ptalk > Tiger burning bright

Tiger burning bright

As for a general review, Tiger seems significantly zippier (once Spotlight stops grinding your disk) than Panther. I agree with most of the Ars review on the UI ‘improvements’, they are not.

Glitches

• Archive and install does not preserve custom pix you put on accounts, it graciously gives you some default pic, and then when it realizes that your Address card is now ‘out of date’, it erases your pic in your vcard.

• iChat still doesn’t unify multiple accounts in a sane way. I have several people’s cells listed as alternate iChat addresses (at least with Verizon #’s you can IM +1<cell #> and it will send as an SMS, which they can reply to; this is really a feature of AIM). The new iChat decided to tell me that these people were now always on line. It does note that they are ‘mobile’ when that is the only active account, but that means I can’t see their real state. I ended up removing these accounts for now.

• Mail seems to have some disagreement with my home courier imap server where it asks over and over for a message that IMAP refuses to give up. This account is stale, so I will just turn it off. It is not worth trying to figure out.

• I use Fink emacs, since the Apple one is not X-enabled (why, I do not know, now that Apple supplies an X server, you would think that they would build their emacs X-aware, or upgrade it when you install X). I had to force-rebuild emacs in fink. The Panther version got some bizarre malloc error. Makes sense, since you have an all new gcc in Tiger.

• Oh, and there is something funky where you cannot access any ‘legacy’ afp: servers. I think this is just a bug that will get fixed eventually… [Later: Apparently not. OS X is just not going to support afp: over AppleTalk any more!] There is a new feature where you can tell the Finder to tunnel afp: over ssh.

• Haven’t figured out if dashboard is worthwhile. Since it is hidden, I probably will never remember to use it. AFAICT, it just means that there are a bunch of widget runtimes around, which seem to waste memory and cpu even when not displayed?

• I think there may be some confusion about all the ways to sync. What happens if I tell my calendar to sync to .mac on two computers and both computers think they are also publishing those calendars to .mac so my family can share them? Who’s on first?

• So far spotlight has a) made me aware of some emails that I should have deleted, b) made me realize that I need to spend a lot more time putting keywords on my photos, if iPhoto would stop crashing every time it complains that my firewall is blocking sharing, and c) made me wonder if it is at all useful to have my lps playpens indexed — or any code directories for that matter: it seems unlikely I really want to see all those .h files.

• TextEdit can open Word files. Cool. I am one step closer to deleting MS Office from my drive. Hey. Pages can import and export Word files. Even cooler.

• Preview understands PDF 1.5, annotations, forms. Hm. Do I need Acrobat any more? Does Apple pay Adobe a license fee?

Haven’t noticed the other 193 ‘new features’ yet…