“Friday evening, 18:00 CET, Apple released Mac OS 10.4 ‘Tiger’ to us Europeans. I attended a ‘launch event’ (which is a posh means of saying free drinks and snacks) at an Apple Center in Berlin to be among the first mortals to see and use it. They had set up various Macs with the much anticipated new version of Mac OS. After playing around for a while, making good use of the free drinks and snacks, I shelled out the €120,- (somehow they didn’t charge €129,-) and walked out a happy, but poorer, man.” eXpert Zone takes a quick look at Tiger.
Apple’s New Cat: Some Thoughts
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Has anyone figured out how to change which stocks are displayed?
umm.. dude!!!! hit the little “i” in the botom corner
“Has anyone figured out how to change which stocks are displayed?”
Yes, click the small italic “i” that appears on the dashboard module when you hover your mouse over it. The rest will be self explanatory.
My favorite feature…
type command spacebar and then start typing…
Click on the i at the bottom right of the widget to add or remove stocks.
I was looking at the quicktime demo of this on Apple’s site … when dealing with those widgets, is it an ‘all or nothing’ kind of thing, or can you call them up individually? Can they be docked on the menu bar or the dock?
umm.. iChat is broken!!!! dude, I cannot audio chat with my brother who is still on panther.
weird quirks, like the dictionary mouseover function not always working in safari.
odd stuff liek that.
other than that, sweet!!!!
the fedex/ups package tracker widget is cool (need to download it) live the new stickies… kep them out of the way… yellow pages.. sweet!!! only thing dashboard is missing for me is a movie list… ther ei sone by some guy, but it is still at like .3
you choose which idgets you want on your dashboard layer.. ther eare a ton more that what they show.. you add them by clickin gon a plusin teh corner.. they have a “get more widgets” thing but it is only open to .mac members.
they can not be docked.. you do not want them to be.. tehy are ther efor a quick look adn a banishment from teh work space. they can interact with the desktop apps though… wikiwidget calls up safari and puts in a search query to wikipedia for your search term.. I am sure tehre are soem visual alerts you can have them do if you code one to do it , but it would take CPU resources away when it is not in focue (currently you have zero cpu usage when they are not focused.)
Would be nice if Apple provided a widget for atleast the All Ords (Australian) or the NZSE40. I would have thought at minimum they would provide the ability to check the stock prices on the Neikei
Modman,
In Safari (or any cocoa app that has text boxes), place the cursor in the text box in which you’re typing and select Edit->Spelling->Check Spelling as You Type. Then right-click on the 90-or-so red underlined words for spelling suggetions. This will make you posts less painful to read
And it only has to be done once, ever.
I am really impressed with Tiger! I have 3 Macs. A Mini, and old Ibook (600 MHZ G3 with 256 MB of ram) and a G3 tower (Blueberry)
The one thing that is really impressive is that I upgraded my Ibook and it runs even faster (This has been the case for each upgrade. I have upgraded this machine from 9.1 to 10.4) I wish this were the case with other OS’s. Linux is pretty close, Windows LOL! They are already talking that you will need a Longhorn certified machine to really enjoy it.
All the new features are sweet. The Smart folders are really cool and so is dashboard (Even though there is one thing I don’t like about it and that is the fact that you can’t work with dashboard and the rest of the machine at the same time like you can with Konfabulator)
The one thing I didn’t know is that dashboard was it’s own emviorment of sorts. When you bring it up you can only work with it. With konfabulator (And Gdesklets and Super Korumba (spelling) in Linux) You can pull your widgets onto the desktop, see them and work with them while working with everything else.
Smart folders allows you to make a query within the folder and tell the folder to collect within it’s self all files with a particular extension or that have particular words in them. So you could make a word document that has the word “Tiger” in it and then tell the smart folder to pull any documents with the word “Tiger” in them into it. Pretty neat.
The other thing that was cool was that that I could upgrade my old Ibook (Which only has a Cdrom ) by using the IDE DVD burner in my windows machine. I just hooked it up to one of those firewire external drive cases. I plugged it into my Ibook and ran the upgrade from that. Flawless. This is something I could not even imagine with Linux or Windows.
All in all I am impressed. Mac OSX might not be for you, but it’s great to me!
One think that I don’t like, the Quicktime HD videos socks in my iBook (1.33Ghz)… I mean, the videos consume all my CPU!!!!! and make QT to skip frames. Any one have a soluction for this???
Over on http://www.macosxhints.com they’ve got a hint that shows you how to drag a dashboard widget onto your desktop!
This is very cool!
The downside is they float on top of everything, but that’s OK if you have enough desk space…
woops.. forgot to turn it back on!! :-p
http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]@….
4th messege down
umm… don’t watch HD content?
I mean seriously.. HD is super intensive!!!! what did you expect?
did you even loook at the minimum HD specs? it’s like a dual 1.8 or better
The same is true on Windows PCs with WMP. Heck, WMP hi-def videos are huge and tend to run iffy on even gaming computers.
I want ze Mac =/
it is not the RSS.. it is not the page rendering…
I can finally open a new window from the application icon in the dock!!!
type command spacebar and then start typing…
Unless you have your system setup from Panther for multiple languages – then it will probably default to control-space (command-space is the default to change languages)
What more do you exactly do on your windows pc that you couldn’t accomplish on a mac? I’m just curious thats all.
Also try to keep the comments on topic, this article is not about iPods.
Yes, and of course Apple’s Dashboard for instance isn’t a stolen idea
Hmm…interesting…
Yes Apple does overhype, and yes they tend to overmarket (but open up any tech rag and whos ads do you see??).
As always when it comes to library of apps and games the fault lies on the software developers for locking their software development into using MS only tools and such. It’s nice to hide behind that mantra of no software/no games as a way to convince yourself that you’re running the one true platform. What’s wrong with having some level of competition?
Some things that surprise me:
– With each release of MacOSX being so much faster than the previous ones, Apple really did get away with initially releasing a true piece of trash.
– Apple is able to get so many of its users to fork out big bucks with each and every release, which seems to happen every 6 months or so.
No, I’m not a windows fanboy nor am I a mac fanboy, just a long time linux user who is well amazed at what some of these commercial os companies can get away with.
No, it is not. I refer you to the konfabulator FAQ.
Well, first the above “stealing” post. TFA says: “Apple already had something Dasboard-like in 1982 (!), in System 6 (that predates the Macintosh, you know), called ‘Desk Acessories’. So, Konfabulator ‘stole’ the idea from there.”
Okay, now let me battle against Will’s arguements. As a disclaimer: I am a Windows user (mostly for the games), so hah. I’m also splitting this up into itty bitty pieces to make the argueing easier.
Wintel is faster. Hehe. The difference is actually pretty inconsequential, and speed isn’t everything that OSX has over Windows.
Your grammar, spelling, and one paragraph writing style annoy me.
If you check windows ‘support’ forums, you will see the same thing about Windows PCs. The fact is, these forums are for people with problems, not people with working computers.
Your arguement about the software library is mostly pointless. There are some proprietary apps you can get on Windows and Windows alone (not Linux, not OS X, etc), but these aren’t exactly in the majority. You can do most every normal task with OS X that you can with Windows, even if Windows has 50 apps that do the same thing while OS X has one. Big deal.
XP is a “little upgrade” over 2k that cost about the same, even more. However, while most of what XP added was prettyness and such, Tiger is adding neat things like Spotlight. As well, Apple is actually doing things with their OS, rather than talking about doing them. I mean, again, you can get Spotlight on Tiger while Windows users are still waiting on this and other features.
I don’t get the “fuzzy new names like iCalc and iSuck” thing. You’re wacky.
The iPod, which isn’t innovative now, was probably one of the first small, “cute”, and easy to use harddrive-based MP3 players. The old Nomad and the likes don’t fit into any of those. Nowadays there is competition, some of which is better imho, but still it was good.
The jab at Steve is immature.
“Software choices” is pretty broad. Back up your own statement, sheesh. One can do video editing, photo editing, web development, programming, limited gaming, most anything you can do with Linux, etc., on a Mac. Like I said, if you would kindly back up your own statements, your arguements might carry some merit.
Oh yes, and OS X (talking about iLife mostly now) comes with more software, and more useful software, than Windows. mspaint doesn’t count.
… http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
? Ummm, Panther came out over 18 months ago. Not 6.
And unlike Microsoft, Apple realised that their old OS was not up to speed, not secure and outdated (Like Windows is now) They took the step of admiting that and comeing up with something almost totaly new! Instead of reselling us the same ole crap.
Yes it had some problems when it first came out. It was totaly new from scratch (At least for Apple)
Also not only does MS still you with a BIG fee for Windows, but then they makes you put in CRAZY codes and then you have to connect to MS to verify that you own that version of Windows. Change a couple of pieces of hardware, do it again. Buy a PC with Windows now and you have to call them before you can use it! Crazy!
No Apple is not perfect, but this is a good release, not many changes (Meaning that the os looks and feels mostly the same) but a ton of new features. I would LOVE to see MS do that. (Without makeing your PC so slow that it feels like it’s running in reverse.)
As I said in my other post I am still using my 5 year old Ibook. Have not upgraded it at all, including the fact that I still only have 256 MB of ram and I am still able to use things like spotlight and dashboard without much slow down.
And the only reason there is more software for Windows has nothing to do with anything but money, companies know they have more customers on Windows. That is all.
umm… don’t watch HD content?
Or why watch it to begin with? I mean, honestly, unless you have a screen with ultra-ultra-ultra high resolution graphics, the guy trying to view the content would be better of compressing it down to H.264
I picked up Tiger last night and installed it on my mini. Love it! One question though. (I posted this on the article’s talkback but I’ll probably get a better answer here):
Check out the RSS screen saver. Very cool, very useful! I “get” RSS when it’s used this way (it reminds me of PointCast), but I don’t “get” RSS when you visit a web site, see an RSS button, and then click it and let Safari reformat the page using its RSS engine. Why? Why not just use the regular page? How is this easier? Is there some way to save this view so I can jump to it later? I just don’t get going to slashdot, for example, and clicking the RSS icon, only to see the exact same front page content reformatted. Can somebody help me out on that? Why is this useful?
And unlike Microsoft, Apple realised that their old OS was not up to speed, not secure and outdated (Like Windows is now) They took the step of admiting that and comeing up with something almost totaly new! Instead of reselling us the same ole crap.
Want to know the *really* sad part; Microsoft had something. Imagine had Microsoft kept improving Xenix, licenced SYSV code from AT&T, slapped a nice GUI on top, kept the kernel and GUI seperate.
Today, you’d have a rock solid operating system; there would never have been the whole hell-that-is 9x, and we wouldn’t have the problems with virus’s and security concerns like there are now.
Buy an iMac or a PowerBook 🙂
Seriously, It’s splattered all over the QuickTime HD trailer pages that they require a G5 to play..
For 1280×720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 256 MB of RAM
64 MB or greater video card
For 1920×1080 (1080p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 512 MB of RAM
128 MB or greater video card
Looking at the video card requirements, it looks like it needs CoreImage or Quartz 2D extreme too.
Ooops spotted the typo, I meant to type buy a iMac or a PowerMac, I swear I typed PowerMac.
Dave
Anyone want to see HD videos on their computer and for sure it is going to be “Display capable”. And come one guys… what are these requirements????…. I know that compresing and decompresing videos takes CPU, but this is excessive!!!!!…. For me it looks more like “we need to release QT7 with HD videos now” decision than anything else, unless someone here give me real technical reasons to think otherwise.
Beside, I think that is going to affect apple customer, first the ones like me that just bought a mac three months ago. Second, this is not my question, but could it be of anyone else: “If I am capable of running games in my ibook, how the hell i can’t play videos????”.
What is the big secret of H.264 that make it so “special”?… I just going to wait for the codecs to test playing HD videos in FreeBSD and Linux, and if it work fine I’ll never ever again going to buy and apple unless Apple release some patches in the meantime to fix the problem.
Just forgot to tell in my last “RE: HD…” that If I download the video it works fine….so, another question, what make the difference in download or streaming?
Just forgot to tell in my last “RE: HD…” that If I download the video it works fine….so, another question, what make the difference in download or streaming?
Depends. I’ve had experiences where streaming from my server is a lot nicer than viewing it locally.
You are right about that. The crazy part is that with Windows when there is a problem 99% of the time the problem will go back through all the NT versions of Windows and even some of the 9x versions! That is crazy!
If your streaming an HD video and its choppy it’s probably because YOUR STREAMING IT! Download it locally so that it runs off your hard drive, not your internet connection AND your hard drive.
Am I the only one that likes this? It’s a great screen space saver on my 14″ iBook. The vast majority of the time, you don’t need to view it so it gets tucked away, making Mail look neater and saving screen space. When you need to look in other mail boxes, click the Mailboxes button, do your business and then tuck it back underneath Mail again.
I honestly love this thing. Is there a way of having this feature in the new Mail?
If you look at my screenshot of Mail you’ll see that I have like, I dunno, a lot of mailboxes, so the maildrawer was useless; it was always open, and it acted wierd in combination with Expose (the drawer completely being misaligned and such). The new method is much better.
Spending 120€ just for an OS upgrade is ridiculous.
Windows XP Pro Upgrade retail: $199
Windows XP Pro Full version retail: $299
Windows XP Pro Home Upgrade retail (aka cripleware): $99
Windows XP Pro Home Full version retail (aka cripleware full): $199
…And XP comes with nowhere near the features of Tiger
So please….
Yes, and we know Longhorn will cost %5 to 10% more cause MS always raises the price of Windows in new releases.
And what you are going to wind up is with Windows XP heavy. It’s going to look like Windows XP, but you are going to need a whole new PC to run it and get the full features.
On top of that EVERY feature that Apple said they would have is there. Microsoft has not even put out their OS and they have dropped a ton of features. You gonna still wind up with sorry as_ NTFS, and no Journaling. Gets all fragmented when handling large files! Still have to defrag it everytime you turn around!
Messy!
no dvd on my mac, and i’m not about to go buy a dvd rom just for this, must go read up on netboot installs…
“no dvd on my mac, and i’m not about to go buy a dvd rom just for this, must go read up on netboot installs…”
Umm…you can get your media exchanged.
http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/tigermediaexchangev2.pdf
does your other computer have a firewire port? then just use that machine’s dvd drive and install via the firewire cable.
@modman
>No, it is not. I refer you to the konfabulator FAQ.
Let me rephrase my previous comment, “And Apple’s Dashboard idea is soooooo original”
Right.. hope you “got it” this time *nudge*
@C
>Well, first the above “stealing” post. TFA says: “Apple >already had something Dasboard-like in 1982 (!), in System 6 >(that predates the Macintosh, you know), called ‘Desk >Acessories’. So, Konfabulator ‘stole’ the idea from there.”
Right.. and so ends another episode of “Apple had it first!” join us next time, buhbye
Seriously, It’s always like this.. When someone says Apple ripped something off it’s like “OH NO, that’s wrong, Apple had something faintly similiar like 20 years ago, so it was their idea to begin with” Even if that relic is somewhat similiar Apple would never have made Dashboard if it wasn’t for Konfabulator’s success. JUST FACE IT!
now I will say:
“So?”
The Mail drawer functionality is still there:
Under the View pull-down menu choose Show/Hide Mailboxes (Shift-command-m). You can also add a button if you customize your mail toolbar (control-click on toolbar).
in Safari, clicking the rss icon in the address line will reformat the rss feeds for the page. If you drag the reformatted pages address into a bookmark folder (add one to your bookmarks bar) you get the option of opening all of the feeds in that folder in one page. In my case, I have about twenty sites rss feeds bookmarked in the one folder, click on the folder and you get an option to view all rss feeds formatted in one page. The page can then be sorted by name, age, site etc. Very useful.
To badly paraphrase that great line in the mediocre film “The Pirates Of Silicon Valley” where Bill Gate’s character says how it’s like Apple and Microsoft had a rich neighbor that left his door open only Microsoft got to steal the big screen TV first. Then Apple was screaming about how it’s not fair cause they wanted a chance to try and steal it first. It certainly illustrates how pointless issues like these are.
The thing is, yes, Apple could have thrown some duckets (moolah) Konfab’s way – they would have had the added advantage of being able to discontinue it for Windows and fold in or even throw out the implementation coming up with their own way (kinda like they did anyway). Basically, buy out the competition (if you will) and close it down.
I guess I don’t see why they should have answered to Konfab in this instance. The implementations (for all the lamenting) are in fact different. You can’t moan about look and feel since Konfab itself was arguably based on Apple interfaces – And court’s hate look and feel arguments. Plus, Apple did it better – hands-down. That’s how things work, unless there are patents and whatnot, competition will look at what you offer and then try and build a better mousetrap than yours. If Konfab wanted to compete, they could expand and create something even more useful and exciting than Dashboard. There was also prior art to the whole web apps on your desktop thing, but that’s another story.
Maybe I’m just being contrary. Us Apple apologists love to do that ; )
Could you tell me why we must pay to get the full Quicktime? I’ve paid $149 CAN to get Tiger and still, I would have to pay another 30$ to get QT Pro…
Give that to MS, they include a fully working Media Player…
QT Pro does more than the WMP. heck.. at least QT can play MP3 audio and you get a DVD player from them.. WMP needs you to buy those and it will cost you 30 bucks.
all the features of QT 7 Pro can be had with other freeware options, and, if youve paid for QT 6, just rename it before install, then afterwards youll have the qt 7 player and your qt 6 pro version still which can do most of the stuff still
That is what I did. I have a firewire case that you can put hard drives in. I took my DVD burner from my Windows PC, hooked it up to my old 600 MHZ G3 Ibook and did the upgrade. Works like a champ!
(Don’t try this at home when upgrading Windows kids)
One of the MACs I just upgraded to Tiger is also an iBook. No problems with Quicktime HD. In fact it approximately ROCKS!
Cheers.
You all really need to get your facts straight. If the intarweb wasn’t here you could be forgiven but really:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Desk_O…
It wasn’t 1982, it was 1981. The rudimentaries were there and they were there already when the Commodore 64 still meant something.
Later they had something called the starter, which was not quite the same thing but a variation on the theme.
Did Apple build this because Konfabulator made it look cool? It probably did. But did Konfabulator came up with it first? I think not. I also don’t actually appreciate people who systematically claim Apple stole it from somebody else. There will have been that, and Steve has said as much, but there was also a lot of hard work done by a great many people building a really cool way for people to work with their computers.
H.264 is crazy great and I’m not even running a fast Mac [but I’m thinking about getting one
]. I expect to see the video people going apeshit over this puppy. I don’t have a true Apple monitor, much to my dismay, but it’s worth buying one for it. It is really A LOT BETTER than what you usually see on your computer.
Some of the widgets you have to wonder about the sanity of the guy making them, but the real reason for having them is to gather little bits of data that are dynamically updated. That is where they shine. I see a great demand for these things as they can be very helpful. The implementation is really nice.
Oh, and it IS faster. Not staggeringly, but things are moving along just that bit snappier. Really good.
There’s a lot to love about the Tiger.
I disagree.. the UI is a lot snappier. I would say that it is as snappy as WinXP (maybe slightly slower) but it is so much snappier that I actualy had to adjust my mousing.
“Even if that relic is somewhat similiar Apple would never have made Dashboard if it wasn’t for Konfabulator’s success. JUST FACE IT!”
That’s actually a pretty obvious fact. I wasn’t debating that, I was just pointing out something interesting in the article that basically says that konfabulator isn’t a 100%, super original idea. But they did it well, they did it really well, and of course that’s why Apple is capitalizing on the idea now. JUST FACE IT! (geh)
Crud, if I really wanted to argue about the whole stealing thing, I could also mention Desktop X, which seems to have had far more konfabulator-like widgets first, though it was bloaty, slow, and buggy in the first versions.