I’ve finally gotten around to buying a copy of Mac OS X “Tiger”, and now that I’ve had a chance to play around with it a bit, it’s a great upgrade. Safari finally renders this site as intended, and the Safari rendering engine is blazingly fast. Dashboard is really cool, and Automator is going to be a real lifesaver. The whole UI seems faster than it was in Panther – Apple’s continuing their tradition of making each OS X release faster than the last one.
Spotlight took less than a half hour to index my iBook’s drive, but with only 30GB of storage that’s probably not a particularly difficult task. The Smart Folders concept is a fantastically useful concept, but the implementation needs a bit of work – future patches will likely take smooth over some of the minor UI issues there.
Mac OS X was already a great operating system in 10.3. Tiger adds some great new features that Microsoft won’t have until October of next year — assuming the ship date for Longhorn doesn’t slip, and generally makes the system feel faster and more responsive. Mac geeks need no selling to make the upgrade, but potential switchers now have another reason to go with the Mac.
UPDATE: I don’t know what Apple did with font rendering in Tiger, but screen fonts actually look better than they did in Panther – and Panther was already the gold standard for screen fonts. The fonts are incredibly clear and easy to read on my iBook’s display.
