Tiger Happy: "

It’s been just over 24 hours since I installed Tiger on the powerbook so I thought it was about time I pasted some random thoughts up here.

Everything certainly feels more zippy, but that may also be due to the fact I did a clean install and my previous system had seen some incredibly strong experimentation over the past year.

Safari is definitely faster, it’s the absolutely best web browsing experience I’ve had yet. Yes, even compared to a heavily tweaked firefox. The built-in RSS reader feels like a gadget or last-minute add-on; you can, however, define an external feed reader and NetNewsWire keeps that honour for me. The RSS screen saver feature had me amused for a while though.

Mail also feels faster. The interface, as many people seem to agree on, is a step backwards (cleanup hacks are already available). An interesting new feature for people forced to interact with the corporate world is that you can now talk to exchange servers, meaning I can hopefully retire that horribly bloated Entourage for work-related email. I’ll check that out on Monday as I no longer have VPN access due to Cisco not being ready with a Tiger-compatible client yet.

I was never impressed with widget systems like Konfabulator and can’t say I was awaiting Dashboard with bated breath, but I can see potential there. TailDash has already found a home on my desktop and I’m playing with some widget ideas of my own.


You’ll have noticed that several widgets come pre-installed, one of them is a small weather forecast panel. Here’s a tip: it correctly guesses your city from the system settings; however, it seems to assume everyone lives in the good old US of A. The default setting for Brussels is actually pulling weather for Brussels, Illinois and I’ll bet our neighbours in Paris are getting Texas or Arkansas forecasts. So if your local forecast looks strange, check the location settings.

Spotlight is great for searching inside documents and the finder integration is really neat but I’ll stick to Quicksilver for the rest. It’s faster and more powerful.

Automator is the gem in this release. I’ve only scratched the surface and my workflow has already improved. User-contributed actions are already pouring in.

And if you’re into Ruby on Rails, a Tiger installer is on its way.

Last but not least, this is the first OS upgrade where hardware specifications have reduced the features available to me. Granted, these features aren’t critical (visual effects in Dashboard, multi-party videoconferencing, high-definition quicktime,...) but the time to upgrade may be approaching.

"

(Via one.point.zero.)