Archive for the 'Software' Category
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.