I’m a Mac user. I don’t know if that sort of statement surprises people any longer, but it still surprises me to hear myself say it. I have been a “switchter” for a year and a half now and I really enjoy the combination of a very well designed graphical OS with Unix under the covers. I spend a good portion of my time in a Unix command line programming with emacs and testing command line scripts and such. I guess that puts me in a very small class of computer users, but I feel that I’ve found the ideal environment. I’ve got an even more powerful RedHat Linux system sitting right here too and it just isn’t the same.
While folks were lining up for the public release of the latest version of the Mac operating system at 6 pm last Friday, April 29, I had already received my copy that morning via the FedEx guy. I’ll spare you a full-blown review, here are some of my favorite new features:
Safari’s RSS newsreader: I thought Firefox hit it pretty well with their ability to detect RSS feeds a website and creation of live bookmark folders. Safari has taken this one step farther and integrates a full-blown RSS newsreader into the browser. I don’t know why I could never get attached to any particular newsreader. I think maybe having to open up another application to find news when I was already reading blogs in my browser kept me from making it habit. A full integration of a newsreader and browser is where it’s at. Already I’m making yet another browser transition.
Spotlight: Apple’s answer to desktop search. Apple did it well. Very few stones are left unturned on the system by this search indexer. Now, being a Mac user, I haven’t tried Google’s desktop search, but I can’t imagine that they can possibly get such a tight integration as this. The second that files change, they’re included in the index. And if you’re the type who gets a bazillion emails and keeps them all in one big folder (like me), this is a life saver. I can instantly find any email with any search criteria. I have always strongly resisted the notion of filing every email (and every document, image, spreadsheet, PDF, etc. for that matter) into well organized folders. Moments after the installation finished, I had found several emails that I knew I had but couldn’t find a few days earlier. Finally, I’m free.
The new Dashboard is just plain fun and visually appealing. It’s like a second desktop that’s only a mouse-click away, where cool desktop widgets rule. The general theme of widgets are one of two things: 1. useful tools that you always need and are just a little to far out of reach because you got to dig through the finder to launch them, like a calculator or a simple calendar. 2. tools that gather information from online web services, like stock tickers, flight information, and weather.
The new visual iChat AV looks amazing. I just need someone to chat with. Then maybe I’ll buy a camera. Return of the JangroCam?
Apple put together a great video demonstrating the new features. Well worth the watch whether you’re a Mac user who has just upgraded to Tiger or if you’re thinking about giving it a go. Oh, the new QuickTime 7 is quite nice as well, allowing very clear full-screen viewing of video.
A few annoyances so far, 4 days in.
I have an extensive web development envoironment set up on my PowerBook G4 with a very customized Apache/MySql/PHP configuration. The upgrade overwrote the apache’s httpd.conf file without warning. It did preserve a backup, but I had to figure out what was wrong and then hunt it down.
The video demonstration that Apple provided showed a much snappier Spotlight search, with the results coming up practically before the keystrokes were typed. The demo was on a G5. My G4 with 1.25GB of RAM is a little sluggish under the search load, just a little. Must be all those emails.
Spotlight can’t shine into Microsoft Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook). No big surprise there. I was using it because it had better search capabilities than the previous Mac Mail program. I’ve switched back. Thankfully, Mail 2 can import Entourage’s emails.
The funny thing about Mac products…I’ve always (almost) paid for software
(being a computer systems engineer), but for the first time in my life, I don’t mind paying good money for software and OS upgrades. In fact, I couldn’t wait to plunk down $125 for the new OS. Some people will probably be disappointed at what you get for the pricetag, but I’m good with it.
