Tiger: First Impressions

At first, I must admit that it doesn’t seem like there is a whole lot new. Spotlight is neat, but I already had much of that functionality with Quicksilver. Dashboard is a good idea, but I’m not sure I’ll work it into my daily routine quite yet.

Here’s a list of applications and neat additions:

  • iChat
    • Ability to choose between Away and Logging Off when using Fast User Switching… this was a huge annoyance for me in the past.
    • Multiple AIM/Jabber accounts
    • Mobile users show up with the word Mobile next to their name. This means I won’t accidentally IM Gary’s phone anymore.
  • Group support is much better! (It’s actually usable now, because they adopted a method similar to how all the other IM clients do it).
  • Safari
    • RSS: I’m not sure I’ll use this here. I’m quite used to NetNewsWire.
    • Undo in forms! (Was this is Safari 1.3?)
  • New page pops up helping you get on the internet if you lack a connection when you try to load a webpage.
  • Airport/Wireless
  • The menu bar meter seems to always show more bars… nice psycological effect.
  • iCal
    • Calendar Groups (much like Folders in iPhoto, etc). Not sure what use these have.
  • Show birthdays in iCal (no need for extra programs or plugins).
  • Mail
    • Smart mailboxes
  • Different interface (unsure about my feelings on this).
  • Dictionary
    • Very useful
    • Pretty interface/font selection
  • Looks very professional
  • Preview
    • Annotation features
  • New display options (continuous pages, book mode, etc).
  • Spotlight
  • AWESOME
  • System Preferences
  • I like the ability to search for what I’m looking for. Doesn’t always pop up with what I was thinking (e.g. a search for ‘scroll’ doesn’t highlight the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane).
  • Grapher
  • Cool program for plotting 2D and 3D images. It won’t replace gnuplot for making graphs for papers, but it is easier to use than say Mathematica for quickly making and manipulating a 3D graph.

Update: I just remembered I posted my inpressions on the Developer Preview last July. It’s an interesting read to compare my views… some things (like Safari and iChat) were fixed up, but other problems (Dashboard) remain.