“Every time Apple revises its Unix-based operating system, it produces a list of dozens and dozens of enhancements — more than any ordinary human wants to read through — and some of them so minor they’re barely worth mentioning,” Glenn Fleishmann writes for InformationWeek. “In their marketing, Apple wants to emphasize just a handful of features, some of them to tweak Microsoft for not offering them or having already deleted them from Longhorn’s list of upgrades. Others are just plain cool, demo well, and might appeal to existing users who need some encouragement to part with their money for an upgrade.”
“Reviewing an operating system is always a tricky task: either you already like the general approach and are considering upgrading to a new version, or you have an aversion (rarely disinterest) in the OS and want ammunition,” Fleishmann writes. “Let me try to avoid both paths by focusing on what’s new in Tiger. If you haven’t used Mac OS X before, you should look elsewhere for an article that covers its general approach. Suffice it to say here it is the BSD flavor of Unix with tons of open source and free software under the hood and a pretty and usable interface on top.”
“When I first heard about Tiger a year ago, I wasn’t confident that there was enough there to convince me and other power users to upgrade. The more I’ve worked with it and then had to switch back to Panther for my more routine projects, I’ve found myself less and less satisfied with the previous system release. That’s another way to say that Tiger was a compelling upgrade for me,” Fleishmann writes.
Full article here.
Advertisement: Pre-order Mac OS X Tiger today for delivery on April 29th and get access to an exclusive online seminar. Free shipping. Just $129.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Associated Press: Mac OS X Tiger ‘provides another excellent incentive to switch from Windows’ – April 28, 2005
NY Times: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger is the most secure, stable and satisfying OS on earth – April 28, 2005
Mossberg: Apple’s Tiger ‘the best, most advanced personal computer operating system on the market’ – April 28, 2005
InformationWeek columnist: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘a compelling upgrade’ – April 28, 2005
Wired News: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘full of welcome surprises’ – April 27, 2005
Its gonna be impossible to ever use a computer without Tiger after you have used spotlight.
The amount of time it will save will be amazing, and remember…time is money…money for apple shareholders!
Search on, baby
Wizeguy…how would you know…you get a sneak preview edition and been working with it for years?
Yo!searchlight! NNNnow I can find my porn quicker that I got hidden deep in the bowels of my harddrive…
can i just say, had tiger for a week.. and I use the computer completely differently already from a week ago. I thought that panther was a great update, and was really pleased with it for my year and a half with it, but now it seems as old as jaguar and puma.
hq:
I, ahem, stumbled across a Tiger beta a few months ago and played with it for a few days. It only takes half an hour to be fully convinced that Spotlight can change how you navigate your file system. The Finder in its current form is doomed. I’m not sure how it’s going to change exactly, but change it will.
Spotlight is brought to you by the Unix function “grep” (see any Unix manual). This demonstrates the brilliance of the idea of putting Apple’s classy and functional GUI on top of BSD Unix to produce a bullet proof, industrial grade OS.
The often cited (but never sighted) Longhorn search utility apparently requires adding meta-data to all of your files. If that’s the case Longhorn isn’t even in the same league as Tiger.
It’s happening. They won’t be happy doing without it after using it in earnest for real world tasking.
Its gonna be impossible to ever use a computer without Tiger after you have used spotlight
—
Hmm kinda like goin back to XP?
Zeke beyond the obvious text, Office, PDF files Spotlight requires a plug-in as well, witness the Ashlar-Vellum plug-ins that were announced this week.
MDN Magic Word: “lead” as in where Tiger leads Longhorn cannot follow.
Zeke: Spotlight is brought to you by the Unix function “grep”
Possibly behind the scenes, yes. But grep doesn’t pre-index and doesn’t provide realtime hits on search parameters.
Tommy Boy,
I imagine that’s a purposeful limitation. You usually don’t really want to search the contents of most other files. It would yield large and mostly unuseful results.
Had Tiger previewed for us yesterday – Spotlight is using SQLite to index the files, storing that information in four hidden files on the volume, it’s not a real time GREP – can be used at the CLI (command line interface), forgetting the real command. It takes 1-2 hours to build the index files then can update them real time from then on. I’m getting several reports from people that got Tiger early it’s MUCH faster than Panther even on Powerbooks.
My copy is getting delivered tonight by FedEx direct from Apple – but I can’t install it on my Powerbook until the VPN client I need to have working tests out OK – my wife’s G5 dual 2.5 doesn’t have that limitation
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” /> MDN magic word “heavy” as in a heavy duty OS!