18/06/05
Jeremy is right! Tiger underwhelms, except for...
I have to come out and agree with Jeremy, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is a little underwhelming. I’ve been using it for 8 weeks now, and overall, I’m not as wowed as I was with the Jaguar>Panther upgrade. Sure, there are a lot of improvements, but I’ve not found a use for Dashboard and Spotlight, the supposed major features. I’m still missing uControl’s virtual scrolling, and haven’t found any suitable replacement. Thats a sore point.
Dashboard takes a while to ‘kick in’, as you watch the widgets load slowly. I think this is still yet to reveal its usefulness, as a lot of widgets are things like ‘Amazon Search’. Hmm, referrer fees are wonderful thing aren’t they? Even the Transmit widget isn’t that useful. Why use that when I can just drag files to a dock or finder sidebar icon? It also seems to use up CPU unnecessarily, and since turning it off with DashOnOff on my powerbook is improved. Those widgets that I actually use (Calculator and currency converter) I have bookmarked in Safari, and open them in a tab. (To do this, ctrl-click the widget, and open the main .html file found inside).
To be honest, I still prefer my neat little Stattoo.
Spotlight is nowhere near as quick to use as Quicksilver (although, to be fair, I find the fact that it indexes text in PDFs quite useful). The jumpiness of its search results are annoying to say the least.
I think there are sleepy features that will reveal their usefulness over time, such as Automator, but until then, the one thing that has made me glad to upgrade is Safari 2. Not only for its new features (little things like undos in textareas), but for its RSS Reader. I had very low expectations for the in-built RSS reader, despite really wanting a browser+RSS solution. I’ve now found myself using it all the time. Its convenient, feeds are synced along with my bookmarks, and it suits my style of reading perfectly. I always prefer to view the actual content in the browser, using RSS readers as little more than a notification of updates. It also seems to cope well the 250+ feeds that I subscribe to – no speed problems at all.
Admitting this makes me feel very guilty though, as if I’m personally betraying Brent Simmons and David Watanabe.
I’ve had a few questions about how I use the RSS feature, so I thought I’d just quickly outline what I do. In my bookmarks toolbar is an ‘RSS Feeds’ folder, in which there are sub-folders for ‘Mac’, ‘Music’, ‘Design’ and so on. This means that each sub folder has a ‘View all RSS articles’ command at the bottom its menu, which means I can view feeds together, or just in 1 category. New feeds are set to be coloured red, and sorted by ‘new’. Finally, I’ve hacked the appearance to be little less vanilla. I love the fact that that I can do it all within the browser.
In fact, there is only one drawback I’ve come across. Sometimes it takes two goes to get the RSS feeds displayed. Click ‘View all RSS Articles’ once – nothing. Go back and do it again, it works fine. I’ve also seen this happen on individual feeds, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason or reproducible steps to it. Has anyone else found this? Its odd, but I find that I can put up with this (and hopefully its a bug that’ll be fixed in the future).
So thats the way it is now, at least until NetNewsWire gets even more browser features…
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Paul D said 1063 days ago:
I guess everyone’s Tiger experience is a little different. I haven’t touched Safari RSS (NetNewsWire does the job), but I do use 2 or 3 widgets regularly. Spotlight probably helps me find a few buried files every day, but it’s not quite revolutionary yet. I still think Smart Folders will be the best thing in the world once they iron the bugs out.Now Automator is pretty cool once you play around with it. Once you know what actions are available, you can whip together simple but useful workflows in about 60 seconds. It has saved me considerable time on repetitive tasks, like renaming all the files in a folder sequentially.
Drew McLellan said 1063 days ago:
The real winner for me is Spotlight when used within Mail.app. The ability to easily locate old email based on a vague notion of what was discussed has literally revolutionised my workflow. I deal with a lot of email.Jon Hicks said 1063 days ago:
Except that Mail was always able to search for keywords – it doesn’t seem particularly better with Spotlight.Neil said 1063 days ago:
I find the spotlight feature in Mail.app to be way better than the search in Mail 1.3, which was slow as molasses. Also, the smart folders feature alone makes Mail 2.0 worthy in my opinion – being able to quickly pull up reasonably complex searches quickly (like “all emails with attachments sent between March 15, 2004 and Apri 25, 2005 from client x”) is killer.In general, 10.4 is more of a evolutionary step up – it’s not a gigantic leap like 10.3 was. It really is a developer’s release – the stable API, the cornucopia of new frameworks and features that devs can build into their apps… all great. I’m surprised people upgraded as quickly as they did – I assumed that the upgrade curve would be much more gradual, as new technologies were integrated into 3rd party apps and people started to see the usefulness of the new OS.
Oh, and Safari 2.0 is the shiznit. Especially when you start to run it with nightly WebKit builds.
Simone Merli said 1063 days ago:
Jon, thanks for info about “DashOnOff”.My PB terribly slow down when I start 10/15 widgets.
Now I can choose!!!
Mike D. said 1063 days ago:
Jon,Have you given Bloglines a try since you like getting your feeds in a browser? It’s especially nice if you use multiple computers. It’s the best web-app ever invented in my opinion.
Joel said 1063 days ago:
This might be too-little, too-late, but when I was looking for a new RSS reader, I stumbled upon is Lektora ( http://www.lektora.com/ ).It integrates fully with Firefox and Internet explorer, and going by their homepage, it also has support for OSX systems. =)
Ryan said 1063 days ago:
Yeah, I’ve noticed the same thing with the RSS button; sometimes it just takes two clicks. I thought it was just me until now.Personally, I use Spotlight a lot. Certainly more than I expected to. I use it mainly for opening applications, but I definitely have grown to appreciate the searching inside text and Photoshop files in the last couple of weeks. It’s not actually as fast as I expected it to be, but waiting 3 seconds for a result still offers a considerable difference between trying to locate something in Finder.
I haven’t found too many useful widgets, but I do enjoy Dash Dock when it comes to keeping my dock less cluttered.
mark said 1062 days ago:
Spotlight has been great for me. I use it for searching and as an app launcher. I have heard some people complain it was slow though. Dashboard I also find very handy. Wikipedia being one of my favorites followed by phonebook and of course calculator. Dashboard only occassionaly takes a while to load for me. I also use a system pref pane called widget manager. A quick google search will pull it right up. But Tiger like many things will have two sides to it. I however have noticed some annoyinng system slowdowns which may be a result of dashboard. 10.4.2 supposedly will be a major dashboard update. We shall see.P.S. John, it may be the southern comfort talking but your journal entries are always great fun.
Dave said 1062 days ago:
Well you do learn new things, i was not aware of the DashOnOff function. Heh i guess my ibook might load within 25minutes now :PJon Hicks said 1062 days ago:
Mike – I really couldn’t get along with bloglines, Looks nasty, and the pages were slow to load.Mark – HAS to be the Southern Comfort! ;o)
Paul said 1061 days ago:
I totally agree. It does seem that Tiger is just a few gimicks and a bit of tidying up on top of 10.3 which was a great revision before it – interesting reading Neils comments regarding this being a ‘developer’ release.As to spotlight, I’m quite organised anyway, so haven’t found the need for it, Smart Folders required some thought (they didn’t ‘just work’), and as for Dashboard, I guess it is only as good as it’s widgets – so 100% better thanks to the ShortStat widget! But the slowness needs fixing given this is one of the star attractions for Tiger.
With Safari, great idea combining with browser and RSS, but it bugs me that I can’t just bookmark a site once, and Safari auto-discover whether or not it has an RSS feed. It seems mad having two bookmarks for one site, and frankly, a bit of a pain in the bum!
Tiger – could (must) do better!
clint said 1061 days ago:
I was thinking just tonite about the overall lack of user communicado regarding Tiger.. I am still in .9 and enjoying widgets compliments ofamnesty
John Nack said 1061 days ago:
RSS in Safari is the feature I anticipated it most eagerly. I’ve been on Tiger for all of two days, and so far I’m liking the RSS support, but I’m wishing for two abilities:– Display article headings directly in the Bookmarks bar and menu, a la Firefox – Assign a keyboard shortcut to the “View all RSS articles”
I don’t see the former being supported, but is there at least a way to do the latter? Maybe I’m surreally lazy, but having to mouse up and pull down a menu is a drag.
Fingers crossed,
J.
Jon Hicks said 1061 days ago:
Paul – Nice idea, who knows they may support that in the future?John – A keyboard combo for ‘View all Articles’ would be hard to implement I guess. People like me have several sub-folders, and each one has its own ‘View’ option.
Richard Earney said 1061 days ago:
I use Smart Folders for web projects – set a date that a site was last updated – then as I add files it tells me which are new.Spotlight I do like, but not tried Quicksilver.
Dashboard – hmmm – i like certain widgets but it is a bit poor really
quis said 1061 days ago:
The bloglines notifier widget is the only thing that has made dashboard truly useful to me. I have it in developer mode so it just sits on my desktop, and updates every few minutes with the number of new feed items. Really awful for procrastination, but really great for labour-saving.Steve P. Sharpe said 1061 days ago:
I use NetNewsWire for RSS. Maybe I should use Safari more for RSS?Dashboard is ok, although it is a bit gimmicky I guess. There are a lot of pretty useless widgets around. However I do still use certain dashboard widgets. (World clock, Shortstat, Dictionary, BBC Radio, Lorem Ipsum, plus some more from time to time.)
I use Spotlight and Quicksilver, two completely different things.
I was a bit annoyed to findout that iSync doesn’t work with my Nokia 6630! Maybe a update soon will fix that?
But hey, at least it’s not Windows… =]
Teevio said 1061 days ago:
I am definitely disappointed in the lack of really useful widgets. Most of them are time wasting widgets (I guess some of them could be considered time-saving). But almost all of them just give stats about something, the weather, time, amazon, google, whatever. I think the power of the widget is there, people just aren’t harnessing that powerI think widgets like ColourMod:http://www.colourmod.com are extremely helpful as a widget. There are times when I’m working in a text editor and don’t want to open Photoshop or something similar just to find an appropriate color and hex value. ColourMod is perfect for that.
Either way, I think you will see a much more beneficial side to Widgets in the future.
James Crossett said 1061 days ago:
My powerbook has slowed down significantly sinced I installed Tiger and I too have not found much use for spotlight, widgets or automator. Everything is just so slow now. Spotlight takes a while when it is first invoked and as for widgets don’t get me started.Most definetly underwhelmed.
Javid said 1061 days ago:
I find the new Safari a little annoying -the fonts seems to mess up for me. When I go to say yahoo.com – it is not the same as previewing with my older safari… and even though i changed the font setting in preferences.And the dashboard weather does not seem to work for canadian cities!!
Just my ramble!
John Nack said 1061 days ago:
Update: I’m happy to report that it is possible to assign a keyboard shortcut to “View All RSS Articles,” via the Keyboard & Mouse control panel within System Preferences. I added a new custom shortcut for Safari and assigned it to “View All RSS Articles.” Voila—hitting Cmd-Opt-R now brings up all my feeds at once. I don’t know what would happen if I nested RSS feeds in folders and wound up with multiple instances of that menu item, but for now I’m just basking in the satisfaction of being able to see all feeds with a keystroke.Kevin Marino said 1061 days ago:
Interesting comments. I am a MS Windows user and have used older MAC interfaces and the newest is definitely somewhat of a step back.What is most telling is the performance issues. I think this really strikes at the core of Apple’s issues. The CPU is potent but the graphics maybe lacking. With Tiger relying so much on GPU, I have a feeling that Apple’ has had to make compromises. Also with GPU acting less “powerful” on Apples than pn PCs hints at issue for people with “older” hardware.
Now what I said does not mean people here have old and weak hardware, its just that perhaps Apples decisions in the hardware caused problems. What will be interesting will be performance on the Intel platform.
Merely speculation, as I await the Intel platform to upgrade to.
Paul D said 1061 days ago:
“What is most telling is the performance issues. I think this really strikes at the core of Apple’s issues.”Spoken like someone who hasn’t used OS X much or at all.
Every version, including Tiger, is faster and more responsive than the previous version of OS X on the same hardware. Anyone who’s experiencing otherwise (like Mr. Crossett apparently) has a faulty installation or other hardware problems.
Jon Hicks said 1061 days ago:
John – you can also use Menu Master to create a shortcut for the main folders “View all..” command. Thanks for the idea.Kevin – woah there boy! Tiger isn’t a step back in any shape or form. Its definitely moving forward, its just that the leap isn’t as big as it was with Jaguar to Panther. I don’t think Apple has had to make compromises either, but running Dashboard on my Powerbook has proven to be a bit of a CPU hog. Fine on my G5 though! ;o)
Daniel Andrews said 1060 days ago:
I’m quite unimpressed with Tigher, features wise, as well. I do find myself saying “oh cool!” every now and again, but I’m not sure it’s $129 US cool.I’ve all but ditched other browsers on the Mac as well. I used to be a pretty hardcore Camino user, but recently I’ve kind of given up on that browser keeping up with Safari and others.
Safari’s speed was the one thing that really had me using alternatives before Safari RSS came out. Now, it’s nearly as fast as any other Mac browser. I’m anxious to see what kind of additions we see to webkit now that Hyatt has fixed the Acid2 bugs and the webkit source is totally free to download. I anticipate an even better rendering engine in the near future for the best browser for the Mac.
Jason said 1060 days ago:
Personally, I love Tiger. I just installde it today, Monday-Jun 20, and it’s awesome. I can’t wait to download cool widgets from Apple’s web site tomorrow… :)Vanish said 1060 days ago:
This is a perfect case of “To each his own”, I’m thinking. I’m unsurprised at the lackluster perfomance on Powerbooks. Laptops have always lagged behind the desktops in power, expecially in the Mac realm.I actually love Dashboard. I haven’t launched Watson or Sherlock since installing Tiger. Dashboard gives me what I want form them much more quickly and much less obtrusively. I also agree that the true potential of the widget has not been realized yet. Give it a year or so and see what wonderous things are produced.
Spotlight. I am greatly amused each time I read a review of Spotlight. I’m anal retentive by nature, and as such my files are highly organized. Finding files, at that basic level, is not what Spotlight is all about. It was when I typed in a search phrase to find all documents about a clent, and 13 PDF files popped up I hadn’t remembered mentioned them at all, and even better, several php files of other clients popped up as well and I could see where I had crossover and affiliations long forgotten. That opened up a whole new world for marketing to me. Spotlight shines when you get outside of the box and see what it really just did. Oh, and I disagree wholeheartedly about Mail. With spotlight, it rules. Panther Mail simply cannot compare.
Safari 2.0 is very nice. I too am irritated that I need two bookmarks for a site. I am definitely going to sub-folder my RSS Feeds bookmark bar. Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks, Jon!
A final note: I am stuck using Panther at work, but have Tiger at home. A testament to whether an update is worth the fees is what I am experiencing daily now. I get to work and get frustrated by what I no longer have access to that make slife so much easier at home…
James Adams said 1059 days ago:
Jon, I’d love to see what’s filed underneath the rest of your folders along your toolbar. Not just under the RSS folder but the other’s as well. Mine is a lot smaller and I’m getting anxious thinking I’m missing out on some good stuff. I only had about half of your Mac OSX list. Help! Awesome stuff, as usual.Noah said 1058 days ago:
I think that Dashboard hasn’t found it’s niche yet. There are very few widgets that serve the purpose of Dashboard, that is, to be able to quickly access data with one key stroke, then hide it with another. Right now, Weather, and the Shortstat widget are all that I use. I can glance at them, then move on. Why would I want to use the iTunes or the Calculator widget, when I have easy access to them on my desktop already. In my opinioin, no one is making widgets that fit the Dashboard “idea”. At least not yet…Vince C. said 1058 days ago:
Why does your RSS feed send out this entry all the time?Coleman Dash said 1058 days ago:
Hey Jon,Have you tried Sidetrack for scrolling? (http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/) Though it doesn’t let you map keys to scrolling as did uControl, it does allows you to use the track pad to scroll.
Jon Hicks said 1058 days ago:
Coleman – I have thanks. I’m looking for a way of scrolling using a mouse, rather than trackpad. uControls ‘virtual scrolling’ was a godsendjohn said 1057 days ago:
I just downloaded DashOnOff, and for some reason it doesn’t seem to turn off Dashboard when I ask it to.Anyone else have this problem?
I enjoy Tiger, but Dashboard has definitely had an adverse effect on the speed of my machine.
Ryan Clark said 1057 days ago:
I agree that Tiger’s a mixed bag. I find I rarely use Spotlight; its jerkiness is aggravating. And the new Mail icons left me feeling downright depressed for about a week.But…I really like Dashboard. It may be a bit slow to load the first time, but with the right widgets, it can be a real time saver. These days if I want to know how warm it is outside I just hit F12. And even the frivolous widgets can be a lot of fun. And I feel the OS is speedier all around and possibly more stable as well (not that it wasn’t before).
Andrew said 1055 days ago:
I also just disable Dashboard w/ DashOnOff (G4PB), but I’m unable to get most widgets to work by simply executing the html file from within the package. Meh, maybe in Leopard I’ll use it. For now, Quicksilver is my quickest way from point A to B for most things, since I’m on a single processor laptop.dan said 1051 days ago:
I almost entirely agree with what you say in the main post, however I have noticed speed issues with safari rss, I only have a mac mini, but it does get a bit sluggish when there are lots of unread feeds.Tudor Oman said 1048 days ago:
Does anyone find Tiger slower? I find that the using the same apps as prior to upgrade the system slows very quickly and has even crashed a few times. Have even thought of downgrading to 10.3 again.