“I spent some time over at Apple yesterday taking a closer look of their new OS known as Tiger or Mac OS 10.4 I had seen it at MacWorld in January and was pretty impressed with the demo then, but seeing it up close and personal yesterday made it clear to me that Apple is light years ahead of Microsoft when it comes to developing PC operating systems,” Tim Bajarin writes for Technology Pundits. “There are a lot of new features in Tiger, including a much more powerful Safari Browser, a much better email client and something called the Automator, which is a simplified scripting system that quickly and easily can automate repetitive tasks. But, its real value is in three key components that really sets it apart from any OS on the market today.”
Bajarin writes, “The first new feature is their new desktop search engine called Spotlight… The second new feature worth pointing out is something called Dashboard. This is a new UI navigation tool that lets a user activate what Apple calls Widgets. Widgets are little programs that are mostly utilitarian in purpose, such as clocks, calculators, metric and currency converters, flight trackers, dictionary, etc. These little tools are extremely helpful and since they can be created in HTML, anyone who knows how to create a Web page could create additional Widgets of their own. This is the area where third party developers could be very creative and deliver all types of Widgets to sell to Mac users over time… The third feature I really like is their newest version of iChat. It now supports up to 10 people in audio conferences and up to four people in video conference mode. More importantly, the way they allow a user to see the other video conference participants are really innovative. It literally allows you to view the others in a 3D like environment where each person in the conference is framed as if they were sitting right in front of you at three different angles. And, you can even see their shadows on the virtual conference table in front of them, creating the illusion of all four people in the conference sitting together at a table having a chat. This alone is worth the price of the new OS.”
“Apple has created a really powerful new OS that will clearly make the Mac faithful happy and will also help them attract more new users to the Mac platform,” Bajarin concludes.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Why doesn’t Apple advertise Mac OS X on TV? – April 12, 2005
Apple to ship Mac OS X ‘Tiger’ on Friday, April 29; pre-orders start today – April 12, 2005
Apple Announces Mac OS X Server ‘Tiger’ to ship Friday, April 29 with 64-bit application support – April 12, 2005
Analysts: Apple’s new Tiger operating system could really impact Mac sales – April 12, 2005
Piper Jaffray raises Apple estimates on Mac OS X ‘Tiger’ release news – April 12, 2005
Hey Jerry T,
I am a designer and I work in a lot of PC shops (all Mac myself) and I can tell you that OSX will be able to use all of those PC fonts, no trouble. I swap back and forth all the time from my Mac to thier PCs. Conversion? Don’t need it anymore. OS X rocks. Read a little more here: http://www.apple.com/pro/design/kozlov/index3.html
Greg Wostrel
http://www.gwcreative.com
Greg-
Excellent! Thanks so much. I had no idea OSX can use “any” font format. As soon as I get the cross-grade information in line I’ll be switching at the next upgrade cycle.
BTW, I like your website. You do very nice work. Do you freelance? If so I’ll contact you through your site.
Thanks a million!
biased article.
Jerry T. Hope you can get back on a Mac soon. I can relate to the costs of being Mac in a windows world. I am the only Mac Business User in a company of 600. They provided me with a laptop but it had to be a PC so I got a Vaio.
Well, the Vaio sits gathering dust because I shelled out for a Tibook with my own cash. It just drove me nuts having to do things the windows way when I know there is something better. Life is too short and work time is too large a percentage of it to waste being unhappy with the main machine I have to use for it. So it was worth the cash for me to be able to enjoy my work day so much more (or at least reduce the frustrations
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