Today is 05/05/05. Cool!
Today is also my first day w/Tiger. So far, so good. Very smooth upgrade, even though I chose the ‘erase and install’ option. I transferred my user settings and apps from my panther clone on an external firewire drive after installing. Next time, I would install the apps manually afterwards, but truth be told, I was too excited, and didn’t feel like dealing with it. I had already found tiger compatible updates for most apps before the install. Only problem was virex, which i knew wouldn’t work; and I had to get update for sidetrack. I hated not having it, even for the 1/2 hour that it was gone.
Widgets are pretty cool. I downloaded one that is a rubik’s cube for the desktop, one for easy uploads to flickr, one that makes a user defined slideshow from flickr, jiwire hotspot finder, wikipedia lookup, and a color picker. I liked the included weather, dictionary, calculator, unit converter, translator, flight tracker, and tiger tile game, but have not yet figured out how to type on the sticky note.
Spotlight rocks as hard as they promised it would, and as of now, I have retired my ever faithful copy of Quicksilver application launcher. Safari RSS reader is WAY better than anything I was expecting! I’ve still been using netnewswire for subscribed feeds, but I’m using safari for viewing feeds that i click on.
I am SO excited for automator, but haven’t had time to play yet. Also haven’t tried new mail, ical, or address book yet. I wonder if they can sway me from Entourage…
Update #1:
– Rubik’s cube widget is a pain to maneuver.
– new Mail app rocks! Way better than the last one! No autocorrect for spelling, though.
– address book and iCal still suck…
– i’m not so into the bright blue apple logo (don’t mind the spotlight one for some reason), but the graphite setting makes my scrollbars grey, and that just won’t do!
Update #2:
– turns out the “can’t type in stickies” thing is an intermittent bug
Update #3 – the next day
– ok, widgets are cool, but dashboard is a pain!
For example, I want to upload a photo to flickr. I have to start dragging the file, click on F12 (to bring up dashboard), drop it in the flickr widget if it’s open in dashboard (otherwise, have to open it and start again). Not hard, but I really wish I could just leave the widget on my desktop and just drop the photos in.
I don’t like that dashboard is always running and using system resources. I just downloaded Amnesty Widget Browser. Widgets loaded in Amnesty run completely independent of dashboard. So far, it is doing exactlly what I hoped it would. It creates a menu bar menu that gives you a choice of which widgets you want open, and several ways to display them.
Update #4
– spoke too soon about retiring Quicksilver! Spotlight is very cool for a lot of things, but Quicksilver does the job of a launcher way better/faster than spotlight.
– flickr widget is buggy in Amnesty and I have no idea what to do w/the versiontracker widget
RANT: I am trying to use ical, since I’ve pretty much made the switch to mail2 and address book (from entourage), but it’s hard not to hate it. Entourage calendar imported as one calendar, so no categories were transferred. Not so hard to fix, but not what I felt like doing either. The only reason I’m even trying to switch is because it opens so much faster than entourage and my calendar needs are relatively basic. I think I can adapt, but ‘the drawer’ may be more than I can handle. I hate the drawer! And I would be greatly indebted to anyone who can show me how to remove the whole calendar list/minical/notifications pane on the left side from view.
Update #5 – Utilities – 5/8/2005
– OnyX does not yet have Tiger compatible version. Older versions will not work.
– There is a Tiger update for TinkerTool
– MemoryStick 1.3.4 works fine w/Tiger
– macjanitor 1.2.1 also fine w/Tiger
– Cache Out X – 4.0.1 – broken in Tiger. No update yet.
Amnesty Widget Browser update… There are a few bugs still, but the developers seem to be fixing them almost as fast as they are discovered, so keep checking for updates. I sent a bug report this morning about color picker and flidet, and got a response in under an hour. I haven’t had a chance to try flidget in the new version (0.60b as of today) because flickr has been down since I woke up.
Update #6 – Widget Manager
– Just downloaded Widget Manager. It’s a preference pane that allows you to inspect, remove, and disable dashboard widgets. Very handy! Thanks to Randy at ebmug for the tip.
Update #7 – maybe the dashboard’s not so bad…
– I’m starting to like the dashboard for certain widgets; things like weather, calculator, etc. It’s nice to be able to just pop it up and down easily. I’m still using Amnesty for widgets that require more complicated interaction, like fliget (still buggy in amnesty, but works fine through dashboard).
Update #8 – 5/27/05
– iCal helper (whatever that is) wants my password all the freakin’ time! May have something to do w/syncing, but I can’t really see any pattern, logic, rhyme, reason, or external explanation of why it is happening. Searching the net, including apple support forums bring me only the knowledge that I am not alone with this problem, but no solution. So far, this is the most annoying thing since installing Tiger. Other than that, I have come to love dashboard, appreciate Mail 2 even more, and tolerate iCal a little better aside from the password thing.
Update #9 – 8/18/05
Tiger is close to perfect now. After a clean reinstall and adding apps back manually, a few updates from apple, and tiger compatible versions of other software, tiger is running clean and fast. I use dashboard all the time, especially for the calculator, but also for BART schedules, address book, dictionary, and a bunch of other useful things. Spotlight can still use a little more work, especially in making it not index my external backup drive when I plug it in, and staying more current on my internal hd. Still it works amazingly fast in Mail, and is also very fast at finding the items on my hd that it has already indexed.
Update #10 – 12/21/05
I am still loving Tiger, but there have been some annoyances since the 10.4.3 update.
Mail was crashing and freezing a lot until I disabled rules created with mail ‘act on’. I haven’t checked to see if there is a newer version that is compatible w/10.4.3. I also disabled the junk matcher ‘extension’ that I found somewhere on the web. It is actually just a rule, very similar to the built in junk filter. I don’t miss it at all, and have edited the regular junk rule to do what junk matcher used to do. Mail does not crash anymore.
I haven’t used Amnesty widget browser in a long time, and haven’t missed it either.
I switched to ‘Cocktail’ for maintenance. It was too confusing using 5 different apps to get things done. SuperDuper! released a new version which is even more excellent than the first version. Both apps run fine even after 10.4.3 update.
Random problems with Firefox 1.5, but I don’t think I can blame that on Tiger. I am also suddenly getting error messages when I open Safari that simbl (latest version) is not compatible w/safari v2.2. No idea if that is tiger related or not, but it is annoying.
Things seem to be moving slower in general since the 10.4.3 update. I am hoping this will be fixed in 10.4.4. From what I have read, other people are having even worse problems w/10.4.3, like not being able to connect to wireless networks with airport, or having very slow connections. My connection seems slower in firefox, but is still speedy in Safari.
Spotlight seems to be finding more than it used to, and it is finally following my instructions that both partitions on my external drive are ‘private’ and should not be indexed every time I plug it in!
Update #11 – 1/15/06 – 10.4.4 update
I updated to 10.4.4 about a week ago, and as of now there are no problems. The upgrade was smooth and all problems from 10.4.3 seem to have been fixed. I re-enabled Mail Act-On, but haven’t used it enough yet to see if there are still problems. So far, so good.
Switched to G4 optimized version of Firefox 1.5 and still having the random script errors as I was in regular firefox. It is noticeably faster than regular Firefox 1.5.
Uninstalling SIMBL fixed Safari problems. That would be a crappy solution if I was using Safari as my main browser, but it is no big deal since I’m not.