Tiger: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Now that many of us have installed Tiger and release that (gasp!) it does not pay our bills, create world peace, or cook dinner it is time to step back and take a look at some changes that have occured in our favorite operating system. Some are good, some are ugly. Without futher ado here are some of the gems in week one with Tiger.
1. Screenshots are PNGs.
PNG is a great file format and all. Much sexier that a JPEG, and far more agile than a nimble gif. But I thought the whole idea of Quartz was that it was a PDF based? I loved being able to take screen shots and in one swoop email them off in the industry standard pdf format. The client could comment on the PDF, annotating the heck out of them. Now I know you can make PDFs from Photoshop, but try it from Safari? I simply don’t understand why Apple would switch formats. That said, I do know (thank you very much) about SnapzPro, I couldn’t have written iPod and iTunes Hacks without it. But, still, this is a step backwards.
2. Safari Offline Page
If your machine isn’t connected to the internet Safari prompts you with its own 404-type screen. It informs you that you need to be connected to the internet, and shows a nice large Network Settings button. Click on it and you get sent right to your System Preferences, Network area. Very nice touch.
3. iChat Now Playing.
Back in the old wild Panther days there was this great little piece of AppleScript written by Doug Adams. It put the song and album name of the currently playing iTunes track in your iChat status message. Very cool. Well Apple has built this feature into Tiger’s Jaguar, and upped the ante (and presumbibly its coffers), by including the feature in iChat, along with an arrow-link to the song in the iTunes Music Store. Anyone know what happens if the song isn’t sold by iTunes?
4. Mail link of, or contents of page from Safari
Sometimes it’s the little stuff. Lee Posen points out that you can now hit Apple-I in Safari (or go to the file Menu) to send the page you are viewing in Safari as a html page. There is also an option to send a link. Another nice touch from Cupertino.
5. Supplies button in the Print Window:
Yet another example of Apple thinking of how to integrate it’s business into our lives is the supplies button in the Print Window. Brilliant, but you have to admit, if Microsoft did it we’d all be calling up the DOJ.
6. Stuffit-less sits
When you download a .sit file stuffit expander doesn’t open (in fact, it isn’t included with Tiger). Bad news for Alladin, good news for the end user. This makes dealing with .sit files a more seemless experience.
7. FontBook is fast
FontBook has been updated to 2.0 and it shows. It’s fast, it works with a slew of applications, and well, it’s fast! Apple, just add auto-open for applications and we can say good riddance to suitcase forever.
The Not So Good
1. Safari RSS:
Speaking of Safari, the RSS integration, as far as I can tell, is either a joke, or really hard to figure out. Compared to a real newsreader it is a disappointment at best.
2. Odd GUI
I’ve written about this so many times I am getting tired. But it still is a problem with Tiger. Why is iTunes metal and Safari not? Where the heck did the blue in Spotlight come from? Why are there G5 like holes in the Dashboard background? There are countless other examples of Apple’s inconsistent approach to user interface design. Coming from the company that revolutionized the GUI this is a disappointment to say the least.
What are the nice, and not-so-nice touches you’ve noticed in Tiger?
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Comments
TBH, and at the cost of sounding bitchy, the real not-so-nice feature in Tiger is its stability!
It is very very bad!
I can understand a new OS having problems with third-party software, when when your finder and spotlight constantly restarting and beachballing at the thought of any large multimedia files, and safari beachballing every other web page and widgets crashing!!! How can a widget crash and need to ‘retry’ opening it? And don’t let me start on QT7, that must be some in-house joke by Apple to see how many people they can irritate!
Anyway, rant over… I would point out what nice touches I have seen in Tiger, but the system and integrated applications just foul up so much and so frequently that I can’t remember what they are.
Safari and iTunes are both metal in Tiger, just like they’ve always been. I’m not sure what you meant by your comment about them being inconsistent.
Sheesh man of course there are bugs in a 10.4.0 OS. Man I swear some of you have must have been born yesterday. Tiger won’t hit its stride until 10.4.2 or so. Rumor has it that the .1 update has been worked on for a month. Some times you just have to say “ship it” and then use the early adopters as a fine tuning beta processes. That’s life on the bleeding edge.
Outside of mentioning that Aladdin is now Allume, can you figure out who is handling .sit files? I was sure to keep the Stuffit framework and engine installed so it would work, and I still use Expander. Can seem to make Tiger use anything else, nor can I find the truth on this. What do you know?
One praise for Tiger:
Installing iApps, Creative Suite, and Studio MX 2004 went 35% faster in Tiger than in Panther. They got something right.
I would find these comments more helpful if you would simply say what you use with Tiger. Like G4 or G5? Seems obvious to me so why don’t you do so?
For example, I have no issue with Panther and my g5iMac. Thanks, Randy
Tiger is running great on my 1GHz G4-upgraded Sawtooth PowerMac, on my 1GHz G4 iMac, and on my new 1.67GHz PowerBook. The only glitches I’ve had had to do with some Dashboard widgets misbehaviing. My AirPort signal strength has improved about one bar, responsiveness of almost everything is peppier. Tiger has been a pleasure to me so far.
Tiger is running smooth as silk on my 900 MHz G3 iBook, I was surprised, it actually seems more stable than Panther.
As far as inconsistancies in interface design, I agree and add the fact that Mail now sports a completely different interface than all other apple apps.
Now that is helpful. Thanks a lot. Have a old iMac G3 I wondered about. I asked because I simply didn’t encounter the problems I kept hearing people complain about with 3.9. The iMac G5 is just a few months old with no or little third party apps. 3.9 fast as lightening, loading pages, mailing, whatever. Solved the fan noise too. Even my wife figured out the Java problem and downloaded the security patch from Apple after reading about it. So I wondered what the issue could be? At least I didn’t encounter problems with this machine.
I realize though there can be many variables. But at least we have a start knowing something about the machine someone is using when a problem is encountered.
- To me, the biggest plus in Tiger is the leap in performance. Startup and login is much snappier.
- Working in an office with a secure .pac file for Internet connection, SafariRSS works now against such a file. I have had to rely on Firefox for my browsing on Panther. So this is a big plus for me on Tiger.
My biggest grouse is with Mail. I think the UI changes here are *all* for the worse.
- The toolbar buttons with their grey wrappers look gross.
- I also liked to have the drawer for my mail folders which allowed me to have a very compact view of my inbox. Now, the window is huge and Entourage-like.
- Whats with the pale blue shade to the folders section ? It does not gel at all with the mailbox.
- Another big let-down was the so-called-UML support in XCode 2. There’s a farce if ever there was one !
On the whole, I like Tiger’s snappier feel. But there is nothing there which is going to change the way I work in any great measure (Exposé did just that in Panther)
- Sathya
What version of 10.4 are you using where Safari isn’t metal? Safari has always been metal and is one of the few apps to do it right besides iTunes. Otherwise I completely agree with the inconsistent GUI gripe. I mean, they turned the freakin’ Keychain application metal!
Also, why do you consider it good that StuffIt Expander no longer launches to uncompress .sit files? Now I have to do it manually instead. How is that better for the end user?
an interesting article that assumes loads of people have upgraded. It doesn’t particularly sell the idea of the upgrade, and the so called improvements aren’t that great. It reminds me of system 7 which was constantly being souped up according to apple but not much really happened.