Tiger: A Week Later
Thanks to an appreciative client, "Tiger":http://www.apple.com/macosx/ was delivered to my door at 10am the morning of April 29th, 2005. The pretense was that I was going to guinea pig it for them, but personally I just wanted Tiger immediately and I wanted to avoid to paying for it myself. Apple's demos had gotten me all excited about it's new features. So what do I think after a week of playing (read “testing”)? I’m not sure. I guess I’m happy with the upgrade but a few things I feel are definitely not as advertised.
h2. Spotlight: A Great Demo
I loved the "Spotlight demo":http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ . “You can find anything, instantly, with a click and a few keystrokes.” I still think that would be great. If anyone has had that experience with Spotlight, I’d love to know what machine you’re running it on. I have a 1-year-old ti-book G4, 1.3 GHz with 1GB of RAM. On my machine, Spotlight is a dog. If I attempt to use the Spotlight search box located in the finder window, with fair predictability I can type 3 characters then I have 30 seconds of The Spinning Rainbow of Death. If I type anything else during that 30 seconds, I am rewarded with another 2 minutes of The Spinning Rainbow of Death while Spotlight attempts to catch up with my typing.
How is this ok? Did they not test this on a system similar to mine? It is only a year old. That behavior is completely unacceptable. What happened to multi-tasking? Why The Spinning Rainbow of Death? I am now looking for the option to get rid of this box so I don’t accidentally type something in it.
To be fair, the behavior in the Spotlight menu is much closer to acceptable, although still orders of magnitude slower than the demo. And Spotlight does seem to respond a bit faster if it's already searched for that term before.
h2. Mail: What Could It Possibly Be Doing?
I prefer the interaction I get from the new "Mail 2.0":http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/ application when it decides to freak out. Rather than give me The Spinning Rainbow of Death, Mail just stores everything I type and, with great delay, echos it back to me as if I were connected to my computer via a 300 Baud modem. How nostalgic.
It seems that occasionally Mail decides to do something that takes an incredible amount of horsepower. I notice this when suddenly my computer becomes almost completely unresponsive for no apparent reason and the fans kick into high gear. After minutes of struggling to successfully open the Activity Monitor, I can see that Mail is being a complete hog. I shut it down, ahh, that’s better. Start it up again, computer goes into a drunken stupor. This sucks, and is much better than The Spinning Rainbow of Death.
h2. Smart Folders: Half Way There/Where’s the Metadata?
I love the concept of having collections (folders) formed automatically based on the attributes of the content. But how do I make a smart folder for a specific project? Anyone? If you’re suggestion involves a file naming convention, save it. The files all have various names chosen be the person that sent them to me, and I'm not interested in renaming every file on my computer so that name spaces don’t clash. For instance, using the project number in the file name (as I had been doing) is a no-go or I’d have to rename every image from my digital camera that happens to have the project number in its name.
I want "ad-hoc tags and metadata":http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html . I want “Project = Project Name”. Something that intrigued me about smart folders was that they provided for something to be in more than one folder at a time. But currently, there’s not an easy way to put things into that folder. Although, I’m guessing someone will probably solve this problem fairly quick. It seems that it would be pretty easy to create a little drag-and-drop application that gave you access to the new "extended attributes":http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/7 available in Tiger. I’d love to have something (a folder/app) that allowed me to add an extended attribute by dragging something onto it, and then I could pick up on that with a Smart Folder. Maybe this functionality exists and I’m missing it.
h2. How Do You Do The Cool New Preview Thing From the Finder?
I knew about many of the new features, but I hadn't heard about he new "image preview feature":http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/images/slideshow20050412.jpg that blacks out the screen and allows you to easily cycle between images. I love it, it's great, except I can't figure out how you can just take a bunch of images and do that with them. You can do it from Spotlight and from Mail, but doesn't seem you can from the iPhoto, the "Finder":http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/ or Preview.
*Update:* Found it. Preview has a "Slideshow" option from the menu, or command-shift-F (for "Full Screen" I guess).
h2. Dashboard Widgets Save The Day
I love the "dashboard widgets":http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/ . If it weren’t for those I would be struggling to find a markedly positive experience with Tiger. They’re just fun. I use Apple's weather one a lot. I think it’s a good example of a well-designed widget. At a glance, you can see the information you're interested in, and it even does some of the cognitive interpretation for you (Is it raining? Is it sunny?). I find I am more interested and likely to absorb this information since it is so easily accessible and digested. (yea, it's just the weather, but it's what we got to work with here).
It might be cool if you could associate a person’s picture with each instance of the widget. Usually cities I track relate to a person that I know, and currently I still have to do a cognitive work to figure out who's getting rain. There are of course some "badly designed":http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/dashboard/dashmonitors.html widgets out there too. Apple put out a good list of "widget design conventions":http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/Dashboard_Tutorial/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001340 that some people didn't read I guess.
Lest all this whining sound like I hate the Mac OS and despite whatever dissonance between my expectation and the reality, Tiger is still orders of magnitude better than any other operating system I've used. While there's a few things I think could be done better, Tiger is definitely a worth-while upgrade and I'll likely be installing it on my appreciative client's machines within a few weeks.