Tiger OSX 10.4 first day impressions

(posted via a Dashboard widget no less!)

OK, so at this point you could probably slap an i in front of anything with an Apple logo and I’d buy it, but I did go out 15 minutes after it was possible to get a retail version of tiger and plunk down the cash for the install.

Due to family obligations, I didn’t get to install it until late last night (after backing up to my very handy iPod) and Tiger installed things in the usual effortless way that Apple seems to excel in, while I played Monopoly against my nephew.

First impressions of Tiger?

Panther was a leap in productivity for me. It seriously cemented me being on OSX and made me realize productivity is really what I need to be all about. Tiger seems like a honing, rather than a quantum leap, despite what everyone else says. But it is an impressive honing for all that and I’m only playing with it on my first day.

My system does feel much snappier though. Not sure why as technically I would have thought it would have been less so. Spotlight is amazing. I cannot believe how nice it is having everything searchable virtually instantly. It is by far the best feature.

Dashboards are cool eye candy, but I find a lot of the functionality they provide I already use in my menu items. It may just be a matter of getting used to it… I’m using this little DashBlog freeware right now just to check out how it works (quite nicely and you can have your stuff instantly available while you’re writing it rather than tucking it away in an app. Seems awesome for those stream of consciousness posts I need to get out but ignore sometimes. Quite handy when you’re working on other things and I have to admit overall, Dashboard is very, very usable even minutes after the release of Tiger which beats the crap out of the menu items extras (one weird issue… I don’t get the much heralded water drop effect when dropping widgets on my Dashboard but someone else I know with Tiger gets it all the time. Difference in the graphic card I have in my older machine maybe ?

Improvements in iCal fix a lot of annoying issues I had with it and kept me from depending on it for anything major. Mail seems much, much faster though I really hate the new grey is blue colour scheme and have lost a number of plugins momentarily while the developers catch up.

Actually, I take it back about Dashboard. I am now flipping back and forth between it and my main desktop with this little blog posting widget have to admit it is pretty handy. Also, disappears instantly if I need to talk to someone about other things as well.

I haven’t played around with the Automator yet, and to be honest can’t really think of anything i do a lot that I would need automated (well, except for keeping posting between my blog tools and journalling application, MacJournal current).

I’m impressed at the strides OSX makes in terms of security. There is an Advanced option in the new Sharing preferences with the firewall to enable Stealth mode ensuring that evil cracker types don’t even get a response for unwanted traffic to my machine. Very cool.

Overall, I have to say I’m having a very postive experience. Tiger rocks and the new features definitely have polished any little issues I had with the built-in software and the overall OS. I’m actually very surprised that so many things seem to work with the upgrade as I was expecting a few more problems considering how much stuff I’ve done to this poor machine.