Comments on: Tiger: How to Wow… Kinda

By: Todd Sieling

Todd Sieling — Mon, 02 May 2005 12:28:12 +0000

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.

By: Jeremy Wright

Jeremy Wright — Mon, 02 May 2005 11:50:57 +0000

“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

By: Mr. Incredulous

Mr. Incredulous — Mon, 02 May 2005 03:58:29 +0000

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!

By: mc

mc — Mon, 02 May 2005 00:57:47 +0000

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?

By: ex2bot

ex2bot — Sun, 01 May 2005 13:23:16 +0000

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

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 01 May 2005 12:08:46 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 21:00:11 +0000

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 . . .

By: Stephan Segraves

Stephan Segraves — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:37:06 +0000

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).

By: Todd Sieling

Todd Sieling — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:22:41 +0000

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.

By: Jeremy Wright

Jeremy Wright — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 18:25:03 +0000

*yawn*