Saturday, April 30, 2005
Bill Palmer's MacOS X Tiger review
Fun stuff. It's been a year and a half since we've had a new operating system to play with. Sure, there were (count 'em) nine free updates released for Panther in the intervening eighteen months, but none of them actually contained anything, you know, cool.
Installation was, you know, normal. Just what you've come to expect from an Apple release. Not much else to say about it.
Once it was installed, like a kid on Christmas morning, I forgot all about why I'd bought it in the first place (to eke additional spped out of an aging G4 PowerBook) and raced right into the new toys. Dashboard, which I was quite sure I wouldn't want to go anywhere near, turned out to be eight kinds of fun to play with. In fact, I really like the idea of my specific-task applications all being a mere keystroke away. Just last week I was in the room with another Mac user, who asked where the heck his computer's calculator was. "Go to the Finder, open a window, click on Applications, find your calculator and launch it" is just too much of an explanation to be worthwhile, you know? Sure, you can put something like a calculator in the Dock (mine is), but how many little apps like the calculator do you want taking up space in your Dock? And yeah, you can put your Applications folder in your Dock (mine is also), but that's just clunky.
Dashboard, on the other hand, as it turns out, is a very handy way of putting all such tools immediately in front of you. And like a kid in a candy store, I couldn't help but place nearly every Dashboard Widget available somewhere on my screen, rearrange them all a million times, and think to myself, "how cool is this?". I wanted even more, so I went to Apple's website and downloaded some cool-sounding ones, and kept adding them to my desktop until I'd darn near filled the thing. And unlike Expose (which I almost never use), Dashboard is cool enough that I'm actually willing to have it corner-activated, and I'll just live with the fact that every now and then I end up launching it unintentially. Oddly enough, though, while you can now set Expose to be triggered by any modifier key at all (including, strangely enough, the Apple key), Dashboard can only be set to be triggered by one of the top-row keys (F1, F2, F12, etc.). So just as soon as I got excited about using the nearly pointless "Function" key at the bottom left corner of my PowerBook's keyboard to launch Dashboard, I just as quickly became disappointed that you can't do it that way. Oh well.
The problem with Dashboard, though, and it's presumably a temporary one, is that while there are plenty of cool Widgets, there aren't nearly enough useful ones. Apple may have abandoned Sherlock, but I won't be abandoning it until there's a Widget that gives me the same movie-lookup features that Sherlock currently does. There appear to be any number of third parties that are eagerly developing new Widgets as we speak, so hopefully Dashboard will realize its true potential before too long. I can tell you this, though: I'm not remotely interested, nor will I ever be, in any Widget that carries a price tag. So if third parties want to make a living by producing Widgets, then they're going to have to come up with something more creative than charging for them. Good luck to them on that front.
I launched the mail program and was promptly treated to a performance in which Mail imported every last one of my existing email messages (into itself?). Considering there are north of ten thousand of them, I suppose "prompt" is the wrong choice of word. But I love the new mail program. The interface is cleaner and makes more sense. Instead of your mailboxes hanging off the side of the window like an afterthought, they're now deeply integrated into the main window.
The best improvement lies with Mail's search function. Used to be, you'd have to click on a pop-up menu to choose whether you were searching for From, To, Entire Message, etc. But now it's done contextually, and although I haven't quite gotten used to it, I know I'm going to end up liking it.
It was right about this time that I began to recall why I bought this Tiger (speed boost), and started wondering why they're really wasn't any. It was then that I clicked on Spotlight, and found at least part of my answer. It seems Spotlight takes quite some time to initially index your entire computer, several hours in fact. So I crossed my fingers that all the indexing in the background was using up so much processing power that my speed boost was merely being masked, and that turned out to be the case to some extent. But still, Tiger almost felt slower than Panther, and if that was the case, then I'd thrown my money away and killed my productivity level at the same time. Momentary thoughts of doing something as drastic as reinstalling Panther just to get back to my previous speed levels were so repulsing that I popped open Activity Monitor to see what on earth might be going on. And I should have known what it was.
Each and every one of my precious/useless Dashboard Widgets was taking up a fair amount of both real and virtual memory, and with all fifteen or so of them combined, they were swallowing an unbelievable amount of resources. Just because they're all hidden doesn't mean they're not still running. I suppose on a G5 or even on a modern G4, they wouldn't be much of a burden at all. But on this ole 667 Mhz rig, it was clear to me that they were overwhelming the beast. So one by one, I shut off each and every Dashboard Widget until I was left with only one -- the local weather one -- and sure enough, I'd found my speed boost after all. So in order to keep my speed boost, it looks like I'm going to have to go light on the Dashboard stuff until I have my hands on my next laptop. And seeing as how Dashboard's Widgets still need some more time to be more fully developed, maybe that's not such a bad thing. Right about the time I'm buying a computer powerful enough to run a million Widgets without a hiccup, is right about the time that Dashboard ought to be fully coming into its own.
Having used Tiger for the better part of a day and a half now, I can tell you that there are many, many little yet ingenious improvements that I'm going to love about it. Far too many to list here, but it's almost as if Apple's engineers spent a year and a half trying to find everything about the MacOS X experience that could be considered even mildly annoying, and then proceeded to come up with a smarter way of implementing it. Tabbing backwards through applications? Solved. Searching Google for a term and then searching the resulting page for the same term? Nailed it. I could go on and on. I won't.
There are a few things that need to be refined. To get rid of a Dashboard Widget, you first have to click the "plus" button, which suggests that you're going to add one, not remove one (that's almost as dumb as clicking on the Start button to shut off a Windows PC). Not only can the Spotlight icon the menu bar not be moved to the other side of the menu clock, when you're typing in Spotlight's text-entry box, clicking the "up" arrow doesn't take your cursor to the beginning of the box as it obviously should. For some reason, Tiger thinks I now only have 384 MB of RAM in my PowerBook instead of the 512 MB I've had for the past year. And defying explanation, the keyboard shortcut for moving between Safari tabs has been totally screwed up for no reason at all. Apple-Shift-Left and Apple-Shift-Right still work, but only when your cursor is not in a text-extry box, making them inconsistent enough to be useless. The new "official" shortcuts, Apple-Shift-[ and Apple-Shift-], simply cannot be typed with one hand unless your hand has more than the five fingers that mine does. Moving between tabs is the single most common thing I do in Safari, and to reduce it to one of the most contorted key combinations ever concocted is just stupid...especially considering that there was no reason for the change and nothing gained in the process. If I wanted to use a web browser that's pathetic when it comes to moving between tabs, I'd use Firefox.
So what it comes down to with Tiger is that it represents several steps forward, but there are little things to be cleaned up here and there. But that's the really cool part. Unlike some companies that release an operating system and then spend the next several years not doing anything, Apple will spend the next year and a half cleaning up anything and everything that we can possibly come up with to complain about -- no matter how small.
And at this point in the evolution of MacOS X, all complaints are small ones.
Fun stuff. It's been a year and a half since we've had a new operating system to play with. Sure, there were (count 'em) nine free updates released for Panther in the intervening eighteen months, but none of them actually contained anything, you know, cool.
Installation was, you know, normal. Just what you've come to expect from an Apple release. Not much else to say about it.
Once it was installed, like a kid on Christmas morning, I forgot all about why I'd bought it in the first place (to eke additional spped out of an aging G4 PowerBook) and raced right into the new toys. Dashboard, which I was quite sure I wouldn't want to go anywhere near, turned out to be eight kinds of fun to play with. In fact, I really like the idea of my specific-task applications all being a mere keystroke away. Just last week I was in the room with another Mac user, who asked where the heck his computer's calculator was. "Go to the Finder, open a window, click on Applications, find your calculator and launch it" is just too much of an explanation to be worthwhile, you know? Sure, you can put something like a calculator in the Dock (mine is), but how many little apps like the calculator do you want taking up space in your Dock? And yeah, you can put your Applications folder in your Dock (mine is also), but that's just clunky.
Dashboard, on the other hand, as it turns out, is a very handy way of putting all such tools immediately in front of you. And like a kid in a candy store, I couldn't help but place nearly every Dashboard Widget available somewhere on my screen, rearrange them all a million times, and think to myself, "how cool is this?". I wanted even more, so I went to Apple's website and downloaded some cool-sounding ones, and kept adding them to my desktop until I'd darn near filled the thing. And unlike Expose (which I almost never use), Dashboard is cool enough that I'm actually willing to have it corner-activated, and I'll just live with the fact that every now and then I end up launching it unintentially. Oddly enough, though, while you can now set Expose to be triggered by any modifier key at all (including, strangely enough, the Apple key), Dashboard can only be set to be triggered by one of the top-row keys (F1, F2, F12, etc.). So just as soon as I got excited about using the nearly pointless "Function" key at the bottom left corner of my PowerBook's keyboard to launch Dashboard, I just as quickly became disappointed that you can't do it that way. Oh well.
The problem with Dashboard, though, and it's presumably a temporary one, is that while there are plenty of cool Widgets, there aren't nearly enough useful ones. Apple may have abandoned Sherlock, but I won't be abandoning it until there's a Widget that gives me the same movie-lookup features that Sherlock currently does. There appear to be any number of third parties that are eagerly developing new Widgets as we speak, so hopefully Dashboard will realize its true potential before too long. I can tell you this, though: I'm not remotely interested, nor will I ever be, in any Widget that carries a price tag. So if third parties want to make a living by producing Widgets, then they're going to have to come up with something more creative than charging for them. Good luck to them on that front.
I launched the mail program and was promptly treated to a performance in which Mail imported every last one of my existing email messages (into itself?). Considering there are north of ten thousand of them, I suppose "prompt" is the wrong choice of word. But I love the new mail program. The interface is cleaner and makes more sense. Instead of your mailboxes hanging off the side of the window like an afterthought, they're now deeply integrated into the main window.
The best improvement lies with Mail's search function. Used to be, you'd have to click on a pop-up menu to choose whether you were searching for From, To, Entire Message, etc. But now it's done contextually, and although I haven't quite gotten used to it, I know I'm going to end up liking it.
It was right about this time that I began to recall why I bought this Tiger (speed boost), and started wondering why they're really wasn't any. It was then that I clicked on Spotlight, and found at least part of my answer. It seems Spotlight takes quite some time to initially index your entire computer, several hours in fact. So I crossed my fingers that all the indexing in the background was using up so much processing power that my speed boost was merely being masked, and that turned out to be the case to some extent. But still, Tiger almost felt slower than Panther, and if that was the case, then I'd thrown my money away and killed my productivity level at the same time. Momentary thoughts of doing something as drastic as reinstalling Panther just to get back to my previous speed levels were so repulsing that I popped open Activity Monitor to see what on earth might be going on. And I should have known what it was.
Each and every one of my precious/useless Dashboard Widgets was taking up a fair amount of both real and virtual memory, and with all fifteen or so of them combined, they were swallowing an unbelievable amount of resources. Just because they're all hidden doesn't mean they're not still running. I suppose on a G5 or even on a modern G4, they wouldn't be much of a burden at all. But on this ole 667 Mhz rig, it was clear to me that they were overwhelming the beast. So one by one, I shut off each and every Dashboard Widget until I was left with only one -- the local weather one -- and sure enough, I'd found my speed boost after all. So in order to keep my speed boost, it looks like I'm going to have to go light on the Dashboard stuff until I have my hands on my next laptop. And seeing as how Dashboard's Widgets still need some more time to be more fully developed, maybe that's not such a bad thing. Right about the time I'm buying a computer powerful enough to run a million Widgets without a hiccup, is right about the time that Dashboard ought to be fully coming into its own.
Having used Tiger for the better part of a day and a half now, I can tell you that there are many, many little yet ingenious improvements that I'm going to love about it. Far too many to list here, but it's almost as if Apple's engineers spent a year and a half trying to find everything about the MacOS X experience that could be considered even mildly annoying, and then proceeded to come up with a smarter way of implementing it. Tabbing backwards through applications? Solved. Searching Google for a term and then searching the resulting page for the same term? Nailed it. I could go on and on. I won't.
There are a few things that need to be refined. To get rid of a Dashboard Widget, you first have to click the "plus" button, which suggests that you're going to add one, not remove one (that's almost as dumb as clicking on the Start button to shut off a Windows PC). Not only can the Spotlight icon the menu bar not be moved to the other side of the menu clock, when you're typing in Spotlight's text-entry box, clicking the "up" arrow doesn't take your cursor to the beginning of the box as it obviously should. For some reason, Tiger thinks I now only have 384 MB of RAM in my PowerBook instead of the 512 MB I've had for the past year. And defying explanation, the keyboard shortcut for moving between Safari tabs has been totally screwed up for no reason at all. Apple-Shift-Left and Apple-Shift-Right still work, but only when your cursor is not in a text-extry box, making them inconsistent enough to be useless. The new "official" shortcuts, Apple-Shift-[ and Apple-Shift-], simply cannot be typed with one hand unless your hand has more than the five fingers that mine does. Moving between tabs is the single most common thing I do in Safari, and to reduce it to one of the most contorted key combinations ever concocted is just stupid...especially considering that there was no reason for the change and nothing gained in the process. If I wanted to use a web browser that's pathetic when it comes to moving between tabs, I'd use Firefox.
So what it comes down to with Tiger is that it represents several steps forward, but there are little things to be cleaned up here and there. But that's the really cool part. Unlike some companies that release an operating system and then spend the next several years not doing anything, Apple will spend the next year and a half cleaning up anything and everything that we can possibly come up with to complain about -- no matter how small.
And at this point in the evolution of MacOS X, all complaints are small ones.
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