01st May 2005
Part 2: A Couple of Tiger Claws
Tiger’s a hit in the Price Smith household, and we’ve only looked at a couple of its claws.
Oh, wait. That’s overstating it. What I mean to say is that my daughter and I are happy checking it out, but we’re not ready to make it the default OS on our PowerBooks. Susan will be happy to watch us be guinea pigs.
A friend of mine had this to say about my cautiousness: “Coward! Don’t you trust Steve?”
Heh heh … not with my only machine on hand. I’d rather bounce between Panther and Tiger until the dust settles. I’m happy to say it’s not too dusty ….
Spotlight
So anyways! Spotlight rocks. The Apple rep at the SoHo event said it would index a drive in 15 minutes. I silently rolled my eyes, and donned a wetsuit to withstand Perfect Stormwaves of marketing hype. Of course it takes a lot longer than that, but it’s all good once things are indexed. Speaking of indexing, you’ll find some useful hints over at “Force Spotlight to reindex a drive”. Sophia asked a pretty good question at the event: “can you search for files opened within the last 6 or 12 hours?”. The answer we heard was “no”. I don’t quite believe it though, as I imagine a plugin of some sort will be able to get at timestamps and let you perform more fine-grained searches. Someone that looks through dozens of files per day (like my wife) is going to want the “within the last two hours” option.
An iTunes tip …
I choose to do a fresh install on an external drive, and slowly build up my environment. I don’t know what the migration tools do about your iTunes account. Here’s the tip: before you kill off Panther, deauthorize your iTunes account! When you get going with iTunes on Tiger, you can then reauthorize your account. I suspect that if you don’t do this, the Panther “slot” never gets freed up, and you effectively have one less “computer” on which you can play your purchased music. I could just say “tie up loose ends before doing something new”.
Dashboard
I love some of the widgets that come with Tiger, and am looking forward to seeing what I can do with them (since they’re basically JavaScript, HTML, and CSS). There’s a good overview at “Developing Dashboard Widgets”. One of favorite non-Apple widgets so far is dashLicious, which I’ll use to quickly save bookmarks on my del.icio.us space.
Sophia likes the Dictionary/Thesaurus, and couldn’t resist the the Hula Girl widget. I like the Phone Book, but I’m going to modify it to use Google maps instead of Mapquest.
Speed
My initial impression of Tiger is “right on!”, and some of that has to do with speed. I know Safari feels a lot faster. As far as the general feel of the finder and the system in general, I don’t know how much to attribute to “new setup”, and how much to “external firewire drive which is faster than internal PowerBook drive”. Time will tell. Dashboard and Spotlight will do a lot to speed up the “find something, or look something” aspect of using a Mac, so that’s a big win.
Way to go, Apple.
