My first week with Tiger

It has been a week since I upgraded to Tiger and its been a slightly bumpy ride (although things are smoothing out now). Initially the upgrade went well but unfortunately Mail 2.0 just would not accept any new messages. After hours of debugging I just could not get it to work so I reluctantly switched over to Thunderbird in order to email. Unfortunately in the process I managed to loose a bunch of messages which resulted in a few embarrassing emails to people asking for them to please resend. Eventually (like today) I finally realised what my problem was with Mail (iAlert was incompatible with Tiger) and with that fixed I am now back to Mail 2.0 again.

I now have Mail 2.0 working (Click to enlarge)

Mail 2.0 is a big improvement over the original Mail once you get rid of the hideously ugly buttons with Cage Fighter. There are some really neat options for attachments like viewing a slideshow and importing images directly into iPhoto. The Spotlight search within Mail is really quick and very versatile. The Smart Folders in Mail are nice but that essential when the Spotlight search is so good.

Spotlight itself is a feature thats going to take a while to grow on me. I think it would be great on a G5 system but on my G4 laptop the two or three seconds it takes to search and display results is just a little too long. The search system is a little limiting as well. Apple have harnessed the unlimited attributes capability of their HFS+ filesystem to index the hard-drive. This allows any file to be quickly searched but it does not extend to databases (such as web browser caches or Thunderbirds .mbox mail boxes). Consequently the search system is a little limited but at least it is available now and is very fast. What I am finding is that rather than crawl through my Applications directory to use odd utilities I am pressing Option+Space to activate Spotlight, typing the first few characters of the program and then pressing enter (as it prioritizes applications over documents).

Spotlight Searching (Click to enlarge)

The improved Safari browser has made me switch back from Firefox. Its a lot faster and now works with every website (even Google Maps). I use NetNewsWire for RSS news-reading so the RSS features of Safari go unused (but they do look pretty). In the upgrade I have also made the move from NetBeans 4 to Eclipse 3 as my Java IDE. The SWT toolkit makes it is a lot faster than NetBeans and in the near future I want to get into some multi-platform SWT programming for rich client interfaces.

My Dashboard Widgets (Click to enlarge)

The Dashboard feature of Tiger was something that I did not think would be that useful after using Konfabulator for a long time but I have found it very good. It does not drain resources like Konfabulator and there is some really good Widgets available. Theres a great screenshot widget whilst Emma loves giggling at the little hula dancer one.

Overall the upgrade has been well worth it and I have a feeling many of the new features like the graphics subsystem, Quicktime 7 and Spotlight have yet to be fully leveraged by Apple or third party developers.