Roar! Go on, be a Tiger
So I finally upgraded to Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4. Why did the project codename become so prominent in Apple products. It is a little confusing, did I just upgrade from Panther or was it Jaguar. I find myself thinking, is a Jaguar bigger than a Panther. Numbers seem to be much easier to keep in a linear order.
I wasn’t planning on upgrading because I was not excited at all about the three hyped features: Spotlight, Dashboard and Automator. I know where my documents are; I had already grown bored with Konfabulator and its gimmicky widgets; and I know how to use cron, scripting and Photoshop actions. So each didn’t address anything for me.
But I finally forked over my money because of a few small items:
1) files show up immediately in finder. A minor annoyance to have to click the window, switch views just to have a file show up. This is now fixed.
2) Preview browsing of images was supposed to be greatly improved. I’m not quite sure about this yet, I need to play with it more. It seems Windows image viewer is still nicer, but at least Preview shows PDF files a lot better. Plus it is so much faster to launch than Acrobat Reader.
3) I was hoping that Tiger would fix my Wake From Sleep problems, the computer not my personal issues, that’s why there is coffee. Unfortunately, my system still freezes when waking from sleep.
4) Safari’s context menu has a back button, alone almost worth the $99 upgrade (w/ Amazon Rebate)
What I don’t like about Tiger is that there are a lot of goofy skins and schemes now. The whole system doesn’t feel consistent, more like a bunch of random software components cobbled together. But all in and all, the system is faster, it addressed some issues I had. Plus I’m sure there are some other new features I’ll end up finding and enjoying.