“Review I’ve been running Mac OS X ‘Tiger’ since the day after its release, on 29 April. At the time, hundreds of reviews of the operating system were published, but I didn’t want to be a part of the herd, since many of them were little more than lists of the new features. I wanted to spend some more time with Tiger before getting off the fence.” Read the article at TheRegister.
Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ in depth
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It’s smart that he did this thing!
I mean wait – cause, things are not always like it seems to bee if you are not looking at the hood a little more. And get’s used with things in a daily life
If I’d written this review shortly after installing 10.4, I’d have had more to say about Dashboard. But as time has passed, it has been activated less and less frequently.
Same here. My Konfabulator trial ended, and I never bothered with it, and don’t miss it at all. Dashboard looks really cool, and Apple knows how to present it, but I wonder how many people use it often? It was a big ‘feauture’ for the Tiger release, but it’s no Spotlight.
I had the opposite experience. I installed Konfabulator and it went unused. Dashboard on the other hand I use a lot. Instead of using the hot key, I use the lower right corner of the screen, (and upper right for Expose) and I find that setting it up that way makes it very confortable and usable. For the same reason, I set up my GNOME virtual desktop pager hard against a lower corner. I just throw the mouse pointer to the corner and use the scrollwheel to switch desktops. It’s a very fast way to work.
bingo….
that is the only way to use Expose and Dashboard effectively….
more people need to look into settings and how to tweek the OS before they make a judgement.
” I just throw the mouse pointer to the corner and use the scrollwheel to switch desktops. It’s a very fast way to work.”
For you. I’m 10 times more productive with keyboard.
I, for one, find my self using Dashborad more and more. I programmed it to activate in the upper right corner of my screen and whenever I need the international time, or the local radar, or to track a UPS package or see my stocks, I just hit the upper right corner of my screen with my mouse and bingo, the information I need is presented- and gone with a click. Unlike many other programs that do the same thing, Dashboard does not use up any of my valuable screen real-estate. I think that Dashboard is a feature that will grow on people as new and interesting widgets are created. Apple keeps a listing of the most popular widgets. I give it 5 stars.
OMG, I find Dashboard EXTREMELY usefull. All those little apps that you need, but hate clicking to get them. For example, the calculator, calendar, itunes controller.
Those little things that you hate to either open a full blown application for like iCal, or bring iTunes to the foreground just to change the track.
Fantastic!
that is the only way to use Expose and Dashboard effectively….
Not the only way. I have my dashboard set to shift+right mouse click, and the 3 expose options to control/alt/command + right click. Even faster for me than moving to the corners
I guess thats the whole point in having configurability in the first place
Well the article does bring up some valid points. Mainly things like spotlight needing a interface and input formats. I must say I do enjoy the Automater and wish someone would go more indepth on that feature.
that is the only way to use Expose and Dashboard effectively….
I would disagree on this point.
I find the best method is to use my Logitech MX 500 mouse to do all 3 features of Expose and bring up dashboard using the 3 center buttons and the scroll button located above and below the scroll itself. No moving the mouse to a screen corner or use the keyboard… just have to tap my finger.
And since one tends to use the mouse in interaction with Expose and Dashboard to select the window or widget it just makes sense to link these mouse buttons to these features. Of course this is if you have a 8 button + scroll mouse like the Logitech MX500/510/518/700 etc…
I did a quick screenshot of the config I use plus the mouse if your not familiar with it. http://www.travisjmac.com/screenshot/mx500config.jpg
well.. my general point was that the keyboard buttons are not that good for expose and dashboard unless you use the keyboard to navigate the UI all the time. I tried my mouse buttons, but I found it a bigger time waster than the corner. the corners are very fast.. split second and I do not have to reposition my fingers which means to do not have to task switch in my head. I am mousing and I just move the mouse.
Dashboard will profit from newer and better widgets. It can go far if the developers work on it.
sounds similar to stuff i use in linux
I haven’t used Dashboard yet, but a hot key seems rather dumb to me. I am more used to Super Karamaba on the KDE world. To me, I like having a weather widget on the desktop, or RSS feeds, etc. It doesn’t bother me sitting on the desktop, and it loads with each session.
i use linux and osx at home. I goto macupdate daily to see if there is any new and usefull software ther for my osx panther installation and since tiger, all i see is widgets, widgets and more widgets. personally i like a clean uncluttered desktop(ubuntu) and i use quicksilver on the mac… so.. for all ive read about tiger.. big deal.
Not quite a zealot yet but I’m getting there. I like OSX, being a hardcore Unix guy from forever ago; the pretty candy Aqua shell over a powerful Unix nugget intrigued me. That and BSD happens to be one of my favorite Unix types. However, there’s always a but, OSX is slow, 10.1, 2, 3 and 4 all have been sluggish. I believe this to be from tight integration with archaic legacy code found in the finder. I really don’t nor do I care but until they speed things up a little OSX will be just a toy for me, albeit a very cool toy.
No it is not quite the legacy code which makes the UI feel like a rubber band, it is more that apple does heavy things on the UI side which look simple but drag down every hardware which is older than the latest you can get.
For instance, double buffering every screen operation, add to that that it does compositing on a texture level (which maxes out 32MB in no time)
The main speed problems are caused exactly by those two operations, which gurantee total flicker freeness, but also guarantee, if you dont have 64 or 128MB video ram, that things are constantly swapped over the AGP into the main ram.
You can see that the best at resizing, which is tough on composing and double buffering because live reszing triggers constantly repaint operations on the grahics buffer.
Quartz2Xtreme will help with that a lot, bug only if you have a graphics card, which can handle the shader code (which the Radeon 9200 in the ibooks and Mac Mini which only has shader level1 wont be able to do)
Apple could definitely improve resizing by not doing live operations on the screen but simply doing a polygon resize on the window composite and doing the last screen operations after the resizing is done, that would speed things up tremendously.