Against the advice of all my peers I recklessly installed Tiger over my existing setup yesterday!

Installation

No problems – less than 30 minutes later I was up and running.

On first reboot I was a little concerned by 30 seconds or so of blue screen. But it was just everything getting itself sorted out and the machine started up just fine. Thanks to years of Microsoft conditioning I no longer associate blue with calm and tranquility, but rather with impending doom and hours of lost work.

The first thing I was presented with was a settings transfer screen and internet setup with the added .Mac sell!

Spotlight needs to access your hard disc for a while, and things can be quite sluggish while it does this, but once complete (I found a reboot helps too) everything settled down and now is running very smoothly.

The only application I had trouble with was Mail. It would crash shortly after loading and trying to download new mail. Turns out it was caused by an incompatible extension that I had installed in the old Mail app. So if you are in the same boat, try a search in your library folder(s) for a little program called something.mailbundle and move it somewhere safe. Chances are all will be fine after it is removed. I had ‘MailPriorityPanther.mailbundle’ which allowed me to request receipts when I sent Mail.

Apart from that, no problems with applications crashing.

Features

Dashboard is sweet. I am not convinced (yet) of it’s long term usefulness, although I will not be surprised to eat my words! A lot of it just depends on what you need to do and what widgets are available. A UK phone book would be very handy. I’ll look forward to writing some widgets for Dashboard at some timewhatever happens.

Spotlight is the star along with the associated ‘smart’ folders you can have in the finder and Mail etc.

Mail is a major improvement. Smart folders work nicely. Getting rid of the terrible mailbox drawer is a real plus; however the new icons/interface if dire. If nothing else it proves a serious lack of direction and style guide for OS X. Inconsistancy in the GUI is really poor especially coming from Apple themselves. Check out Cagefighter to reclaim what is rightfully yours!

Safari RSS feed handling is really nice. It may take me a while to decide if I want to use this over NetNewsWire, especially as my browser of choice is Firefox. Still it looks well thought out and with a little patience could be a very handy feature. The RSS screensaver is pretty neat too – the idea is nothing new but the implementation is great. You can also add images to iPhoto straight from Safari, and email web pages, whole, to other Mac users!

Image/Photo Slideshows built in to Mail and all finder (folder and spotlight) windows is cool. Just pick a bunch of images and choose the slide show option – very nice. Mail gives you the same features with photos attached to emails.

Preview has had a major overhaul and you can now do cool stuff like annotate PDF files – very handy.

DNG and RAW camera format support is now built into the Finder. Wicked digital workflow options now abound for digital photographers. Works with the new slideshow and makes RAW image formats just blend in like JPEGs and GIFs.

Built in dictionary and thesaurus is now available throughout the operation system. Just right click (or ctrl-click) on a word and bring up a definition instantly. Hold down Command(apple)-ctrl-d and move the mouse over text for on the fly definitions.

No chance to play with Automator yet – not enough hours! I have to install this on five other Macs over this weekend for goodness sake!

I’m not a big user of Quicktime so I’m not going to comment on the major updates to this, although they are potentially far reaching.

The core image, dataaudio and features I think are one of the strongest points of this new release and will over time come to have a major impact of the developemnt of new and exciting applications for the Mac platform. Core image is already starting to appear in apps like iMaginator.

Finally, if you get a chance, sign up for the online ‘seminar’ when ordering through the online Apple store. This is basically a 30 min video run through of all the main new features. Even if you find the American presentation style annoying just bear with it, it is worth watching and there are some top tips in there to get you started. It’s in the new poncy HD Quicktime video format so very slinky looking!

If you want more, then check out this great list of 50 Random Observations from Chris Biagini’s Assortedgeekery blog.

Kudos to Apple, for delivery on the launch day, and Farpoint Apple Dealers in Bath for a decent launch and expert advice. Thanks!

Resources
Apple – Tiger homepage
Apple – new dashboard widgets to download
Apple – new automator actions to download

Dashboarddev.com – more widgets
AutomatorWorld.com – more automator actions

And if you want something serious, ArsTechnica have written a really decent technical overview.

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