I am. Dashboard and Automator are worth it all by themselves, but Tiger is also supposed to be even speedier than Jaguar. I'm definitely down.
Not me. I'm still running one of the prior jungle cats - don't recall which. I may upgrade the next time - by then there'll be enough improvements in the thing to warrant the $129 "upgrade" price.
Doh! Panther, yes. Faos: Automator is a program that essentially allows you to automate repetitive tasks. Right now, the only way to do that is really through Apple Scripts which you either have to write yourself or find one's that have been written. This is a simple program interface that allows you to create scripts to handle all kinds of things. For example, I take a lot of digital photos and I often want to rename them all to something relating to the date they are taken. This will find the pattern in those file names and replace them with a repeating filename similar... i.e. from dsc0001 - dsc0059 to may202005_01 - may202005_059 You can also create workflow items that will run something and then shut it down automatically. It will save me a LOT of time. Dashboard is very similar to a program I used to love called Watson. It is another Dock at the bottom (or on the side) of the screen with all kinds of smaller programs called "widgets." These do everything from showing you the weather and radar to running stock tickers to language translators to advanced calculators, flight tracker, address book, iTunes controller...you name it. There are literally dozens of these things. And, because OSX is built on a Unix frame, developers will probably build hundreds of these widgets to add to Dashboard. Watson had recipe finders, price watches, auction watches, dictionary, thesaurus, sports boxscore and stats tracking, all kinds of clocks...it was amazing. Watson discontinued when they sold the concept to Apple for Dashboard. Go to Apple.com and check it out under their OSX section. They have a Quicktime movie of Dashboard. It is cool!
By the way, the new Finder in Tiger is killer. It will search everywhere like Finder does now, but it will also break files down into categories, file types, etc. and allow a much smarter search. Combined with Spotlight, which not only searches files but addresses, bookmarks, email messages and on and on, it will make the Mac much easier to use. And, I'm kind of looking forward to their speech recognition software. I don't know how well it will work, but I wouldn't mind playing around with it.
Apple's Tiger earns its stripes USA Today Now, there's Tiger, the pet name for the Mac OS X Version 10.4. Apple will unleash Tiger Friday to the adoring fans who, I expect, will rush to snare the first copies. Much as I admire the new operating system, I'm not optimistic that Tiger will lift the Mac's fortunes past its puny single-digit market share. Apple loyalists hate to hear it, but it's true: Macs continue to be mauled in the software habitat by Microsoft, whose next major overhaul of Windows (dubbed Longhorn) is due out next year. It's a shame. Like its predecessors, Tiger more than earns its stripes, even if I find the single-user upgrade price of $129 a bit steep. I tested Tiger on a 2-year-old PowerBook. (The software upgrade process exceeded an hour but was otherwise painless; I haven't always been able to say that when installing a Windows operating system upgrade.) On the other machine I tested it on, an iMac G5, Apple preinstalled Tiger. Tiger's minimum requirements: a Mac with a Power PC G3 processor and 256 megabytes of RAM. The bottom line Apple Mac OS X Tiger Version 10.4 $129, www.apple.com 3½ stars (out of four) Pro. Fast desktop search, multiway video conferencing, handy little programs called widgets, RSS added to Safari. Con. Tad expensive. Search doesn't include cached Web pages. Apple says Tiger delivers more than 200 new features, many of them under the hood. As with earlier versions of OS X, Tiger is based on the Unix operating system. In my experience, the Mac has proved itself more reliable and stable than its Windows-based counterparts; nothing in my few days evaluating Tiger suggests that won't continue to be true. Tiger highlights: •Desktop search. Spotlight is probably the most useful of the standout features that consumers will notice right away. This speedy and superb version of desktop search is built into the fabric of the operating system. With one notable exception, you can rapidly search virtually everything on your hard drive by category — contacts, documents, images, music, movies, applications, PDF documents, mail messages, to-do's and so on. When you do a text query, Spotlight will find any of your files or programs that include that text. When I typed "beach," Tiger found a PowerPoint presentation with a beach theme, a picture of my daughter and songs in my iTunes library by the Beach Boys. Spotlight starts spitting out search results the moment you type in a few keystrokes. If you add files on the fly, Spotlight instantly adds them to the results. What's more, because Spotlight also searches metadata (the underlying data on a file), you can quickly find a photo or document by entering the name of the person who e-mailed it. By default, Spotlight displays the top 20 items that match your search criteria. You can click on "show all" to see everything. Inside a search results window, you can view thumbnail previews of pictures and movies — and click to run a full-screen slideshow. You can fine-tune searches by date or type of file and save your search results in a "smart folder." What's missing? Spotlight doesn't search the "cached," or stored, Internet pages you've viewed — a feature Google's Desktop Search does include and that I find helpful. Apple's reasoning: Spotlight is designed to be purely a desktop search, not a Web search tool. Apple explains that if you want to refer back to a Web page later, you can save it as a PDF file directly from the print menu; Spotlight will automatically index it. But the fact is you don't always know what you'll need later. (By the way, you won't be able to rely on Google's Desktop Search, which doesn't work with a Mac.) To access Spotlight, you click on an icon in the system menu on the screen's upper-right corner. •Useful info in a jiffy. The Dashboard feature is a shortcut to some lightweight but handy customizable applications called widgets. You can display some or all the widgets and drag them around the screen. Among the initial roster of 14 widgets: a world clock, calculator, dictionary (the New Oxford dictionary and thesaurus are included in Tiger), translator (in a dozen languages), flight tracker, weather updater, stock ticker and metric converter. More downloadable widgets are in the offing; people with programming talents can build their own. •Video conferencing. When Panther was introduced in 2003, Apple included a slick, hassle-free broadband-based video-conferencing program called iChat. Tiger gives it more teeth. IChat AV 3 lets you hold a video conference with up to three friends simultaneously, or you can hold an audio conference with up to nine. In a face-to-face conference with one other person, you can peer at each other full screen. In a multi-way conference, participants appear in a virtual meeting room. The video effects are so authentic that people's reflections bounce off the table in the room. You start a video conference by clicking on the icon next to a name in your buddy list. (You'll need a video camera, too.) Though the picture may show distortion, the video quality is generally good; the sound is even better. (Note to techies: IChat and the QuickTime media player now support a video standard known as H.264.) •Other impressive features. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been added to the Safari Web browser. That means you can check out news feeds and blogs and be notified when articles of interest are published. You can even create an RSS screen saver. That way, you can peek at flying headlines from your favorite feeds and press keys to jump to the article; naturally, I created an RSS screen saver of my column. Tiger also has added parental controls that let you limit the Web sites that children can visit and with whom they can chat or e-mail. You can also prevent your child from looking up profane words in the dictionary. Through a new drag-and-drop feature called Automator, your computer automates such repetitive tasks as renaming groups of files. It's one more way Apple aficionados will come to happily rely on the Tiger. E-mail:
Got it this morning and already installed it!! Thank god for FedEx Employees who dont pay attention!! What a day...Tiger and a Rockets Playoff Game!! I did install it on a 80 GB External Hard Drive and if everything goes well I will install it on my main HD next week. I reccomend that for everyone if possible!
I played with it at Macworld in January, and it is real and it is fantastic. the iChat is wicked, the spotlight ... the dashboard thing is hard to explain until you mess with it. I am totally psyched.
n00bs. I've been running Tiger for over a week now at work. I really hope I don't have the actual release version, though, because it's buggy as hell. (I can't even properly shut down my computer.) However, aside from the bugs, Tiger is okay. Spotlight and Dashboard are rather neat, and my computer seems to load quicker.
Is the release of Tiger one of those events I'll have to wait in a long line and battel Mac nerds with my light sabre?
WTF? I just noticed on Apple's site that Tiger is available tomorrow at 6pm. 6pm?????????????? WTF?? http://www.apple.com/
