Impressions of Tiger
Fri, 2005-05-13 13:56 — jrearick
Well, I have been using Tiger for a while now. There are a few things that I have gripes about, but I believe most of the new stuff makes up for it. Here are some things I have noticed.
The first problem I found was the tab order in the TCP/IP tab in the Network Preferences. Tabbing from Router address to the DNS servers actually takes you to the spotlight and then to the DNS servers. It's a little annoying already now that I have set up 4 machines with Tiger so far.
Another problem I have is with my PowerBook. When I sit idle for about a minute, the screen dims. This is rather annoying when I'm reading a long article or am looking at something I need to concentrate on. It does this weather or not it is plugged into the wall. I can understand if it does it while on battery. I have fiddled with the settings in Energy Saver, but it doesn't seem to work. On power adaptor mode, I have it set to not put the screen to sleep.
Dashboard is a really neat utility. All the Apple widget seem to work really great. I have Dashboard mapped to my wheel click on my mouse so I can access it very easily. The widgets I usually run are weather for Ames, Yankton, and Auborn, NY, the Des Moines radar map, Calculator (I suck at the maths), iTunes controller, and a few sticky notes. For a while I had a package tracker up when I had my DVD-R media in the mail. I have noticed that some of the widgets (in particular the package trackers) do not save their settings when the dashboard/dock is reset. So, when I restart, log out/log in, or the dock randomly crashes, I have to reset some widgets. Also, there are some widgets that take up CPU time while it is in the background. For example, there is a battery indicator widget that takes a good 10% of my CPU while it's not displayed. Something like that should be able to conserve process cycles in order to maximize battery life anyway. Hopefully, widget developers will get smarter as time goes on.
Now, enough of my ranting about what I have found a little buggy. I really don't think those were huge problems, just a little annoying, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them will be fixed in 10.4.1. I want to talk about a few of the smaller things that I really enjoy abut Tiger.
Kerberos support is stellar. I was blown away by how easy it was to set up Mail.app to use ISU's email. I installed the most recent Kerberos Extras available at www.sitelicensed.iastate.edu and pulled down the edu.mit.Kerberos configuration file from www.public.iastate.edu/~kula/edu.mit.Kerberos to my /Library/Preferences file, all same as before. I then open Mail.app and walk thought the setup assistant. I enter my POP server and it automatically detects that it needs to use Kerberos v5 and prompts for the Kerberos authentication. All automatically, it just frickin' works!
Also, printer setup blew me away. The interface for printer setup has changed a lot, and a lot for the better. It is so much easier to set up a printer now. When configuring an IP printer, I just have to enter in the IP address and Tiger does the rest. It selects the correct drivers for you, and then prompts you for some of the installed options. It even has to ability to check on supply status and is linked to the Apple Online Store to help you order replacement supplies. The print dialog is also a lot simpler in some applications (Preview) that allows you to change the Page Setup options right inside the print dialog box. Very spiffy.
Another cool little thing is that Open dialog box browser allows for previews. This was extremely annoying when I add images to my Photo gallery before. Now I can see what the picture is while I'm adding it, so I can give it a proper caption.
Another really cool feature is Safari's RSS support. I have been using a really cool program called NetNewsWire for my RSS needs, and I though Safari was going to offer a redundant, less feature full implementation of an RSS reader. Though, there is a place to tell Safari what the default RSS reader is. Now when I see a site I would like to add to my RSS reader, I just click the RSS button and it appears in my news reader automatically.
Well, that's about it for now. I usually don't do reviews like this, but I really appreciate all the little things Apple has done to make my life just a little bit easier. They tend to come up with features that are extremely useful, that I never even thought about before. These features are not just the big things like Dashboard, Spotlight, or whatever that they hype, but the little things like printer setup, Kerberos, and the way the OS just works.
The first problem I found was the tab order in the TCP/IP tab in the Network Preferences. Tabbing from Router address to the DNS servers actually takes you to the spotlight and then to the DNS servers. It's a little annoying already now that I have set up 4 machines with Tiger so far.
Another problem I have is with my PowerBook. When I sit idle for about a minute, the screen dims. This is rather annoying when I'm reading a long article or am looking at something I need to concentrate on. It does this weather or not it is plugged into the wall. I can understand if it does it while on battery. I have fiddled with the settings in Energy Saver, but it doesn't seem to work. On power adaptor mode, I have it set to not put the screen to sleep.
Dashboard is a really neat utility. All the Apple widget seem to work really great. I have Dashboard mapped to my wheel click on my mouse so I can access it very easily. The widgets I usually run are weather for Ames, Yankton, and Auborn, NY, the Des Moines radar map, Calculator (I suck at the maths), iTunes controller, and a few sticky notes. For a while I had a package tracker up when I had my DVD-R media in the mail. I have noticed that some of the widgets (in particular the package trackers) do not save their settings when the dashboard/dock is reset. So, when I restart, log out/log in, or the dock randomly crashes, I have to reset some widgets. Also, there are some widgets that take up CPU time while it is in the background. For example, there is a battery indicator widget that takes a good 10% of my CPU while it's not displayed. Something like that should be able to conserve process cycles in order to maximize battery life anyway. Hopefully, widget developers will get smarter as time goes on.
Now, enough of my ranting about what I have found a little buggy. I really don't think those were huge problems, just a little annoying, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them will be fixed in 10.4.1. I want to talk about a few of the smaller things that I really enjoy abut Tiger.
Kerberos support is stellar. I was blown away by how easy it was to set up Mail.app to use ISU's email. I installed the most recent Kerberos Extras available at www.sitelicensed.iastate.edu and pulled down the edu.mit.Kerberos configuration file from www.public.iastate.edu/~kula/edu.mit.Kerberos to my /Library/Preferences file, all same as before. I then open Mail.app and walk thought the setup assistant. I enter my POP server and it automatically detects that it needs to use Kerberos v5 and prompts for the Kerberos authentication. All automatically, it just frickin' works!
Also, printer setup blew me away. The interface for printer setup has changed a lot, and a lot for the better. It is so much easier to set up a printer now. When configuring an IP printer, I just have to enter in the IP address and Tiger does the rest. It selects the correct drivers for you, and then prompts you for some of the installed options. It even has to ability to check on supply status and is linked to the Apple Online Store to help you order replacement supplies. The print dialog is also a lot simpler in some applications (Preview) that allows you to change the Page Setup options right inside the print dialog box. Very spiffy.
Another cool little thing is that Open dialog box browser allows for previews. This was extremely annoying when I add images to my Photo gallery before. Now I can see what the picture is while I'm adding it, so I can give it a proper caption.
Another really cool feature is Safari's RSS support. I have been using a really cool program called NetNewsWire for my RSS needs, and I though Safari was going to offer a redundant, less feature full implementation of an RSS reader. Though, there is a place to tell Safari what the default RSS reader is. Now when I see a site I would like to add to my RSS reader, I just click the RSS button and it appears in my news reader automatically.
Well, that's about it for now. I usually don't do reviews like this, but I really appreciate all the little things Apple has done to make my life just a little bit easier. They tend to come up with features that are extremely useful, that I never even thought about before. These features are not just the big things like Dashboard, Spotlight, or whatever that they hype, but the little things like printer setup, Kerberos, and the way the OS just works.
Twitter Updates
RSS
Comments
such a pity microsoft hasn't figured out how to get windows to "just work" yet...
If Dashboard widgets are taking up CPU time when Dashboard is hidden you should complain to the developers.
Dashboard Widgets as outlined in Apple Documentation has several properties:
onshow() called when Dashboard is opened so widgets can update themselves
onhide() This is the one that the developers aren't using. This is called when the Dashboard is hidden, this is when the widget should stop running processes and dealloc memory,basically do whatever it needs to do before it's hidden
onremove() is called when a widget is removed from the Dashboard layer, generally you remove prefs, processes, memory, etc.
Of the Dashboard widgets that I use I haven't noticed any of them taking up CPU time while it's hidden, but I haven't extensively been looking at system preferences.
Gaila said "such a pity microsoft hasn't figured out how to get windows to "just work" yet..."
In my opinion the only way Microsoft could accomplish this would be to literally scrap Windows and start over. The only reason they would HAVE to do this is because of this insistance on integrating everything (ie Internet Explorer in Windows, various windows components,etc) this is bad in the long run because the more they integrate everything the more likely something will fail in a chain of events/commands as a result of this design philosophy.
Also in order to do this Microsoft would have to admit their design wasn't the greatest and they have... how do I say this? a bit of an egotistical mind set in that they don't want to ever admit wrong doing. These are the same people who think theres nothing wrong with keepinig $40 billion in the bank in reserve for legal matters. It took years for them to put a popup blocker in IE after a long time of saying IE didn't need one, btw their also saying IE users don't need tabbed browsing like Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, Opera, Shiira, Netscape & OmniWeb have had for years now.