:30:00 PM BALTIMORE MD US DEPARTURE SCAN

May 01, 2005 10:24:00 PM BALTIMORE MD US ARRIVAL SCAN

Apr 30, 2005 12:01:00 PM DALLAS/FT. WORTH A/P TX US DEPARTURE SCAN

Apr 30, 2005 09:43:01 AM DALLAS/FT. WORTH A/P TX US LOCATION SCAN

Apr 29, 2005 08:41:44 PM DALLAS/FT. WORTH A/P TX US UNLOAD SCAN

Apr 29, 2005 08:16:56 PM DALLAS/FT. WORTH A/P TX US ORIGIN SCAN

Apr 29, 2005 08:04:07 AM US BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

Apr 29, 2005 08:00:00 AM Carrollton TX US SHIPPED

[Angry the Clown]

It would make sense to do at least a minor update to the iBooks. The most obvious problem with them now is that they've only got Radeon 9200s for their graphics, which don't have the necessary bits to accelerate Quartz 2D Extreme. The Titanium models have a 9700, so they're already fine.

 

Mmm. I think when it does come it may get a slightly better card, 515mb ram as standard, perhaps a slightly bigger HDD, the scrolling trackpad he Powerbooks got recently and perhaps wireless as standard. The ibooks tend to get updates every April and October by the look of it. Tiger's launch has dominated the spring, but it's sad not to see the ibooks updated today alongside the iMacs. Maybe something will show at WWDC.

 

I'm pretty much set on an ibook now, but I fear we're too close to an update to leap on one soon which is annoying as I'd rather like one soon. Weather is picking up now and I'd like a notebook to take about with me so I can go and sit in a park and work...etc. Some people have told me of "pads of paper and pens" but I've never heard of such things.

 

The update to the store was indeed to show off the new iMac G5s which add improvements to pretty much everything in the machine's spec plus a slight drop in price for good measure, and yes, every other bit of computer kit is now boasting Tiger as standard.

 

Dan

[iainl]

As /. have just noticed, it's an update to the iMac - optional 2GHz models, 512Mb, 802.11g and Bluetooth as standard, and a 128Mb Radeon 9600 so Core Image is hardware accellerated.

 

edit - and dear LORD do they look tempting now. Except I can't afford one, nor justify a new box.

[Angry the Clown]

I think the eMacs got s slight update too. It does in fact leave the ibook as the only bit of kit yet to receive its first update of 2005 (save the Mac mini too of course)... That's even more annoying, Mr Jobs!

 

Dan

 

PS: Agreed on the new iMac specs. Enhanced speed and features (they also offer dual layer dvd burning) and all for a lower price than last year's models? They're just lovely. This PC of mine is only a year old and too newly built for me to leap for a new desktop computer purchase anytime soon however.

[iainl]

Yeah, but they aren't anywhere nearly as shiny as the iMacs. ?1199 for the 20" is yummy (or would be, if it didn't mean forking out a fortune for Excel if I bought one).

[Ryan FB]

There's a potential security risk with the Safari/Dashboard Widget Autoinstall behavior. You should probably not click this link if you're using Safari, but you can read an article about it here. This can apparently be somewhat fixed by unchecking "Open 'safe' files after downloading" in Safari preferences.