Rawr
May 13
So, I made the plunge. When Tiger arrived in the mail on Wednesday, I knew it would have to be installed soon. So, Thursday morning I sat down, hooked the iBook into the Linux box and started backing stuff up. Once I had documents, photos, and MP3s securely copied over to the Ubuntu machine, I stuck in the Tiger DVD and double-clicked the installer. The machine restarted and the upgrade dialog came up.
I know you’ve read my site before and you’re expecting a horror story. You are, aren’t you?
Well, sorry, but I have to disappoint you. The upgrade was amazing. Took about an hour and a half to answer all the questions and do the install (which is mostly just watching progress bars grow). Another reboot and there was Tiger. The first bootup took a little longer than I expected, but that’s probably due to Spotlight starting to index everything.
After checking to make sure everything was still where it was supposed to be (it was), I started playing with the system. I know before that I’ve said (probably not on here) that the Dashboard is a stupid idea. I still stand by that, but some of the widgets may actually prove useful. Currently I’m using the countdown (counting to my birthday, a bit of vanity), the weather widget and weather map widget. The last two take the place of a menubar item I used to use that was great, but not very space-saving. I also see myself using the dictionary widget, Yellow Pages widget, and TV listings widget in the future. So, stupid idea that turns out to have some use in it. Mostly I think it’s useful ’cause of it being hidden. If you had to see them all the time, on this 12″ screen, they’d be more annoying than any use I could get from them.
Spotlight, though…. So pointless when I have Quicksilver installed. Spotlight does pretty well for searching emails and files, but it’s not a launcher. Every once in awhile it’ll pull up an app and let me launch it, but usually not. If it was a launcher, I’d probably go over to it completely, as something built into the system is going to work faster than something third-party. It doesn’t, though, and Quicksilver does all the searching I need of files and email and it’s a launcher. So I’m sticking with that.
Mail’s new interface is horrible. Those buttons belong in Longhorn or some equally disgusting interface. Thankfully Cage Fighter exists to turn them off.
Safari seems to be a lot faster than before and I’m stuck using it now as OmniWeb doesn’t perform great in Tiger. Hopefully that gets sorted out soon. Firefox works fine, but it just feels laggy to me lately. So I’ll stick with the OS X native browser.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this upgrade. It was well worth the money spent on it and doesn’t seem to have any major bugs. Good job, Apple.
I’ve heard nothing but good from this upgrade, and I have read about the few niggles you’ve had. As far as I can remember, Spotlight uses command+space to come up, but you CAN switch that with Quicksilver if you are more used to that result from that key combo. This was information I got from a review on OSNews.com. Oh and about Safari, personally I would stick with it since it can be patched to pass the Acid2 test.
With all this talk, I just find it funny that I still don’t have my own Apple hardware. :(
In any case, take it easy, man. Have fun.
Brit Mckay on May 14, 2005 at 7:57 am
Yeah, I’ve already modified the quickkeys to keep Quicksilver working like it was. I found that you can disable Spotlight altogether, but that might interfere with Mail and other programs that rely on the Spotlight technology. So I’m gonna just leave it alone.
And I don’t really care about the Acid2 test. It’s a cool idea, but passing it or not doesn’t make a browser any better or worse. Safari works for now, but I’ll be going back to Omniweb when it’s updated for Tiger.
You should get a Mac, man. Nice and low-maintenence (comparatively). I know Ray has almost converted! He keeps skinning/theming his machines to look more Mac-ish.
Kenneth on May 14, 2005 at 9:31 am
Aww, man… Go and tell the world that Ray doesn’t have a Mac yet! :) The whole theming thing – is that wishful thinking or a weird fantasy/fetish?
Oh, Lord, what kind of Google ads are you gonna get now?! You know with me using words like fetish fetish FETISH all over the place… HAHA
Ray on May 14, 2005 at 8:38 pm
random hey there…
kvack from sl… found you at textpattern too!!!
anyhow, is it worth the upgrade to tiger?
jufemaiz on May 15, 2005 at 2:58 am
Hey kvack. Yeah, I think it’s worth the upgrade. The system seems to run a lot smoother now, for one thing. I only have 256mb of RAM right now. Back on Pather, I could run maybe 5 little applications before I noticed a real slowdown in performance. Tiger seems to handle 8 or even 10 with no noticable lag.
Kenneth on May 15, 2005 at 10:45 am
enjoy tiger friend, I camped out at the apple store here in atlanta, I was first in line and I blogged the whole thing
http://icespide.com/blog/2005/04/blogging-tiger.html
Peter on May 15, 2005 at 11:24 am
Can you really call it camping out when it was only for a few hours? I mean, you didn’t even camp, you just sat on the floor.
Kenneth on May 25, 2005 at 8:25 pm