Filed under: Features
Ten things we still love about Tiger
Whether you're disappointed or pleased at the four-month delay for Leopard, there's no question that the progress, or lack thereof, on Apple's next OS release has been big news. With all the focus on 10.5, it seems to me that we've lost sight of all the wonderful things about our current main squeeze... so here goes: the top ten things we still love about Tiger.#10: Still runs on the vintage hardware. Officially, Tiger installs on any Mac with built-in FireWire; unofficially, any machine with a G3 processor and adequate RAM will rock the casbah. I've seen happy campers on original Bondi iMacs and USB-only iBooks with Tiger, although most folks on low-end gear will need to disable Spotlight to get adequate performance.
#8: Safari RSS. Although the Konqueror-based browser made its debut in Panther Jaguar (displacing the unlamented IE 5.1), it really started kicking ass and taking names in Tiger. The addition of built-in RSS feedreader capability made Safari the browser to beat. Since 10.4 shipped, it may not have kept pace with the wider compatibility of Firefox or the wealth of options in Opera or Omniweb, but it's still the standard for Mac browsing and the future platform for Dashboard widgets and iPhone apps.
#7: Secure everything. Got to really, really delete that sensitive file? Secure empty trash. Need your home directory obscured from prying eyes with AES-128 encryption? FileVault (introduced in Panther, made better in Tiger). Want your VM pagefile scrambled in case your machine is purloined? Secure virtual memory. Working on a project for Uncle Sam that calls for Common Criteria certification, smart card two-factor auth and the rest of the alphabet soup? No worries, mate: with the possible exception of the nigh-legendary Mac OS 8.6, Tiger is the most secureable version of Mac OS yet.
#6: Exposé. [OK, mea culpa -- Exposé was introduced in Panther! Oops.] Some users might as well have the magical keys to hide and reveal the desktop, all windows or just one application tattooed on the insides of their eyelids, that's how often they use Exposé every day. Others (myself included) find the hot corner activation feature just the thing for the occasional practical joke. Either way, the 'aha!' moment when you first see it in action is universal.
#6, mean it: Dashboard. Yes, we know, everything's all widgets all the time nowadays, from Google to Yahoo! to Vista. Tiger's version (possibly inspired by Konfabulator, which continues life as Yahoo! Widgets) of these tiny, shiny applets set a graceful standard for the implementations now running rampant. Expect more shiny and extra oomph from Leopard's version.
#5: 64-bit BSD layer. OK, this ain't on the side of the cereal box, I grant you -- but for developers of scientific or imaging applications, the first step towards a fully 64-bit-enabled version of Mac OS X is a big deal; access to an exabyte-scale memory space lets databases and other large sets can use as much physical memory as can be crammed into the box. Tiger's implementation of 64-bit computing is limited to non-GUI applications for now, yet it lays the groundwork for Leopard's fully-64-bit system to come.
#4: Automator. Scripting is cool, sure, but having your own personal robot assistant? SO much cooler. By adding the modular, drag-and-drop ease of Automator to the power of AppleScript, Tiger gave the rest of us access to the macro tools long enjoyed by the script elite.
#3: Spotlight. Love it or hate it, the big cat's slickest trick is undoubtedly desktop search. With the ubiquity of filesystem-level indexing taking over from Sherlock and Finder Find in earlier versions, Spotlight's metadata controls have paved the way for search apps like Google Desktop for Mac (not to mention another popular desktop OS and its search feature).
#2/#1: Marklar and Boot Camp. Granted, these weren't in 10.4.0, but you have to give credit where due. Getting a skunkworks version of Mac OS X running (again, post-NeXT) on Intel hardware, in case IBM's PowerPC roadmap disappointed Apple engineers and designers? Genius. Ramping up developer tools and preview hardware to get the application base moved over to Universal binaries? Heroic. Pulling a dual-boot rabbit out of a hat and offering Mac owners the choice of running Windows XP on the same shiny new Mac hardware? Awesome.
See all 200+ features introduced in Tiger here.
#7: Secure everything. Got to really, really delete that sensitive file? Secure empty trash. Need your home directory obscured from prying eyes with AES-128 encryption? FileVault (introduced in Panther, made better in Tiger). Want your VM pagefile scrambled in case your machine is purloined? Secure virtual memory. Working on a project for Uncle Sam that calls for Common Criteria certification, smart card two-factor auth and the rest of the alphabet soup? No worries, mate: with the possible exception of the nigh-legendary Mac OS 8.6, Tiger is the most secureable version of Mac OS yet.
#6, mean it: Dashboard. Yes, we know, everything's all widgets all the time nowadays, from Google to Yahoo! to Vista. Tiger's version (possibly inspired by Konfabulator, which continues life as Yahoo! Widgets) of these tiny, shiny applets set a graceful standard for the implementations now running rampant. Expect more shiny and extra oomph from Leopard's version.
#5: 64-bit BSD layer. OK, this ain't on the side of the cereal box, I grant you -- but for developers of scientific or imaging applications, the first step towards a fully 64-bit-enabled version of Mac OS X is a big deal; access to an exabyte-scale memory space lets databases and other large sets can use as much physical memory as can be crammed into the box. Tiger's implementation of 64-bit computing is limited to non-GUI applications for now, yet it lays the groundwork for Leopard's fully-64-bit system to come.
#4: Automator. Scripting is cool, sure, but having your own personal robot assistant? SO much cooler. By adding the modular, drag-and-drop ease of Automator to the power of AppleScript, Tiger gave the rest of us access to the macro tools long enjoyed by the script elite.
#3: Spotlight. Love it or hate it, the big cat's slickest trick is undoubtedly desktop search. With the ubiquity of filesystem-level indexing taking over from Sherlock and Finder Find in earlier versions, Spotlight's metadata controls have paved the way for search apps like Google Desktop for Mac (not to mention another popular desktop OS and its search feature).
#2/#1: Marklar and Boot Camp. Granted, these weren't in 10.4.0, but you have to give credit where due. Getting a skunkworks version of Mac OS X running (again, post-NeXT) on Intel hardware, in case IBM's PowerPC roadmap disappointed Apple engineers and designers? Genius. Ramping up developer tools and preview hardware to get the application base moved over to Universal binaries? Heroic. Pulling a dual-boot rabbit out of a hat and offering Mac owners the choice of running Windows XP on the same shiny new Mac hardware? Awesome.
See all 200+ features introduced in Tiger here.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Skoalbandit said 9:12AM on 5-07-2007
Tiger is the first OS I ever bought separate from a computer. I am very happy with it and not really excited for Leopard at all. Maybe that will change once I get to play with it but I am in no hurry to change something that works perfectly fine.
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jezza said 10:28AM on 5-07-2007
You could have seen it sooner on MacNN
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/05/07/new.get.a.mac.tv.ad/
Just saying is all, it was posted on the 5th
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jezza said 10:31AM on 5-07-2007
Damn it! that post was for the new 'get a mac' ad. Sorry, been up a long time
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Aron Trimble said 10:44AM on 5-07-2007
"Either way, the 'aha!' moment when you first see it in action is universal." - Is that an Intel pun?
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Zeromaru said 10:48AM on 5-07-2007
Just one comment, and I say this as a Linux user that's entirely sick of Mac user smugness and ignorance. And that's on Spotlight. "another popular desktop OS and its search feature". You are, of course, referring to Vista's Search. Yes Apple had this on the market first. But Microsoft announced Search (and I do believe was available in developer alpha builds at the time) way back about a year before Spotlight was announced.
For the record, it's good that Apple stole ideas from Microsoft. It's good that Microsoft stole from Apple. It's good that they both stole ideas from everybody else. What's bad is when they claim they came up with the idea. Microsoft is guilty of it too (just recently they claimed the password-for-administrative-functions was their idea, which is exactly like the 20+-year-old sudo utility).
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trainwrecka said 11:02AM on 5-07-2007
the first mac i owned came with tiger pre-installed, so i would say i'm pretty lucky. tiger was so far ahead of windows anything - that i along with my whole family - were switched to macs within 6 months. i never thought i would see my mom making DVD movies.
the first mac i worked with was running OS9... that was not a fun experience. it was more frustrating than anything. never saw myself switching to that operating system.
as a former windows user the only thing i'm not crazy about is the mac's mouse. first it was single click only, now it is some ghetto version of a multi-button mouse. sure the design is smooth , but the functionality of the apple mice is far inferior to the pc counterpart. i've been using the logitech MX revolution and LOVE it, but it still doesn't mirror the pc mouse.
________________
http://twibe.com
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Michael Rose said 11:06AM on 5-07-2007
Zeromaru -- Yes, that was a gentle jab at Vista. I didn't mean to imply that Apple invented desktop search.
"Smug Mac users" -- here at the Unofficial Apple Weblog, I think we prefer the term "quiet confidence." :-)
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Eddie Hargreaves said 2:58AM on 5-09-2007
FileVault and Exposé were features introduced in Panther. Yes, they're still around in Tiger, but if that's the criteria why not 'love' Tiger for the Dock or Finder window sidebars?
One thing I love about Tiger is the built-in Dictionary, be it the application, widget or Control-Command-D feature.
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Ryu said 11:22AM on 5-07-2007
Let's not start a war here, eh? haha
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Dave said 11:28AM on 5-07-2007
Re: desktop search - who cares when it was announced? Its when it was IMPLEMENTED that matters. Now I can't say with any confidence that OS X was the first implementation,but isn't thats what is important?
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ThunkDifferent.com said 11:29AM on 5-07-2007
It is true that some of the features were available on Linux and other operating services first, but Apple does them,well. I do think that Tiger hogs the RAM a bit though. I had a g3 ibook with 640 RAM and by 1999 powerbook with an expansion slot runs Panther at an equal speed to my ibook if not faster, and that one only runs 256 RAM. i do miss the more advanced Tiger features much however. i can't wait for Leopard!
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/
http://ThunkDifferent.com
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Brady J. Frey said 11:52AM on 5-07-2007
"Sure, it requires hefty hardware..."Unless you install http://www.ecamm.com/mac/powerboost/ so your friends on G4 laptops
can multichat:)
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Michael Rose said 12:18PM on 5-07-2007
#12 -- Eddie, you're absolutely right; both FileVault and Exposé were 10.3 introductions. My apologies for the error. I'm firing my entire fact-checking staff.
(Post updated.)
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Giao said 12:41PM on 5-07-2007
"Desktop search" was first available on BeOS. The guy behind that feature now works for Apple. BeOS ran on Apple hardware in the way back when.
For all intents and purposes, "Desktop Search" happened first with Apple.
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Kevin said 1:16PM on 5-07-2007
The best reason to love Tiger is that it was the longest-lived of the crop of OS X releases. For developers, this gave them a stable platform to develop on for the widest majority of users.
As for "Mac user smugness and ignorance" - who let in the riff-raff?
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Macskeeball said 1:20PM on 5-07-2007
Safari was introduced with Jaguar, actually.
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jason mark said 1:24PM on 5-07-2007
Humm... I would consider Spotlight one of the biggest steps back. It's slow, and doesn't work. The old "command-F" just worked. I know in *theory* Spotlight is better, but it takes so long to find what I'm looking for even if I know the filename, and the quickkey is inconvenient enough that it comes up when not needed.
Jason
http:www.gravityswitch.com
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Malcolm McClure said 1:25PM on 5-07-2007
Desktop Manager plugin with Tiger already provides the most useful single advance billed for Panther.
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Michael Rose said 1:41PM on 5-07-2007
#16 -- Safari, yes; Safari RSS is Tiger.
***REVISED*** as noted, the post mistakenly said "introduced in Panther," now fixed. The fired fact checking team is now being rehired, chastised, and fired again.
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Michael Rose said 1:43PM on 5-07-2007
#17: Like I said, Spotlight and Mac users have a love-hate relationship. What you're missing is that Spotlight's scope of action -- full-text searching, a zillion datatypes, comment and metadata indexing, drill-down access into monolithic datastores like Entourage or Yojimbo -- is way, way bigger than searching for files by name.
I often miss the old Cmd-F file search, and there are good utilities to replace it. Spotlight is a different animal.
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