Views on OS X 10.4 Tiger

29/04/2005 19:57 | Categories: Apple | 0 Comments 

First thing I did yesterday when I got home is back up most of my stuff to my iPod (I could have used a blank DVD, but I was too lazy for that ) and installed Tiger. Even though I haven't had time to play much with it, I can still talk a bit about my first impressions...

The installation was easy and smooth, though you need to be careful not to overlook certain buttons in the installer. I chose the "Archive and Install" installation mode, which basically moves the whole old version of the system to a new folder called "Previous Systems" in the root of your disk and installs the new one form scratch, while keeping all your users and preferences. I did not want to do a clean install and I did not want to install 10.4 on top of 10.3 just to make sure that the installation was a clean as possible.

It took about 30min to install everything from DVD to my 1.25Ghz 15" Powerbook, but it would have probably taken longer if it wasn't because I noticed a button that allows to customize the items that are installed (similar to what you can do in most Linux distros, but at a much higher level -- you cannot remove very specific packages for example but you can select whether you want certain drivers or not, whether you want X11 at all or not, etc) Speaking about drivers, I saved 1.6Gb from disk by not installing any driver for printers (guess that all the "it just works" and "plug-n-play" has a price after all ) and an additional 700mb by only installing the English and Spanish translations.

Once the installation was ready, the computer booted into OS X 10.4 Tiger. I was surprised how fast the system started up, so I suppose Apple's work on launchd, a new take on the startup and daemon subsystem, has clearly paid off.

Once I got into Tiger, everyhting was in the same place where I had left it hardly 45 minutes ago. The first new thing I noticed was the little magnifier icon on the top right corner opposite the now shiny-looking Apple icon which gives access to Spotlight. Spotlight is Apple's new search and indexing technology for OS X that allows users to find any file almost instantly. As soon as I clicked the icon (or its hot-key, Control+Space) I saw this message:

Obviously, Spotlight had to index the contents of my hard disk before I could even search for anything The indexing took about 30-40 minutes and after that, Spotlight was ready to go. It is very easy to use and most of the times it will find exactly what you need... On the other hand, in some situations it is not that efficient. Typing a generic term like "plog" in my system will yield approximately 140.000 hits including files, email messages, documents and presentations but I suppose that's not Apple's fault...

A couple more things that I like about Spotlight is that it has commands to view, query and extract metadata from files from the command line (despite OS X's beautiful UI, I still find myself many times using Terminal), and the fact that it is pervasive: it is almost everywhere in the system like in the open dialogs or in Finder's new "Smart folders". I really love the these smart folders because I can do things like this:

I can create a folder (or a "saved search", which is exactly the same) which will always show me the PHP files that were modified today, something very useful for somebody like me dealing with my own code plus patches sent by other people, etc (see the upper window) The lower window shows all the new MP3 files that I added in the last 2 months, something which could be useful when it is time to back up those files that were recently added. There are lots more applications of this feature, and even lots more attributes that one can use to define the searches. The only downside is that some of the test searches I created took quite a while to produce any result... but I am still really excited about this feature.

Two nitpicks about Smart folders: first, the Finder's contextual menu only offers "new folder" and "new burnable folder" as options, but no "new smart folder" so the only way is to go to the "File..." menu and select the option from there. Second, the only places where you can save smart folder are: the "Saved searches" folder, the Desktop and your home folder. It is of course possible to move the file later on but it's a bit of an annoyance if you ask me. Let's see if 10.4.1 will fix this one.

Next in line is Dashboard: Apple's own implementation of the concept of desktop widgets similar to Konfabulator, SuperKaramba or gDesklets. I never cared too much about widgets on my desktop because I hardly ever see my desktop when working (I usually keep XCode and a browser taking the whole screen) However, I do like the idea of these widgets appearing with a hotkey (F12 by default) on top of desktop. All the widgets that can be added to Dashboard are so far quite useless but there's still some hope: it is possible to create widgets in Cocoa and ObjectiveC so we will probably see some useful ones in the future... Dashboard also has one of those nice Apple "touches" that Mac fans like so much to show off: when dropping a new widget on the desktop, the desktop itself and widgets around the new one will be affected by a really cool "ripple" effect similar to what happens when you drop a stone in a quiet lake. Though it's quite difficult to see in a still image, here you go:

Next thing I tried was the new Mail.app and Safari. Mail.app 2.0 spent about 5-10 minutes importing my old messages (as far as I know Apple changed the way files are stored in disk, from plain old mbox-like files to a single file for each message like maildir) When the process was over, I found myself facing Mail.app's new look:

I like the new look but the application itself like it doesn't belong here, at least when compared to other applications in the system. The blend of the toolbar with the window title bar looks good to me but it doesn't appear everywhere, and more importanly, the icons in the toolbar look *nothing* like other icons in the system. They are too small, not very self-descriptive and the fact that they are within some canvas or frame makes them very difficult to tell apart. Oh, and what's up with the centered toolbar?

Don't get me wrong, I still like the new Mail.app but Apple has always got a lot of praise because of its interface guidelines and somehow lately it feels like not even Apple themselves care too much about them... I am very much used to working with applications with different look-and-feel and this doesn't annoy me too much, but some people will find it downright outrageous. And they have a reason to. Speaking about different look-and-feel in different applications, think about my windows PC at work: Lotus Notes has its own look, Office and Outlook 2000 have its own look, Viso has a more modern look, Eclipse is again something quite different and the SAP client lives in its very own UI world. You see, it could always be worse

The tolbar merged with the window titlebar is a case of schyzophrenia all over the system: the finder doesn't show it, but Spotlight windows do. Keychain doesn't show it but System Preferences and XCode 2 do... It's even difficult to detect a pattern here. I *do* like this UI change, I just wish Apple had used accross all the system applications!

Going back to Mail.app, it also has got smart folders now (finally!!) I got used to smart folders in Evolution 1.1 or so (they were called VFolders back then as far as I remember) and I have missed them ever since... until yesterday I have already found plenty of uses for them, such as to monitor all the commits by certain people, to see all the messages received today or to have direct access to all unread messages without jumping from folder to folder:

Finally, Safari 2.0 feels *extremely* nice. I have only been using it for a few hours but it renders pages really, really fast. I'd probably say that almost as fast as Firefox in my work's Thinkpad T40 with a Pentium-M 1.6Ghz, and I really like it Safari also has support for RSS feeds and it works quite well, though I don't see myself dumping Newsfire and replacing it with Safari's ability to read RSS or Atom feeds.

There are still a lot of things that I haven't had time to play with such as Automator (which looks really really cool) or the new XCode 2, but this post has gotten way too long and I'd better stop it here

So far I am quite happy with OS X 10.4 Tiger. It also has a noticeable speed increase when compared to Panther and it feels snappier and more responsive than previous versions. And there's more to come: according to the section about Quartz 2D Extreme in ArsTechnica's review of OS X 10.4, Tiger does not have Quartz 2D Extreme enabled by default despite the major performance improvements... One can only wonder how fast will 10.4.1 or 10.4.2 be once Apple decides to enable this feature!