Mac OS X Tiger is out. Normally I wouldn’t comment on this, as it doesn’t affect me. Walt Mossberg said this is the best OS ever, which rocks. I have a lot of respect for Walt.
However, reading the review of Tiger over at MacInTouch, I have a hard time understanding what’s so exciting.
Let me summarize the “key features” (according to the review):
Spotlight: Does less than every other desktop search tool out there, with less flexibility, less files, no email and it has crashed for a large number of users.
Dashboard: Some really nice widgets. But the widget toolbar’s useless. To quote:
Removing non-active Widgets breaks the “widget bar” at the bottom of the screen, causing the icons not to match the Widget they actually launch, or causes the entire Widget bar to be unclickable. Again, we’re not sure how this got through QA; these are bugs in basic functionality.
Similarly, Dashboard does not always notice if you add a new Widget to the Widgets folders, and new Widgets may not display in the “widget bar.” Double-clicking a widget in the Finder causes Dashboard to notice, displaying the Widget both in the “add widget” bar and creating an instance of the widget on screen.
Nice. I can’t imagine what folk would say if Microsoft released these “undocumented features” in Longhorn. Ah well, at least Apple gets some stuff right in this release. The flight tracker sounds cool, even though I’d rarely use it.
Safari RSS: Sure, it does RSS, but you can’t “subscribe” to feeds, you HAVE to bookmark the page. Wtf? Oh, and actually implementing parental controls breaks the RSS feature.
iChat AV 3: Requires dual processors. Yeah, and you thought Longhorn’s requirements were stiff…
Automator: I hadn’t heard of this. This sounds killer. Seriously. Apparently, some more QA issues here:
In practice, however, we also noticed that the Automator application can be slow, and it frequently went into “spinning rainbow” mode for brief periods. We found that some Actions, such as the “View Results” debugging Action, did not always appear in the Workflow, even though other Actions made space for it and renumbered themselves correctly.
Still, sounds kickass. Well done Apple.
QuickTime 7: Minor upgrade. A few nice features. It’s not like Quicktime had any issues in v6, so it’s not like Apple could have done a lot for v7. They kept it stable, which is great.
.Mac Sync / VoiceOver / Parental Controls: All solid, nice features, if you need them. No flash or anything here. They just work.
Apple Mail: It seems that Apple isn’t giving users as many choices as they’d like in terms of how to manage mail and such. It’d be interesting to see how the time and mail management courses I’m helping develop for Microsoft would play with this new mail client. Apparently the interface is confusing and such though, which sucks. Thankfully there are other, better, programs for mail available. This still isn’t a decent PIM though. It’s just wanky mail.
All in all, it seems like a decent upgrade. I will never get over that Mac users have to pay for what is effectively a service pack, but I guess it’s just a different mindset. Windows users pay through the nose for the new OS (if they don’t buy it with a PC), Mac users pay for it (through the nose) over time.
I’m concerned that the reviews I’m reading seem to be all “well, this sucks and this doesn’t work and this is badly designed and this blows… but it’s great anyways”. That really concerns me. As Apple goes more mainstream they need to be held to a higher standard. And, considering their hallmakr has always been how much stuff “just works”, you’d think their QA will be better. Like all major OS releases, expect at least 3 major rounds of patches, several of which conflict. My mac friends always hate new OS X upgrades for this very reason. Hang in there guys, it’ll be stable and rocking again in a few weeks 
Good luck everyone, and well done Apple. In spite of the negativity around this post, Tiger looks rocking. I’ll be looking to play with most of these features first hand when I’m in Vancouver next week.
April 29th, 2005 at 11:29 am
You said:
>iChat AV 3: Requires dual processors. Yeah, and you thought Longhorn’s requirements were stiff…
Not exactly true. It only requires a dual processor IF you want to be the one to host the 3 or 4 way video chat, and you don’t have a G5 CPU in your mac.
Otherwise, if you can let someone else host the video conference then you won’t need to have a dual proc computer.
April 29th, 2005 at 11:36 am
Yeah, the Automator should kick some serious butt. I haven’t seen anything like it in a while. The old macro recorder for Windows (is that still around) is the closest thing. But developers can create new actions for the Automator and distribute them. I’m not sure if you have to write them in Objective-C or if you can write them in any Cocoa language. If you can use Applescript to create your own actions, that will be the killer feature for it since most Mac power users know Applescript.
re: Service pack vs. full OS. How would you define a full OS vs. a Service pack? Do you consider XP a Windows 2000 service pack? To me, service pack says “bug fixes”, expansion pack says “stuff we didn’t have time to ship but is small enough to ship now”, and new release says “stuff that doesn’t exist in any form in the previous version”.
A lot of the features in Tiger mirror what has been announced in Longhorn. I don’t just mean the Spotlight stuff either, a lot of new developer features have been added as well as a new version of the free developer tool XCode (it includes new features, Like creating code from UML diagrams. Old features for developers, but new to the XCode app), The new Core elements, CoreImage, CoreData, hold a lot of promise. Core data, in some articles I’ve read, sounds like an object serialization system (a’la WinFS) than just a ADO like API. I’ll have to see it for myself though.
Don’t be mislead by the similar interface, there are a lot of changes under the hood. Check out the Ars Technica review.
April 29th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
“As Apple goes more mainstream they need to be held to a higher standard. And, considering their hallmakr has always been how much stuff “just works”, you’d think their QA will be better.” It would seem that Apple isn’t the only one that needs better QA.
April 29th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
*yawn*
April 29th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
I think your facts might be off a bit…
* on Spotlight. Not only does it do email, but spotlight is integrated right into the native Mail client with dynamically updating folders. As far as flexibility goes, it’s extensible so 3rd party developers can write their own plugins to make their custom file types accessible to the indexing engine.
* on Safari RSS – how is adding a feed to a reader different from bookmarking? On install, current bookmarks are analyzed and if the associated site has feeds the number of unread items appears beside the bookmark. So bookmarks AND feeds are combined into one item.
* QT7 – the HD codec scales from small screens (video ipod, anyone?) to full on widescreen display or what have you without recompression. It’s hard to say just how much that will change things for video makers, but it’s worth mentioning.
* it sounds like more bugs are being found. The only one I heard about before today was wifi reconnect on waking from sleep. These sorts of things – especially the dashboard bug – are inexcusable if the report is accurate.
I’m not into OS holy wars, but the post needed some corrections.
April 29th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Yes, Spotlight is the coolest search tool I’ve seen to date. I did a few searches on a machine and it returned 3,000+ results that were relevant to the search I typed in. It had them grouped together in an easy to find manner (music, e-mail, pictures, folders, etc). Very intuitive and it showed the most relevant results at the top (and didn’t show all 3,000+ unless I asked for them).
April 29th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
Amazing how ignorant your comments are. This is a MAJOR upgrade anyway you look at it. On first glance it seems very similar, but once you dig around and use the new tools it’s another story. Some people look at a pen and say how useless, others, well . . .
May 1st, 2005 at 6:08 am
I upgraded to Tiger two days ago and I’m not overwhelmed. Copernic Desktop Search for Windows is much better and faster than Spotlight. Dashbord is Konfabulator, sorry. So these two major features are available as freeware or shareware utilities on the Other Side. The rest is just application updates which should be available for Panther too.
May 1st, 2005 at 7:23 am
Wow! Your 10.4 sounds _a lot crappier_ than the one I got Friday.
Spotlight works great for me. It’s instantaneous, comprehensive, and extensible. That’s what I’ve been wanting for years. Hasn’t crashed either.
Dashboard: I haven’t seen any bugs at all.
I was rrreeeaaallyy hoping for gui speed increases. And I got them!!!!!!!!! It’s noticeably faster on even my slowest machine. I was also hoping for OpenGL performance increases. And I got them!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Significant ones.
Were you reading comments from people using betas?
Yikes! What kind of Mac are you runnin? What? No Mac. Oh. Yeah. Great.
Doug
May 1st, 2005 at 6:57 pm
Greetings. In light of your comments, I’d ask you to compare your impressions and description of systems (like QT7) to what Ars Technica wrote about in their detailed write up. The idea behind Ars Technica’s article is that the groundwork has been layed on a new foundation. The idea behind your article is that the user experience ain’t that great compared to your expectations. Is that a fair assessment?
May 1st, 2005 at 9:58 pm
Ummmm… People subscribe to this stuff??? Microsoft pays you to do stuff??? It’s no surprise Windows is the way it is, is there? Just look at the design of this blog… Gak!
May 2nd, 2005 at 5:50 am
“Mr Incredulous”, a few things:
1. I create time management courses for Microsoft. Which has nothing to do with my opinion on any software. I’m opinionated enough without Microsoft paying me, thank you very much
2. My “review” was based on another Mac site’s review. Personally, I don’t care about Tiger. It just caught me off guard that one of the largest Mac sites in the world found so many negative things and yet tried to stay positive about it.
3. Feel free to not subscribe
May 2nd, 2005 at 6:28 am
Tom,
I think Dashboard took a lot from Konfabulator, but the latter deserves to die for an architecture that requires several megabytes of memory consumption for each widget, no matter how simple. The Javascript-CSS-HTML architecture that Dashboard uses makes widgets nice and light, and makes good use of existing open plumbing rather than a proprietary engine.
On Spotlight, I’m hearing really different things about the speed – it’s quite quick on my system but others seem to find it slow. I suspect that systems that have gone a while without a good cleaning, and that are allowing Spotlight to catalog useless files like preferences are showing slower performance. Mine keeps up with the typing for the first 10 or so results, and takes about 3-4 seconds to find everything else.
On other appliication updates, I’m constantly amazed at people’s belief that software companies should be investing hundreds of person hours to delivery applications to users for free. There is this implicit assumption that it costs them nothing to research, plan, implement and deliver updates to applications like Mail or Address Book, or that we are somehow being grossly mishandled for being asked to pay for them.