William Computer Blog

Upgraded to Tiger

I have finally upgraded my mac from 10.3 (Panther) to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) yesterday. When tiger was released, I mentioned that I won’t be upgrading to tiger because I’m planning to get a new PowerBook.

Well, I couldn’t wait any longer so I decided to upgrade my mac and get a PowerBook when a new revision is released. The installation was a success.

I’ve been spending a few hours to experiment with tiger’s new features. So here is a short blog entry about my experiment with Tiger. This is not a complete review, because someone else already wrote one.

Dashboard

These are some of the widgets that I find useful:

• Calculator - I don’t need to run calculator anymore, since I can just hit the dashboard button and start calculating
• Converter - I love being able to quickly convert currency, or other measurements
• Dictionary - I can now use the dictionary widget to quikly lookup words instead of visiting dictionary.com
• Stickies - I find this one to be very useful since I usually keep notes of things on a single text file and save it. I can now just create new stickies.
• Wikipedia widget - This one is less important because I can just search wikipedia articles from my browser but I installed it.

Spotlight

After the installation is finished, it took spotlight around 1 hour or more to index my whole hard drive. I can now find where I put my files quickly with spotlight. I haven’t actually use spotlight since I still remember where I kept the files that I’ve been working on.

I also still use QuickSilver to launch application since it is faster. I set QuickSilver’s hotkey to Apple Command-space and spotlight hotkey to Command-Shift-Space.

Safari RSS

It’s nice that Safari support RSS now, but I still use NetNewsWire as my default feed reader. I do however, subscribe to one news site on Safari so I could set the latest news as my screensaver.

Mail.app

Mail.app no longer uses drawer to list mailboxes/folder and I don’t really like the new Mail.app icon. So the first thing I did is to apply Cage Fighter.

Unfortunately, Mail.appetizer, the incoming e-mail notification plugin for Mail.app no longer works on Tiger. The author is working on an update though.

Finder

The first thing I notice from the Finder is it now displays Application with the .app extension. Example: iTunes.app, iPhoto.app, iMovie HD.app, iTerm.app, and so on.

System Prefences

The new system prefences also have a search function. Just typed in a keyword and it will highlight the icon that matched the search. Really cool.

More features

There are many other features that I haven’t been able to play with. I’ll spend this weekend experimenting with other Tiger features. Apple announced that Tiger had more than 200 new features. I’ll be exploring them then.

Right now, I’m waiting for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to deliver his WWDC keynote. At the time of writing this entry, the keynote is due to start in 3 hours 25 minutes. I really hope there will be a new revision of PowerBook.

• June 6, 2005