Updated: Mini Review of Mac OSX Tiger

I've been running Tiger since April 27th, but I never really got around to pointing out some things about it that I love.

-Spotlight is revolutionary. Being able to find anything on my hard drive in about 5 seconds is nice. While I don't use it that often, I do use it more than I probably realize. It sure as hell makes the old way of searching seem like something from eons ago.

-Dashboard is nice. I've got a few ideas for widgets, but they are just minor things. I love Dashboard because it combines a bunch of mini-applications together that you can access with a button on the keyboard. Having up-to-the-minute information on traffic, stocks, news, weather, etc, at the touch of a button is nice. It's fairly unobtrusive, as well. I use the calculator a lot, so it's nice to have that at the ready when I need it, too. Once they start coming out with some really great widgets, this thing is really going to take off.

Some other minor things I love:
-The built in dictionary in Safari. I LOVE this feature. Anytime I am reading anything on the web, I just mouse over a word and push CTRL-CMD-D and I have the meaning right at my fingertips. I use this feature all the time. Here is a photo of it in action:


-Emailing links to webpages is now as simple as clicking CMD-Shift-I.

-While not exclusive to Tiger, I have to admit, the system-wide spell check is great. That means anywhere I type on my computer, spell check is always on. Awesome.

There are tons of things I am missing, but this is really what I like about it so far. I won't say that it is a completely necessary upgrade, but it sure has changed some things under the hood. I don't think it is such a major upgrade as Panther was (or so I heard), but it is a great upgrade.

It sure makes using a Dell at work with Microsoft 2000 seem like I'm using an old typewriter.

Update:

-Porn...ahem, Private Browsing in Safari is nice.

-I haven't had much use for the RSS portion of Safari, as there are completely different standards by which websites update their RSS feeds. Some of them have tiny snippets of new stories, some of them have half of the story, and almost none of them have all of the story. Which means you have to visit the site to read the story anyway. I think the majority of this is based around advertisements. If people don't visit their sites, the advertisements generate no revenue. This usually means that the sites don't put full stories in their RSS feeds, defeating the whole purpose of RSS feeds: not going to the site to view the news.

-The system overall seems to be running faster.

-The only problem I had after the install was with Mail 2.0. I don't know what the deal was, but trying to import my mail was a hassle, and now I've got a small glitch where if I'm typing an email and switch focus to another window, the Mail icon bounces in the dock and my message says, "Mail cannot save this message right now" which is annoying as hell.

-iCal and Address book weren't really updated that much. There were a few tweaks...but what I don't understand is why the hell isn't there a contextual menu item in Address Book to export vCards to a mail message? No, I have to save it to my desktop, then add it to an email? WTF? Why would I save a vCard to my desktop? It is already in my Address Book! This seems like a gross oversight to me, something that needs to be fixed, pronto. I just sent Apple some feedback on this.