Well, it seems a ton of respected sites are posting their thoughts on Tiger, so it’s a given that I should throw my hat into the ring as well. After using Tiger for a day or so, I have to say that it’s one of the most polished operating systems I’ve had the pleasure of using in quite some time. While the ‘gee whiz’ factor for Spotlight and Dashboard obviously will capture most headlines, it’s some of the other things that have made my experience so far very pleasant.
Some random cool things that have made my day a lot brighter: Safari 2.0 is FAST. Fastest browser I’ve ever used. Safari’s new RSS button (a la firefox’s in a way) will automatically send the feed to your default aggregator if you so choose Control Command D when selecting any word brings up a dictionary definition of the word The ‘Grab’ screenshot app now saves as png, not just pdf. Mail has been totally revamped, and now is a borderline “professional” application.
Lots of features that finally rival Outlook, etc in it’s customizability. Spotlight has already supplanted Quicksilver as my app-launcher of choice. It’s just so much faster and indexes things immediately.
Speaking of Spotlight… I searched for the word ‘and’ with Spotlight, and within 1 second I was shown 16, 000 examples of the word. Very cool. Dashboard is kind of useful, but not something I can see myself using that much.
I do plan on writing a nice little app to let me update my blog without actually having to use a browser, however. As it’s based on javascript/css/xhtml, it won’t be much of an issue. 99.9 of my apps work, and all my ‘mission-critical’ ones do without a hiccup. Overall, this version of OS X runs like a dream.
It’s noticeably faster in almost area (startup, shutdown, app launch, window resizing), and a .4.1 release is due out soon to squash any lingering bugs. Also, with Dave Hyatt making Safari the first browser to pass the Acid2 test, the next release or two should bring us huge improvements to standards-compliance. Overall, I’d have to give Tiger a pretty solid review – it’s only been around a day since I’ve installed it, so I’m sure I will find tons more that I love, and tons more that I hate in a week or two.