Apple Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Its always difficult to review an entire operating system, especially when that system is new and you haven't had a tremendous amount of time to play with it. OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is just such a system, and as I got it installed on my PowerBook only Thursday morning (Saturday evening now), I've had thre days to explore and configure the system.

What I hope to do in this review is give an initial impression from the perspective of a Panther user making the move to Tiger, and also to discuss how it operates in a mixed environment with other Macs running Tiger, Macs running Panther, a Mac running OS 8.6 and a PC running Windows XP. Fiinally, I'll touch on some of the new features, though the specifics of the features are far better described elsewhere and to more than touch on them would really be just repetition.

In my home we have four Macs and one PC. After making a duplicate of my PoewrBook's hard drive, I booted from the Tiger install DVD (sorry, no CD installer unless you send Apple some money) and did a clean install after wiping and zeroing the drive. I do not believe in "upgrades" and so even on a new computer, I will always wipe the drive before installing a different operating system. The PowerBook is the fastest Mac in my household, running its G4 processor at 1.5GHz, with a 64MB nVidia GeForce FX graphics card and the full 1.25GB of RAM that this system supports.

the next Mac to get the Tiger treatment was my trusty Power Mac G4 "Sawtooth" or "AGP Graphics". For this Mac, which has two identical 40GB hard drives, I left the Panther and OS9 installations as they were, and installed Tiger on a clean drive. After an hour of use, I wiped the other drive and now Tiger is the exclusive system on this Mac as well. The PowerMac G4 was originally 400MHz, but was upgraded with a Sonnet Encore/ST card to run a 1.0GHz, has an upgraded 32MB nVidia 5200MX graphics card (supports OSX 's Quartz Extreme video), and 640MB of RAM.

Other computers in the house are a "Lombard" PowerBook belonging to my wife, which is one year too old to run Tiger, though some future hack (XPostFacto) may allow installation soon. The Lombard is a 400MHz G3 running Panther. My 10-year-old daughter has an old PowerBook 3400c running Mac OS 8.6, and in addition to the new PowerBook G4, I also have an IBM ThinkPad T42p, a high-end laptop PC running Windows XP.

Installing Tiger took about 20 minutes on the PowerBook (skipping the install DVD verification) and 25 minutes on the PowerMac. All hardware was recognized and properly configured and the install completed without a hitch. Initially I was a bit let-down in that everything looked about the same, but the more I used Tiger and saw the subtle differences, and more importantly, the more I realized that everything worked just the way a Panther user expected it to, the more I appreciated Apple's interface consistency.

The biggest change to using Tiger, at least for me, is the speed. On both Macs, boot time was cut roughly in half, as was shutdown time. Both Macs were already fast in normal finder operations in Panther, and if only slightly, they both feel faster still in Tiger. My printer, directly connected to the Power Mac and shared to the PowerBook, was properly configured right from the start, with absolutely no involvement from me whatsoever. I expected this on the desktop, but on the laptop I was pleasantly surprised.

The system preferences application was much like the one in Panther, with some minor tweaks to the interface. The end result, however, was that I got everything configured the way I like it (all Mac users are unique, and their Macs reflect this) in just a few minutes. Setting my mouse and keyboard preferences was exactly like in Panther, as was display and power management.

What was very different than Panther, an immediately noticeable, is how quickly Tiger boots up. 20 seconds was all that the PoewrBook required, and only a few seconds more on the older Power Mac.

If the installation went smoothly, some of the application installs didn't. First, I had to fork over another $29 to upgrade Tiger's QuickTime 7.0 to Pro, even though I paid the same price last year with Panther. Common Apple, I paid for the OS upgrade, the QuickTime upgrade should be included. Other hitches were programs that simply don't work with Tiger. Norton AntiVirus and Utilities will install, but don't function and are very difficult to remove, which caused me to actually install Tiger twice on my PowerBook. The same applied to DoubleCommand, which installed but won't function. Absent DoubleCommand, I need to find another utility to disable the Capslock key on my PowerBook, and fast. I am writing a novel and do most of my writing on the PowerBook, but until I find a caps-killer utility, I'll have to use my ThinkPad for that purpose. I also am waiting for a new version of Onyx, a utility that allows you to run the various Unix maintenance scripts that all OSX machines need to run, but that most home-use computers don't as these scripts run automatically during the dark hours of the morning, when my computers are usually shut down or asleep.

While I had trouble with my various system utilities, all of my application software, including games, installed and ran without a hitch. I installed Microsoft Office 2004 first, as this is what I use the most, followed by various Adobe apps and the usual chat clients and Dramatica Pro (review coming soon) which I use for stories. Everything installed easily and works just fine.

So the install and configuration process was rather simple, so lets move on to how Tiger behaves with its older sibblings and with Windows. First, the G4 PowerMac functions both as a workstation and a server. My wife and daughter use it as their primary computers, for everything from internet research and email to fairly heavy gaming. I use it as a central backup location for documents from both my PowerBook and my ThinkPad, and we all use it as a print server, connected to both an old HP LaserJet and a cheap Epson all-in-one scanner/printer/copier. We have an Airport Extreme base station which connects via ethernet cable to the Power Mac, and wirelessly to all of the laptops (yes, even the 3400c).

What is great about Tiger in a mixed environment is how easily it networks. I downloaded a beta of Apple's Bonjour networking client for Windows (printing only) and since the printers are shared using Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) by default in Tiger, the Windows client picked them right away and configured them just like any standard Windows printer. I had tried the same thing when the PowerMac was running Panther, but I was never able to make it work. Of course, the Macs picked up the shared printers right away, even the old 3400c found the two printers in the chooser, though I did have to get drivers for them on the internet. Since the 3400c was already sharing those printers when the PowerMac ran Panther, no change was required. The Lombard was the same, it just continued to work as it always had.

File sharing was also just as easy, though somehow more reliable. When trying to connect to the server with the Windows laptop, Panther was hit and miss, sometimes just refusing to see the PC share, even though the PC could always open the Mac share. Panther's Windows networking was also slow, often taking 3-times as long to transfer files to or from Windows as compared to with another Mac. In Tiger, file transfer to and from Windows is all but indistinguishable from a Mac, with no real difference on either platform - you don't really know you are networking to a different system at all.

Another neat cross-platform improvement is the Bluetooth file sharing, which I had to really fight with to get working between my PowerBook and my ThinkPad, but on Tiger it just worked, immediately, without any setup on either computer. Turn on the bluetooth radios, and the computers discovered eachother. Send a file from one, and choose a password, and a dialog box will appear on the other immediately asking for the password. Type it in, and the file appears on the desktop. Doesn't matter if its Windows to Mac or Mac to Windows, it just works. Its really amazing, but the upgrade to Tiger on my PowerBook and Power Mac has actually given a significant improvement to the user experience on my Windows computer.

So the installation was easy, and Tiger knows how to play nice with both older version of the Mac OS and with Windows. How are the new features that everyone is talking about? Here is where I've spent the least amount of time, as I consider most of this stuff, the toys and gizmos, to be merely fluff, while the OS itself and how well it manages my hardware and other software to be the most important. New features are usually just things that I used utility programs for in the past, that Apple, Microsoft or whoever decides to absorb into the OS itself. Some of these things become indispensible additions, like TCPIP stacks for connecting to the internet, while others are quickly forgotten and seldom used, like the Macro Recorder in Windows or the AppleScript editor in Mac OS. Anyway, here is my take on the most obvious new features in Tiger.

Spotlight search is the feature that Apple is making the biggest deal over. In a business context, I could see this being great. It really is easy to search within emails, PDFs or any type of document, and were I in an industry such as retail, where I might want to pull up all information on sales of a given product, this would be a cool feature. As someone who uses my computer more for communication and recreation than for business, it is of dubious utility. I can already search the web using Google to find anything I'm looking for, and chances are, if something is on my hard drive, I already know where it is. My documents and email folders are already very well organized, so if I want emails pertaining to my daughter's activities, I just look in the folder with her name on it. LIkewise, if I want to see some paper I wrote in graduate school, I just open the graduate school folder, within that the folder for the class, and the paper will be there, right where I left it six-years-ago. Still, Spotlight can find those things quickly too, its just a question of habbit, I'm used to digging through my well-organized folder hierarchy and not used to typing search criteria in a keyword field when looking for my own content.

Dashboard is a program like Confabulator, that makes small applets available on the Mac's desktop. At first I thought this was just the old Desktop Accessories of System 7 or earlier?), but as I played with them, I really came to like this. First off, I live in the Los Angeles, CA area, but half of my family (my wife's half) are in Seoul, Korea. I will also be spending the next 5 months about an hour from St. Louis, MO for some military training starting next month. With the world clock widget, not only can I see the time in any of these places, something any clock application will do, but I can put graphical all 3 analog clocksside-by-side, each set to a different place. Even better, the clock face is white for daylight and black for nighttime. The weather applet is just as nice. Again I put three of them on my desktop (all widgets can open as many copies as you want or have space for), one each for Seoul, Los Angeles and St. Louis. The weather widget not only shows current temperature, but a graphical representation of prevailing conditions and with a single click gives the 6 day forecast. Other useful widgets are the measurement converter, stock ticker and calculator. There are fourteen in all, and certainly more on the way. best of all, just like the Expose feature in panther (still in Tiger), all of the widgets that you select (and arrange as you want on your desktop) appear instantly with a single, customizable keystroke (F12 for mine), and vanish again with either another key stroke, or a click on any part of the desktop OTHER THAN a widget. I am really starting to like this feature.

iChatAV is more of a bundled application than a feature, but it is MUCH improved in Tiger. In Panther video conferencing was already easy to do and of high quality, but both the quality and the simplicity have improved in Tiger. Now an icon for each user shows their capabilities, and you can start an audio or video chat just by clicking the appropriate icon. Once in the chat, you can still do many things through the icons of your contacts, such as drop or add them to the conversation or send them files. Up to 10 users can simultaneously audio chat, with each user having their own VU meter so you know who is talking, and up to four people can video chat. I use this a lot with my relatives in Korea, and when I am in Missouri, I'll use it with my wife and daughter back in California. If my wife is already talking to her family, I can join in to make it a three-way.

Those are the ones that really change things. Most of the bundled applications have also been improved, like Safari, which now supports RSS feeds and Mail, which has Spotlight search and smart mailboxes that can be created by Spotlight searches. These are incremental improvements to already excellent applications.

From what I've read around the web, the stuff we can actually see and touch are only the minor changes in Tiger with most of the serious improvements being in the structure of the kernel and how software interacts with it. I'm not a UNIX geek and don't understand kext and kapi stuff. As I understand it, this mainly means that it will be easier for hardware venders to create Mac drivers for their products, and also easier to port Linux programs to run on OS X. Apple also claims that there will be better compatibility with future OS X versions and Tiger. We shall see.

In the end, I consider Tiger to be an essential upgrade from Jaguar 10.2 (anyone still running Cheetah 10.0 or Puma 10.1 really needs to wake up) and a worthwhile, though not essential upgrade from Panther 10.3. Jaguar was the first really useable version of OS X, while Panther really put OS X in prime time. I still really like Panther and consider it a mature, feature-rich and stable operating system. Tiger is just that much better.