Tiger Review

Since I pre-ordered Tiger directly from Apple, I received it yesterday afternoon. I've been having some profile issues with Panther lately so I decided to backup my data and perform a clean install of OS X 10.4. unfortunately I forgot to export my Address Book so I lost all my contacts. In the future I will keep a paper copy around just in case.

What I noticed first is that Tiger now ships on a single DVD rather than 3 separate CD's like Panther. Bravo to Apple for doing this, I only wish other companies did the same (like id Software with their Doom 3 product). It also shipped with a trial version of iWork '05 which I haven't installed yet. It took less than an hour to install Tiger and it was just as easy as ever. I recommend performing a custom install so you can deselect all those printer drivers and extra languages you don't need. I would also recommend selecting the X11 package which for some reason is not installed by default. The Xcode developers tools are also on the same DVD but can only be installed afterwards.

After the installation I immediately went to check out the new backgrounds and screensavers. Most were pretty cool and some were retained from the older versions. I still have lots to play around with but some of the new features I noticed in Tiger that were different from Panther include the following:

• Pinstripes are gone from the menu bars. Apple lightened them up with Panther and now in Tiger they are completely gone. I guess Apple wanted the OS to reflect how their new hardware looks as opposed to the older generation. I like this change as it looks much cleaner now.


• Dashboard is cool and will get cooler with more Widgits becoming available.


• The new DVD player looks the same but now plays a mini movie when the app is minimized (providing you were watching a movie to begin with).


• There is a new Dictionary application which does exactly what you think it does.


• Mail now has a better interface.


• Haven't had the chance to use Automator yet but it looks promising.


• There is a new Grapher application that uses OpenGl to render realtime mathematical graphs. Reminds me of the OS 9 Graphing Calculator.


• Spotlight works as advertised although I have to admit I never really had a problem finding files.


• I didn't realize this but using iChat AV has some strict hardware requirements now if you want to use the multi video and audio options. You can check out the specs here but as you can see this is going to limit us from performing a multi video chat unless Dave and Rob upgrade their hardware. Gary is also going to need to get broadband.

I hope to write a follow up blog later on my Tiger experience.