Catch Tiger by the Tail . . .
Melanie McDonald
Tiger bounded out of the Apple campus on April 29 and changed computing for all of us. From RSS news feeds as screensavers to smart mailboxes in mail to more than 150 additional new features, Mac OS 3.4 is a huge advance in the way we use our Macs.
I’ve used Macs since the SE came out in the 80’s, and I have always been fairly conservative about upgrading to new systems until they were in their 3rd or 4th iteration with the bugs worked out. But after wallowing happily in Panther, I could not wait to open my office to Tiger. And I have not been disappointed.
Tiger is fun. It is easy to use. It is beyond anything Mac users have ever had in three specific areas: hard drive searching, the fun and usefulness of some small programs called widgets in the Dashboard, and easy programming of repeat processes with the Automator. There are more neat elements than these, and there are probably some important bells and whistles that I have not yet had time to explore, but the above alone make Tiger worth the installation.
If you remember the old days of spending hours flipping through menus and folders searching for a lost document or a misplaced contact, you will sing the hallelujah chorus when you explore Spotlight. Select the magnifying glass icon at the far right of your Tiger tool bar, enter the search term in the window that falls, and you will see a clickable list of every document, folder, contact, mail message, and calendar entry that includes the search word or phrase. In short, realize you have misplaced something or just wonder what you have on a certain topic and a few seconds later, you will see a list.
The second element of Tiger that is a wonderment is Dashboard, a new icon that appears in your dock. Click the dashboard-like icon and the dock vanishes and you will see a gathering of widgets, a selection of stand-alone programs that do everything from recording the stock prices of the day to telling you time around the globe, providing you with a password generator, to racking packages, to listing your local tv schedule, or local weather. And new widgets are appearing every week at apple.com. Just download, move to the widget dock, and use!
If you have avoided AppleScripts but find repetitive tasks tedious and frustrating when you are working on a project, you will find Automator well worth exploring. According to Apple, “You can easily automate tasks such as renaming a large group of files, resizing dozens of images to fit an iPhoto slideshow or creating iCal birthday events using Address Book contacts, then repeat those tasks again and again. Simple and easy-to-understand application Actions are the building blocks, so you don’t have to write any code. Each Action has all of the options and settings you need. You don’t have to work hard to figure out how to make it work.” Using this program, you can create a workflow within a single program, using multiple programs, and/or using the Internet. Automator opens to three panes: a Library pane for selection of the program, an Action pane for selection of the action to be used, and a Workflow pane. Automator will take some time to master, but looks worth the effort.
Less magic-making but still impressive and potentially useful are some of the other innovative capabilities of Tiger. For example, OS 10.4 fine tunes the helpful Expose feature so you can continue to have dozens of programs open at the same time and control the dominance of each using the f9, f10, and f11 keys.
Mac Mail has been given an elegant facelift with Smart Folders, spotlight-driven mail folders that use your criteria to collect mail. iChat AV will delight everyone from simple chat buffs to business types needing to call a quick business meeting. Outfit your computer with a camera and you will have the added enhancement of superb pictures, 3D participants boxes, and flawless sound. And, of course, it is also available for those without cameras who simply want to text message.
Also largely unexplored at this writing but intriguing are the enhanced speech capabilities of a Mac using Speech and the completely new VoiceOver program. Especially for the seeing impaired, VoiceOver appears to be a significant step ahead in making the computer accessible to everyone. “Built In, not bolted over,” according to Apple, VoiceOver provides the user with keyboard commands in place of mouse commands, allows for personalization of voices so the user can distinguish between commands, content, attributes, etc. Anyone interested in such capabilities should spend some time playing with the VoiceOver Utility to get a sense of the range of voices and options available.
A regular user of Firefox as a web browser, I have never been a fan of Safari. The bells and whistles added to Apple’s built in web browser are less than stunning. It now has RSS news feeds and headline drops, but so does Firefox. And despite Apple’s claim that the first time Safari opens it will import Internet Explorer bookmarks—but not Firefox bookmarks–mine has never done that. Could be my error.
And despite my nearly 100% positive reaction to Tiger, I urge readers to do some homework before installing. I may have been just lucky in finding that the installation had absolutely no negative effects on my computer. Some users have reported less success.
To learn about the problems some are having, I urge you to check out http://www.macfixit.com, an excellent source of Mac information and help. And I also offer the usual plea to back up key documents before upgrading.
But most of all, I urge you all to check out Tiger. It is fun. It is enormously useful. And, in my case at least, it is virtually flawless.
McDonald, president and CEO of MacTutor & Services in Southern Pines, is an apple authorized service provider whose business includes technical and networking services as well as system and software tutoring and design consulting. She can be reached at 910.246.2150 or mobbs@pinehurst.net.
