Tiger Impressions?

[UglyShoes]

Tiger Impressions?

[UglyShoes]

Well,  got Tiger today.

So far, not too thrilled.  It's been a bit of a lemon for me.

Curious how others are doing.

Basically, stuff is ether broken. Or is designed dumb.  Big problem number one is Dashboard, I had so waited for this.   It's pretty nice, but has a massive design flaw that makes it worthless, and if anyone goes to the discussions at apple.com, you can see apple is getting a ear full.  Basically, it's all or nothing.  You can't leave an app on your desktop, so say something like the weather widget, or itunes widget that should be on your desk all the time, to have any usefulness is not.  You have to launch dashboard to get the widgets up (brings up all the ones you have set), and then click on the widget (also makes the screen dark during this).  So you have a choice, click on itunes to skip to the next song, or open dashboard, select the widget, click next, then close dashboard.  You get the idea, really pointless.    The apps are pretty slick, but this oversight kills the whole thing.  Sure for apps you use every now and then, popping up then going away is fine. But widgets that are really useful need to be up all the time.  Konfabulator got this right. How apple could be so dumb I don't know.   Also some of the widgets are broken, like the tile game. Some say it works, others like me it doesn't. (not a real issue, but anything broken is bad).

Slide show is a new feature, and a very much needed one. You can select some pictures and right click and open them in a slide show. Which is nice.  Problem is that it tends to be broken, and requires people to restart finder for it to work.  But when it works it's pretty spiffy. Though apple messed up again, by making it full screen only. So if you are looking at pictures, thats all you can do. And to go back to something on your desktop you have to close it.  Again, dumb. All apple needs to do is add a option to have it in a window (like windows picture and fax viewer) and all is good.

On the more positive. Preview is much faster, and added some option, and is in general much better app now.

They added a option when you right click the safari icon to create a new window. No more going through previous windows to make new ones. But still you should be able to just click safari icon and get new ones, not have minimized ones get launched.

The new quicktime is a bit nicer, well, so far the biggy I noticed was that when you click on the green circle it enlarges the window to a size that doesn't put the play button behind the dock.

Of course the added simple "well duh" things that people have been wondering about. Such as they added a option to sync birthdays from address book to ical.

Lots more stuff to mess with.  but I think I'm going to re-install this. I did a archive option and that let a the old apps, not caring for that, would like it to be clean but keep my settings.

System is running slow, don't think things are right.

Also was surprised, apple threw in a iWorks trial cd,  that was a nice surprise, will give it a go.

So anyone else get tiger and what are your thoughts.   To me it's been disappointing so far.  I think a 10.4.1 will be out real soon, since it seams people have enough bugs. Hopefully apple does something with dashboard fast.

[Fanatik]

Wow. I was going to get it but that sounds like a lot of stuff thats useless to me.

[UglyShoes]

Don't get me wrong, it's progress,  but some of it is a real bummer.  I wouldn't go without it.  Even a few simple things is a boost.  I really don't think apple went backwards at all.  But some of the forward steps went a bit off course.

[nervouschimp]

weird. feels way faster to me. spotlight is very nice and very fast. i could care less about dashboard as it is currently implemented. i have a 30-inch screen, so i have all the room i need to keep those widgets open 24-7. i am sure that there will soon be a 3rd party hack for this. in the mean time Konfabulator is far superior. uglyshoes, move your shuffle from the front of your powermac. i kicked mine by accident yesterday, and broke it off right at the usb plug. i'm bummed.

[UglyShoes]

I take it you are referring to my post where I feared this.   I need to move it someplace.  Been thinking about getting the dock for it.  All my hubs are remove (in/under cabinets).  And the USB card in the back is not in any way easy to get at.  I tend to only put it in there as need. It doesn't stay.

I think I definitely need to re-install tiger fresh.  But even still, there seams to be a lot of bugs in it, and soon as I find them, I find I'm far from the only one.  Just a lot of dumb strange stuff.  In a way things seam faster, but then something grinds to a halt.

Far as Dashboard, I think they can fix it soon. Its already been seen that widgets can live on their own in dashboard, just only one at a time, and soon as you open dashboard again its all over.  But from the apple discussion forums, their is a ton of problems with dashboard.  Far as the locking to desktop, they clearly can, it's just a matter if apple will.  There is a lot of things in OSX they could do, but probably won't.  I just keep finding them going in the right direction but coming up short. Always with missing options that seam obvious.  I think if apple intended DB to work properly they would have done it in the first place, like Konfabulator worked.  But they chose not to,  so it's not like they were in a spot of "never thought of that".  If anything its because apple likes to have one way.  Just like how the slide show is full screen only, no option for a window.  Or how adding stuff to your itunes or iphoto library is basically a one way deal, no nice way to remove stuff.  Apple likes to implement one way, and stick with it. So they seam to take the all widgets as one approach.  To have an option would mean making Dashboard a bit less simplistic.   But seeing that the world seams to be flipping out over this, I think they will see the light.

I've yet to see use in spotlight.  It's a search feature, which i rarely use.  Never liked them.

[JhuFrank]

Hmm, I am waiting for the first software update before I jump onboard.

[TheEagleCD]

any comments on Tiger performance on a Mac mini?

Edit: just found the performance page of Anandtech's Tiger review. here's three comments which I found to be interesting:

quote:
What's interesting here is that because Spotlight performance isn't something that I could quantify in Panther (since Spotlight obviously wasn't a feature of Panther), the PowerBook and mini feel slower in Tiger to me than they were in Panther.  It's not because the OS is actually slower, but it's because my usage models have changed with Tiger - thus putting more emphasis on fast hard disk performance.  I'd also say that there's a pretty noticeable performance difference in Spotlight between the mini's 5400RPM 2.5" hard drive in comparison to my older PowerBook's 4200RPM 2.5" hard drive.

quote:
Exposé performs basically identical to Panther under the new OS, regardless of what system I'm talking about.  The Mac mini continues to have issues at higher resolutions, as Exposé stops being smooth and now even Dashboard is choppy on the mini.

quote:
The main thing to keep in mind is that all four of the systems I tried under Tiger performed, overall and at worst, no differently than under Panther.

[chunkyeggfoo]

Tiger REALLY chugs on my G4 350mhz Sawtooth. Granted I have only 128MB of SDRAM but for what's it worth...

[UglyShoes]

I reloaded my computer with a clean install a bit ago.  Things run much better  now,  less weird ness going on, just seams more right.

[stebesplace]

I think I am going to clean my disk, then put tiger on once it comes ADC in the mail. I want to make a seperate swap when i'm working on photoshop and other programs, which is something different from what I had. I want to get an external HD so I can keep all my media related stuff on that rather than on my regular disk. Once I get the external, then I guess i'll put tiger on. Sounds like there may be some problems, but I am looking forward to the automater thinger...

[OurFord]

Still waiting for my copy of Tiger - but since I don't have any 'mission critical'
work on my Mac mini at the moment, I think i'll put up with the problems and await
the iterative update.

Stebesplace - are you going to put the PS swap on an external drive or on a partition?

...just an aside, does anyone think that the Automater character looks like that robot thingee in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" - albeit a little bit thinner

[UglyShoes]

OurFord,   your not the first to notice that about the Hitchhiker robot deal  (think his name is Marvin).  I think it's a 2 similar things at the same time without the other knowing,  since Apple showed the automator robot icon a while back, and no one outside of the film saw Marvin till recently.


I am curious to get automator figured out.

[OurFord]

UglyShoes...

Does seem quite timely, although when I do go see the movie
I bet I'm gonna keep wishing Marvin was batch-renaming some iPhoto files!

Can't wait for TIGER. I spose I'm in a different category than all the rest of you: my only experience with the Apple OS has been 2 weeks futzing around with 10.3.9 (after upgrading my mini from 10.3.7). I won't have any apps (or data for that matter) to migrate over and I don't have an OS9 hangover either - so my expectations are probably a bit different than the long-time apple-goers here at Sudhian.

[UglyShoes]

Ourford,   Eh, I'm not that much different, I bought this computer back in like October. First mac, only spent a bit of time with them in school.  I can't stand OS9.  And even early version of OSX weren't very hot.

I don't have much apps or such to deal with either.  With .Mac lots of the process is easy, just sync before and after and most stuff is good to go.  I don't have many apps, and didn't take much to get them going again.

I didn't dig into panther very much cause I knew Tiger would be out soon enough.

[gwimby]

Ugly you have .mac?
What do you use it for, and do you like it?

[OurFord]

Made an assumption UglyShoes, my apologies...

I think I've been flitting to too many sites/reviews where the user/community has been using
Mac's for like a billion years - anyway 2nd-ing qwimby's question: "What do you use it for?"

[UglyShoes]

no problem,  I know what you mean.  Go to an apple forum and ask something, and you get a response like anyone should knwo the answer yadda yadda cause they have been using macs forever.

For the .Mac,   well mainly I have used it for backing up bookmarks, address books and the like.  I have email from it too, but haven't given people it for fear of it getting spammed up. Plus I just don't like getting email addresses I don't know if I will use forever.

Also if you get a second mac, .mac becomes real handy for syncing stuff between them.

I was very interested in the webspace that came with it, but I haven't used it much, since they have it designed largely for use with their "wizards" for making webpages and such.  You can make your own page from scratch, just not as friendly as it could be for that. And simple things, like just having a folder of pictures out there, and give people the link to the folder and let them see a list of pictures, nope no luck there, you have to send them the URL to each picture.  Apple apparently doesn't want people to be able to do things simply.  They want you to use the homepage photo page builder junk.

.mac is useful, but it has it's annoyances.  But for things like reformatting ones computer it's great,  just sync the box, then format and reload,  sync again, and all your book marks are their, calendars, address book, mail, mail settings, keychain settings and so forth. Makes things very nice.

[OurFord]

Thanks for the insights UglyShoes...yeah it does sound quite useful if you've got another mac, although in my case (only having the one Mac mini in the house) it might seem a bit overkill - I do want an IMAP account though.

...slightly off-topic, but I just went down to my Local Mac shop and watched all the new 1080p HD trailers on a Dual 2.5 G5m, equiped with a 30-inch display. One word........ASTOUNDING!