All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
On Friday, Apple Computer will pull back the curtain on the latest major upgrade to Mac OS X. In keeping with its penchant for playing major product launches close to its vest, few outsiders have seen a working version of Tiger, as Mac OS X 10.4 is known. Even most employees have had to wait.
But I knew someone with a copy and managed to finagle an unofficial demo. So after playing with Tiger for the better part of an evening, I can say it's full of welcome surprises.
With several significant and innovative new features among the 200 additions Apple is touting, I think it's a success. I'm relatively new to Macs -- I switched only last fall after a lifetime on Windows machines -- and I'm not an OS X power user. But I can already see how this upgrade is a definite step up from the previous version of OS X, known as Panther.
The feature I'm most jazzed about, and the one that will have the biggest impact on how I interact with information on my Mac, is Spotlight.
Spotlight is designed to help users find files -- instantly. You type a keyword, and even as you begin to enter the letters, results are already popping up. By the time you've finished typing, say, "Thailand," you've got a comprehensive and categorized list of every file on your Mac in which the Southeast Asian nation is mentioned, including PDFs and e-mail messages.
I usually have dozens and dozens of open Word documents, instant messages and e-mails, and it's far too easy to lose track of the file that has exactly what I'm looking for. So for me, Spotlight is going to matter. A lot. The friend who showed me Tiger only has it loaded on one of two computers, and said working on the one without Spotlight had become a frustrating experience. I completely get that.
Given that Spotlight is such an integral part of Tiger, it's no surprise that it plays a big part in Mail. Mail now allows you to set criteria for searching mailboxes and then saves the results as a "smart folder," which applies the search criteria to all new messages. I'm going to find smart folders indispensable for organizing messages related to stories I'm writing. When articles are done, I'll just delete those folders.
Mail is also faster now, and has a more intuitive user interface. Frankly, it seems a bit more grown up. For me, and I think for others, Mail is finally ready for prime time.
At Macworld in January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs heaped a healthy dose of excitement on Tiger's second major new feature, Dashboard, a collection of reference tools, or widgets, like weather forecasts, a dictionary, stock quotes, a unit converter and so forth.
I thought, "big deal," since individually, they couldn't be less impressive. But after playing with Dashboard, I'm a little more charitable, mostly because anyone with some HTML or JavaScript skills can build their own widgets, and Apple will provide free access to a public database of new ones created by users. I want one with subway schedules, another with baseball standings, maybe one with my favorite Chinese restaurant's menu. Give me those and I'll be a convert.
Speaking of Macworld, after seeing Tiger demonstrated there, I was most looking forward to the video-conferencing capability of the latest iChat AV. When Jobs showed off three-way video chats, to many oohs and ahs, I pictured my wife and I and one our best friends, who are always instant messaging each other, setting up our iSight cameras and jabbering away with video.
Alas, Jobs neglected to mention -- and it's buried in the Tiger literature -- that the person who initiates a three- or four-party iChat video conference has to have eithera G5 or dual 1-GHz G4. That means that the three of us, who all have PowerBook G4s (with only a single processor), are out of luck. While many small businesses will probably have the proper equipment and will find this feature useful, I find the hardware requirement disappointing, and I suspect a lot of other PowerBook owners will as well.
Meanwhile, Safari also gets a face lift in Tiger, though it's mostly about adding support for the RSS format directly into the browser.
If you're an information junkie like me, you're probably already using a dedicated RSS reader like NetNewsWire or Bloglines. So after seeing how Safari incorporates RSS, I'm a little less than overwhelmed. It's not up to my standards of organizing feeds, updating them quickly and automatically, and displaying headlines and content in separate, distinct windows.
But those who are just getting started might be excited by how Safari lets them view feeds directly in the browser. It's a good primer, but I bet RSS newcomers will quickly graduate to dedicated readers as they subscribe to more and more feeds.
Of course, Tiger has other major new features, like QuickTime 7 and Automator -- which allows users to quickly set up automated workflows -- not to mention dozens of minor new features.
But for me, Tiger is about Spotlight, the improved Mail and the great widgets I know the Mac community will come up with. Ultimately, I think Tiger is well worth its $129 sticker price, but I don't think I'll be waiting in line to buy it the minute it hits store shelves.
