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May 04, 2005

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Install and First Impressions

[Google Search: os x tiger ] I did the "archive my system directory and save my accounts" installation on a powerbook G4 with 1.2ish GB of RAM on an 80 gig hard drive and "only" 17 gigs of free space.

Install

The interface for setting up the installation options is terrible. The "archive my stuff and save my account option" is an option under "customize" on the screen where you pick which drive to install to. I had to open the printed instructions to figure it out. Embarrasing.

Setup took 41 mins 11 secs, it was 43 mins 1 sec from "reboot to install" to first login screen. Install would have taken about 10 minutes less to do the install if I didn't install ALL of the language support. But I guess I can sleep better at night knowing that my Norwegian friends can use my laptop assuming they need it and can't do it in English and that I meet some Norwegian people and they want to be my friend and they need a laptop. Anyway, its done.

It took 1 hour 29 mins for Spotlight to index my hard drive.

First impressions

The look and feel is pretty much unchanged. There's still no cool screensavers or background images. c'est la vie.

Spotlight is cooler than I thought it would be. I thought I would be sad because it won't search my mail messages in Entourage, but...

The new Mail.app is actually usable, so I don't need entourage anymore. The smart folders are fun, search is actually usable (it wasn't on the old mail) and I am happy with it. I don't have worry about that lingering fear that my extremely un-portable and un-fixable Entourage database will die.

At first the RSS aggregator in Safari looked useless. It appeared that it wouldn't aggregate and it wouldn't show my un-viewed message counts on the bookmark bar. But, a quick read of the apple web page on the new safari and some poking around by two CS professors (it would have been faster for almost anyone else to figure it out) we found that you can aggregate feeds by...


  1. Put all the feeds you want to aggregate in a folder in your bookmarks
  2. drag that folder into your bookmarks bar.
  3. click on the folder name
  4. in the drop down menu, select "view all RSS articles"
  5. drag the location of that page into the bookmark bar
  6. voila, you have a book mark for all the feeds in that folder.
  7. un-viewed article count appears next to the feed name in the bookmark bar.

If there's an easier way, I'd like to hear about it.

The dashboard stuff is way over the top. I mean, I see the value and its cool (but I thought expose was cool the first day and haven't used it since) but the ripple effects and the slow turning over effect are just gratuitous iCandy. We'll see if it drops into the gimmick category in a few more days.

emacs didn't work.

CodeTek Virtual desktop pro didnt' work.

Fire didn't work (but I just need to download the next version and it will)

Everything else is humming along just fine. Surprisingly painless overall.

Posted by jones at May 4, 2005 09:38 PM

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