UnTiger

Spotlight sucks up my CPU cycles everytime I start up because it has to 'index' my hard drive. In the 'bad-ol-days' that used to take YEARS to complete with Sherlock. . . now its doing it and you cant STOP IT! grrrrr. I have to shell out money to use a 3rd party piece of software to do what Konfabulators doing for free (now) by embedding my widgets onto the desktop. Hence I RARELY use dashboard on my Mac at home, but I use Konfabulator EXTENSIVELY at the office 'cause we are still running 10.3.9.

I'm with Tim Bray. Dashboard? Whatever. I don't have the screen real estate or processor cycles to waste, so I turned it off, no big deal. But Spotlight? It interferes with long-established searching behaviors. That I had to hack it in order to make it default to search by name and to sort as list is the best evidence of its problems. Why in the hell would I want to--by default--search the contents of files? I'm like the above poster: I'm old skool. I know where I put my files, I know what they're called, and I know what folder they're in. If I'm searching my drive it's a special occasion, so I need maximum speed and flexibility. I do not need to search the contents of the thousands of cached XML files saved by my RSS reader. Also, in Mail, "Entire Message" does not, in fact, search the entire message. It should be searching the raw format and returning results from any field or header, not just from the body. Also, if I'm doing a search and I select a new folder, it should STAY in search, not show me the contents of the newly selected folder. Otherwise, I have to re-do the search. Why is there no way to stay in search, keep my search options, and select a new folder to search? And overall, it's slow. I do not want to wait while Spotlight's slow ass catches up to my intentions.

Tiger's best features are those you never see: the additions and refinements to the Cocoa framework.

Instant indexing and search, built into the kernel _is_ revolutionary and _fast_. For instance to see all images on your computer, enter "kind:images" and in 1 sec. you get the list. Now, try that on Win XP. The "query language" could be better though. I also like dashboard. Okay, it is a show-off but I do use the converter and weather widget every day. I like less the ridiculous amount of memory dashboard grabs though. As a UNIX developer, what I really don't like about OS X are the, pardon my french, crappy low-level stuff. The network stack, i/o and basically every thing below cocoa and carbon is a dump of bad engineering. The thing about OS X is that it looks nice on the surface but below it is a steaming dung.

OS X 10.4.3 is great. I love the stability and speed. Things seem to respond quicker with this update. Both Spotlight and Dashboard have been growing on me. Searching in Mail works fine for me. Overall, this is really an impressive update. I would not want to go back to 10.3.9.

A slight correction to my previous comment. After setting devmode on the Dashboard, either logout and login again, or do "killall Dock" from the Terminal. This will activate the defaults write setting. Then you can drag widgets off the Dashboard.

I'm sorry, but it just seems like nit-picking to me. Sure Spotlight and Dashboard were hyped for the release, but come on, they both already existed. Did you really think just because Apple included them in Tiger, they would be better? If you want to be on the bleeding edge, and any new release is just that, then you have to deal. Software evolves (best argument against intelligent design actually) and it either adapts to the user needs, or ends up as junk. The amazing thing is no one is talking about kernel panics, or freezes, or serious system corruption- and that is what I love about OS X.4 Tiger.

If you want to set those widgets free, you can do so now, although it is not an official feature of Dashboard. I believe I first saw this at OS X Hints. In Terminal, type "defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode yes". Then in Dashboard, start the widget you want. Start to drag the running widget with the mouse, and hit F12 to close Dashboard. The widget you are dragging remains! Just drop it where you want on your Desktop, and it will float there above everything else until you close it. That said, I wish this was the normal mode and you could just start widgets like they were normal apps. Also, the choice to have them float at the top layer or not should then be an option.

Set those widgets free! There are a couple of widgets I would use more regularly but can't seem to get in the habit because they are trapped inside dashboard. There needs to be a way to all have widgets that live outside the dashboard. Organization is another major issue. While the sliding dock eye candy in dashboard is cool, its entirely inefficient. There needs to be a better way of managing the potentially hundreds of widgets a user might want to have access to. Spotlight needs work too. Certainly Apple needs to simplify to make these tools useable by the masses but they could learn a lot from QuickSilver and Butler. With that said I'm sure Apple will get it right with Dashboard 2.0 and Spotlight 2.0

Personally, I love Tiger, it feels a lot faster, more stable, and more refined compared to Panther (in my opinion). Spotlight has always worked flawlessly for me, personally. I'm not even sure what he means when he talks about "stabbing at control buttons", I've never had to do anything of the sort, just start typing and watch as the results narrow themselves down. Dashboard, well, it's a cool thing to show Windows using friends and family if nothing else. In the end though, why would you avoid an OS upgrade simply because you don't like a new feature? So don't use that feature, simple as that. For me, Automator is enough to justify an upgrade (please, no "just learn AppleScript" comments).