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Jewish World Review May 6, 2005 / 27 Nissan, 5765 Mac OS X: Buy that tiger? By Mark Kellner
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
An informal and unscientific survey of two Mac users spotted Sunday evening
at the Tenleytown (Washington, DC) branch of Starbucks showed that neither
had upgraded to the just-released Mac OS X, called "Tiger."
Whether that's an omen or an oddity is something to be discovered by Apple's
marketing department in the coming weeks. The new release of the Mac
operating system, didn't inspire the kind of waiting-in-line-at-midnight
mania of earlier premieres, perhaps in part because "launch" was at 6 p.m.
But the $129 (list; $95 with rebate at amazon.com) Tiger has a few things
worth the price and time and trouble of upgrading. Among the 200-odd
improvements, my top favorite is the "Spotlight" search feature, which will
find just about anything on your hard drive, except for e-mails in Microsoft
Entourage. (It'll search through all levels of Apple's Mail.app e-mail
client, which, in turn, can import your Entourage messages, however.)
Spotlight will even search within PDF files, highlighting desired words.
In short, this is the kind of "desktop search" we've been promised in the
next version of Microsoft Windows (code-name "Longhorn" and available, we're
told, next year) and which can be had with third-party applications from
Google and Yahoo (PCs) and Blinkx (stet) for Macs and PCs. But Spotlight
doesn't take much overhead, isn't obtrusive, and works very, very nicely.
I'm impressed, and you might be as well.
Equally impressive, to this reviewer, are the improvements in Mail.app and
the Safari Web browser. Safari now features an optional "private browsing"
mode that won't keep a history of where you visit or a "cache" of pages
viewed. The browser can also read Real Simple Syndication (stet) or RSS
"feeds," such as those made available by The Washington Times, letting you
check what's new on a given Web site easily and without effort. Safari,
overall, is much better as a Web browser now, and is a worthy competitor to
Firefox, while leaving the Mac version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer back
in the Dark Ages.
Mail.app is much improved, too, with the slide out "mailbox" drawer now a
permanent part of the left side of the application window. HTML is the
default e-mail composing language; e-mail "signatures" can now be applied to
specific e-mail accounts. And, the Spotlight search features work within
Mail.app.
There's some "eye candy" in the form of Dashboard, which takes the "widget"
program Konfabulator (stet) and internalizes the concept (but not the
Konfabulator application) in the operating system. The widgets in Dashboard
will look up entries in your address book, check the weather, time and
traffic and link to a dictionary or thesaurus, among other neat tricks.
Though this feature was available before in Konfabulator (which has dozens
more widgets than are currently available for Dashboard), its addition to
the operating system will please and excite many.
And if you have an iSight (stet) video camera and a fast enough Mac and
broadband connection, your online video chats will look more like a network
TV news show (think "Nightline") than a herky-jerky public access effort.
That's because the iChat AV (stet) application now supports the H.264 video
compression standard, but, again, you'll need some horsepower to make it
work.
You'll also need some horsepower to install Tiger: A DVD disc is supplied in
the box; CD-ROMs can be ordered separately. While Apple claims 256 Mbytes of
RAM is needed, I'd suggest at least 512 Mbytes (as I have for a long time)
and 1 Gbyte if possible.
Get ready to set aside about 30 minutes for installation and between two and
four hours for the first "indexing" of your hard drive by Spotlight. But
after that "pain," Tiger is pleasurable and, for my money, worth the
upgrade. Details at http://www.apple.com.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Mark Kellner has reported on technology for industry newspapers and magazines since 1983, and has been the computer columnist for The Washington Times since 1991.Comment by clicking here. © 2005, News World Communications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of The Washington Times. Visit the paper at http://www.washingtontimes.com |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||
