Tiger 05/07

Just some more on my impressions on Tiger.

Sometimes I notice things but don't know how to put it into words until I hear someone else say it and then I get that "Aha!" thing. One of those thing is how I feel about Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger).

I've noticed an overall speed boost. When I first cracked it open I remarked that it felt like I was using a brand new machine, but then I thought that can't be right, but is just like that — for me at least.

I'm glad that transparency has returned to the UI. When I got my first Powerbook, there was a transparent GIF of the Tazmanian Devil that I was fond of. I got it off of the Netscape start page of the time. I used it as my buddy icon and my account pic When I upgraded to Panther from Jaguar it was fine, but later when I did a clean install I found that transparency had disappeared, well at least for my own graphics.

This is Automator. He will become a very good friend of mine shortly. I just haven't dug into the Tiger and it's features yet. This is one of the ways Macs make things easier or so I've heard. I will add more on this later as I get into it.

iChat AV is one of my favorite upgrades. First, they stepped up the "groups" feature. I can't stand AIM for Mac. I tried using it a bit because iChat was duplicating my buddies in each group, but it made just editing the buddy list a task. The only current feature in 4.7 that might interest me is "Multi-point File Sharing." iChat feels so much better. iChat has also added features I would normally look to AIM for. You can, now, edit your AIM profile, view the profiles of others. I haven't used the camera and audio features yet.

The video quality on QuickTime 7 is insane. It's looks as good as any DVD I've played on my Powerbook, although I haven't noticed any banding in the colors that you see on some DVD's. It really does look the same when scaled up. You can even capture stills which I recall trying to do with the screen capture shortcuts in previous versions unsuccessfully. The above enhancements were available on the new HD content. I don't imagine that the regular QuickTime format can be scaled losslessly.

This is a clip from the QuickTime HD Gallery of the movie Serenity. I chose to capture this because I thought it was cool, not that she was doing a full split, but that she was doing the split on the ceiling. 

Not much really can I say. Safari RSS. I did not use the older versions of Safari accept to view "Apple" sites, DaringFireball and MacDevCenter. I can say that since I enjoy reading dated content, blogs, news articles, etc, the RSS feature comes in handy. You can sort by date, title, source and new. It even seems that Spotlight has been integrated into into the RSS search, I was getting results as I was typed words into the search field.

As you can see I am still happy with Tiger. Things are going to be a little slow given my new situation but I will try to update as often as possible.