Just upgraded my Mac
Last weekend I finally bit the bullet and bought the latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system, OS X Tiger or 10.4. Apple has given all its versions of OS X big-cat names, which have gone in a funny sort of order – in no way do they go up the big cat chain. The first two (10.0 Cheetah and 10.1 Puma) we knew only by their numbers, but the last three have had their cat names worn proud. You could say that having the original called Cheetah makes some sort of sense, given that it wasn’t the most reliable and cheetahs are known for short bursts of speed. 10.5 is said to be codenamed Leopard, which is strange given that a leopard and a panther are the same animal.
I’d been mulling over this purchase for some time, particularly since it costs nearly 90 quid (the price I had seen quoted was about £75, but that is excluding 17.5% tax); this is the first time in quite some time that I’d been financially able to spend this amount on my computer interests. I actually nearly bought it twice on Friday evening, walking out of the Croydon PC World shop (yeah, they sell Mac stuff too …) after waiting a bit too long to be served. In the other shop (Micro Anvika, Croydon) I asked the shop assistant why it was so expensive and he simply replied, “because it’s Mac”. I finally drove to the Apple Store at the Bluewater mall in Kent after taking my parents to Gatwick airport on Saturday so that they could catch their flight to Portugal.
Bluewater is a big shopping mall on the outside of London, just off the M25 ring road near the Dartford river crossing. It’s kind of a town centre without a town, and the parking space may actually be bigger than the mall. I almost gave up on it last year, because I went there and found not much of interest. The Apple Store was a pleasant surprise, however; it’s much smaller than the one in Regent Street in London, but I could always find a computer that didn’t have someone on it. In London, the shop is usually full of people who go in there for free internet access (which is, to be fair, usually the reason I go in there myself).
The thing is that not everyone in the Apple Store wanted to sell Tiger to me. I always put the same question to them: what can I, as someone who uses a Mac for writing Word documents, surfing the net, and the occasional bit of programming gain from Tiger? I asked the guy at the so-called Genius Bar – Apple’s instant Mac knowledge desk which they have at every Apple Store. He didn’t know, and directed me to the Apple website (and particularly Developer Connection). One of the shop assistants said that he was doing fine with Panther. A third shop assistant told me about the new features like Dashboard, Automator and Spotlight, of which more later.
I eventually decided to buy it anyway, on the basis that it was really now or never (or at least not for a good while). The shop was just about to close, and I drove the car my parents had left me for the holidays back across south London into the sunset. The actual upgrade actually took longer than I had expected; I needed to abort the installation to change the option from “upgrade” to “archive and install”, which installs the new system afresh while keeping your old system files just in case. During the installation itself, the timer went down very quickly, with the minutes falling off in less time than normal minutes – until it got to installing the translations, in which 4 minutes were definitely four very long minutes.
The first time Tiger started up, it appeared to hang for a very long time after I logged in. No doubt it was doing something very important, but it would help if it told the user what it was doing (unlike PCs, you can’t tell with a Mac when the disk is working). Actually, even after minor system updates, starting up takes longer than usual, but this made me wonder if the thing had crashed. In general, though, I’ve found that starting up has become a shorter process since upgrading to Tiger – and I’ve heard this observation before.
The appearance has been changed a little bit – the “brushed metal” finish has been unchanged, and for those programs which don’t use it, the title and the toolbar are amalgamated with the same light grey finish. This doesn’t always have the desired effect; in the development versions of Mozilla’s Camino Mac-only browser, the bookmark bar (with a plain white background) is incongruous next to the toolbar and tab bar, both bearing (different) grey colour schemes. I’m sure this will be fixed by the time the official first release version of Camino is out, though.
What’s new in Tiger? The three big features are Dashboard, Automator and Spotlight. Dashboard is a system by which mini-programs called “widgets”, written in JavaScript, can be called up as and when needed. Those included as standard include a clock, a calendar, a weather monitor, a stock price monitor and a flight information program (of course, they get their info from the internet). Of course, anyone can write a widget, and someone has written one to submit a post to a WordPress blog.
Spotlight is an easy-search system, in which you can type in what you want to search and it’ll find not only files matching the names, but documents, pictures and other media items relating to them. Automator, which I’ve yet to seriously check out, is a program which functions as “your own robot” (a robot is its logo), automating common tasks, particularly those involving clicking and dragging. Another important new feature is VoiceOver, a screen reader built into Mac OS. I’m sure there’s a way to get it to read out the content of web pages rather than just the control buttons; after all, if you can see the web page, you can probably see the controls as well!
Oh, and the web browser Safari has had an RSS feature added. It works totally differently from that built into Firefox, displaying an adjustable amount of content from each post, and allowing easy searching of the content (not the whole blog though – just what’s in the recent RSS content). Whether it will replace a normal RSS feed reader I’m not sure; their usual purpose is to display short extracts from each entry, allowing the user to view the actual page if he wants to read more. As I’ve said before I’ve found little use for RSS readers; I’ve experimented with two of those available for Mac OS X for free (RSSowl and NewsMac) and and I have one built into my mail reader (Thunderbird), and almost never use any of them.
There is an irritating bug in Safari, by which it doesn’t remember where it was the last time you closed it down; it persistently opens up in places where you don’t want it (in my case, the top right corner). Another bug, which I’ve only seen in Safari but may well affect other programs, concerns the blue scroll bars which appear next to any document or picture: when the document changes length, the old scroll bar isn’t always deleted. This is not a show-stopper, but does spoil the appearance somewhat.
As for whether it’s worth upgrading, well, it may well enhance your experience of using your Mac, particularly if you are using an early version of Mac OS X – and an awful lot of software will be released in the coming months and years which requires Tiger or at least Panther, which you obviously won’t be able to use if you have an early version of OS X (let alone OS 9). If you know several people who use Macs, the Family Pack (with five licences) will help split the cost, and (as I was told by Apple Store staff) the licencees do not in fact have to be members of your family. I’d say this might well enhance your Mac experience. I wouldn’t call it an essential upgrade, however.
