Tiger, grrrr!

[angelophile]

Just finished installing Tiger, the latest version of the Mac operating system software on my computer.

Can't say I've noticed a significant advantage. It's supposed to be more stable (maybe it is, but we bought it cos one of out computers crashes regularly each morning - it still did), faster (not that I've seen) and more user friendly (not especially).

I'm struggling to notice any REAL difference. The only thing of note is a different setup for windows, that takes up more space (grrr), and a cool feature called dashboard, where at the cloick of a single button you can pull up dictionaries, travel times, news, yellow pages, clock, calculator, puzzles, weather, translation etc. That I like.

Ho hum.

Comments

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

Sadly, that's how it usually works with newer versions of things. They claim a lot of difference, but as an end user, you don't see much of it.

*posting via her blackberry while she awaits someone with keycard access to arrove at work*

[angelophile.livejournal.com]

Well, considering the small amount of difference between every other mac upgrade, I wasn't actually expecting too much.

There was only a HUGE leap between everything else and the first OS X which was radically different.

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

Yeah. OSX was an incredible leap from OS9. A very, very good one, too.

But now I think it's really just performance issues that get changed and things you don't really see much of. Other than that bar you mentioned. That sounds pretty nifty, actually.

Tiger

[happy-hacker.livejournal.com]

Things to check out in Tiger:
Spotlight. This is one of THE big features of Tiger. Find files by title or content *quickly*.
Dashboard. Yeah, you found that one. :)

Those are the biggies. If you've only got 256mb of RAM and aren't seeing performance improvements, get more. 256 is the minimum for Tiger. Also make sure you pull down the tiger updates - they're up to 10.4.2. 10.4.0 was definitely a dog - not ready for prime-time, buggy, flakey, and sucky. 10.4.2 has most of the really dumb bugs worked out and is much nicer. Runs better/faster too.

Also, as with all versions of OS X, a clean install or archive and install works better than an upgrade. Apple can't seem to write an installer that does the upgrades exactly right anymore, sadly.

-HH

Re: Tiger

[angelophile.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, a clean install wasn't really an option. There's 50 GB of stuff on my HD I couldn't face replacing from CD after a clean install.

I don't seem to have had any problems so far. What's the difference? Faster, or...?

I've got 768 ram or something, so should be safe.

Re: Tiger

[happy-hacker.livejournal.com]

If you have enough room on the hard disk (ie at least another 50 gigs) archive and restore backs up everything, installs the new OS, then pulls everything in your account back into the new system. It also keeps a copy of your old system, so applications and other things you've installed can be dragged and dropped into the new one selectively. Updated systems seem to have less smooth performance. Whether this is from file permissions being set wrong or what, I don't know. Apple seems to have real trouble grasping the concept that yes, the installer can get borked up by permissions and ownership, and it should verify (gasp) that what it thinks it has done really worked. Happily the OS itself is better than the installer.

Other new stuff in 10.4: it has native understanding of RSS feeds. Safari groks them (and will hand them off to your RSS weapon of choice, if you tell it to), refinements in the dock (anything currently in the dock can be removed from the dock or started at login by right clicking on the dock icon). Lots of little stuff like this. 10.4's biggest changes are under the hood. They changed the kernel to allow things to parallelize better, and you really see this at boot time. It's a lot faster once it's done indexing the disk(s) for Spotlight. They also offloaded more of the graphics system to the video card, though as yet I don't think this is enabled by default. They added CoreGraphics, which gives you the ability to handle and do basic transforms on images right in the OS, and I *think* CoreGraphics is handled in the video card as well, as it should be. Once software starts taking advantage of that, things like photoshop should *scream*.

THe other big thing is that iChat now supports jabber servers, though it's a little clunky and doesn't exploit Jabber's biggest strength - that the jabber *server* can have modules that connect it to ICQ, MSN, etc and give them all to you in a jabber client. I haven't tried this function since 10.4.0, so it may be better now.

Also the usual: new video codecs, bug fixes, code optimization, yadda yadda.

-HH