Ten things we still love about Tiger

iChat video multi-chat is pointless unless you know that many people that have a Mac and are available to chat at the same time. The built-in camera is kind of sad too, practically non-existent low light capability.

I think Spotlight is annoying. I've even had cases where it refused to find files that fit the criteria. Their means of "drilling down" is pretty tedious. And if I know an exact word that's in the file name and don't want to see any other results where that word might be in thousands of other files? Forget it, I won't be able to narrow it down very quickly. It's actually easier and faster to do a find in the terminal.

How about Automator? Sure, it's powerful for somethings, but it has some brain-dead limitations. I can combine multiple PDFs into one file, but there is no means for you to tell the OS where to put it. It ends up as a non-descript file in the /tmp/ directory where I have to fish it out manually. I don't think Automator deserved the top billing it got in the Tiger promotional material. It's one of those bullet point features that they can pretend is major but very few people actually use it.

Dashboard wastes a LOT of memory. For my Macs with 2GB, I have it disabled because the lag was noticeable.

I'm just not that impressed with the actual improvemetns in Tiger. I had dropped down to Panther once and on the whole, just about nothing changed in my typical use.

iChat AV is net, but pointless, unless you're a part of an all mac family or support group. Seeing as I can ONLY use iChat AV's multi video chat feature with other people using a less then 2 year old mac, that kinda makes it impossible to use that "neato Feature"

Michael Rose: "I often miss the old Cmd-F file search, and there are good utilities to replace it. Spotlight is a different animal."

Cmd-F search is still there in Tiger. It works quite good as well.

@Malcolm McClure, Panther is 10.3. Since the codenames can be confusing to some people, here's a list.

10.0- Cheetah (ironic, considering the extreme sluggishness)
10.1- Puma
10.2- Jaguar
10.3- Panther
10.4- Tiger (current release)
10.5- Leopard (not yet released)

Just as a general clarification, the mention of Safari being based on Konqueror is a very clear reference to when Steve Jobs first introduced Safari in a keynote (not sure which off the top of my head). Konqueror is a browser/file manager for KDE, which is basically a popular desktop environment for *nix basically.

That original introduction of Safari was back when Safari's KHTML-based rendering engine was actually part of the Safari app itself. Mail (and I think Help viewer) used its own rendering engine. Eventually Safari's rendering engine was made into a framework known as WebKit that could be used by any app on the system (including 3rd party apps).

The point is that the part about Safari in the original post makes a very clear reference to Safari's early days, but falsely states that those early days began with Panther (10.3). Once again, Safari began life with Jaguar (10.2).

@Michael Rose, reread #8 in the post. Specifically, read this: "Although the Konqueror-based browser made its debut in Panther..."

It's clearly talking about Safari in general, and falsely says that Safari was first introduced with Panther (10.3), when it actually started life in Jaguar (10.2).

#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.

#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.

Desktop Manager plugin with Tiger already provides the most useful single advance billed for Panther.

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