Looking Forward to 10.4.1
Several weeks ago, I mentioned how I was pretty pleased with Panther and remained a bit leery of Tiger. Nevertheless, I had a copy of Tiger in hand at 1:45PM on the day it was released. At first, I threw caution and the better advice of the entire Mac online community to the wind and did a simple upgrade installation over Panther. This resulted in the two scariest and longest minutes of my Mac user life. After the installation was complete, when I rebooted my Powerbook, after the boot screen, when I was supposed to encounter Tiger nicely loading, I was met with a solid blue screen and my mouse pointer. Two minutes. Nothing but blue. I sat there thinking, “It’s screwed. No just be patient. No, it’s screwed. Be cool. Relax. Crap.” and so on and so forth. Then after two minutes the Desktop and the Finder suddenly appeared. My joy at seeing the system actually begin to load was short lived. As the registration screen came up, I was met with my arch-nemesis: the spinning beach ball of death. This colorful buzz kill followed me around my daily tasks in my Tiger installation for the first 24 hours of use. “Well, that’s what I get for choosing to Upgrade,” I thought, and Saturday afternoon decided to blow the Tiger install away and reinstall everything via Archive and Install. This time, installation went much more smoothly, with no blue screen and no spinning beach balls. Since reinstalling, everything has performed much better and I find myself really enjoying the Tiger experience with very infrequent appearances by the spinning beach ball of death. However, things aren’t perfect in Tiger land. Several little apps that I used to love aren’t yet Tiger compatible. Not only that, but it turns out that there are an entire slew of networking bugs that have rendered several products useless until Apple fixes these bugs. Safari RSS is cool and fun to play around with but the titles of posts in the RSS reader are often truncated, loading a lot of feeds at once brings forth the spinning beach ball of death, and some posts have a time stamp listed an hour past when they were actually posted. iChatAV in Tiger doesn’t seem to play nice with people on iChatAV in Panther. I can send images and files to people on Tiger or AIM, but for some odd reason, I cannot send pictures or files to people using Panther. Also, for some reason, iChat’s menu bar control doesn’t seem to work quite as nicely with the actual iChat app as it did in Panther. Spotlight is definitely cool, but, and perhaps this is just because I was so used to the way that Quicksilver functions, I find that Spotlight returns too many results, so that it often takes longer to use Spotlight to access something that I already knew the location of (like a program in my Applications folder). Also, Spotlight has been flat out crashing on me. Several times. One time, the entire Finder froze as a result, and I had to force it to relaunch. Don’t get me wrong: Tiger is definitely a cool operating system with a lot of really interesting and useful new features. I really enjoy the new Mail.app (although those new buttons are a bit ugly). However, over the past several days with Tiger, I’ve found myself running Software Update a little more frequently—perhaps a little more compulsively—than I ever did in the past. I’m wanting a fix to all these little bugs. I’m wanting 10.4.1. I realize Panther wasn’t by any means bug free when 10.3.0 came out. Tiger has fewer bugs than Panther did at this stage. Nevertheless, it is still much buggier than 10.3.8 was, and I’m hoping for a rapid succession of updates from Apple.
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spotlight is not meant to be an applications launcher. it’s a search utility. i personally don’t have much use for spotlight as i don’t use mail/ical/addressbook/safari/iwork, and my files are organized enough so i can find what i need w/ a finder search. let quicksilver/launchbar/butler do its thing and spotlight do its thing. people who upgraded are just starting to realize the power of apple’s marketing muscle.
I’d agree with you except that Apple seems to be marketing it as an app launcher too. For example, if you look at their Spotlight Tips page there is an entire section about the keyword app functionality.
After a few more days with Tiger - it is nowhere nearly as stable as Panther is. I’ve experienced multiple problems when invoking Spotlight.. bad enough to require reboots. SystemUIServer still hangs up like it did in Jaguar/Panther
It also seems to me that networking (smb/afp/etc.) is NOT improved one single bit - a real tragedy held over since 10.0.
I can’t remember back to 10.3.0 - but it does seem like 10.4.0 has been prety unstable. I too am eagerly awaiting 10.4.1
> I can’t remember back to 10.3.0 - but it does seem like 10.4.0 has been prety unstable. I too am eagerly awaiting 10.4.1
I wouldn’t be able to comment on that, given that I upgraded to Panther at around 10.3.3, and Jaguar at around 10.2.2. I had a glitch or two that weren’t in the previous version, but waiting the 6 or 8 weeks, which is always the sane thing to do, continues to prove worthwhile.
Use Spotlights “Kind” keyword list (from Apple’s Spotlight tips page at http://www.apple.com/macosx/tips/spotlight.html ).
To find mail.app quickly, you would type:
kind:app mail
10.3.0 was far scarier than my installation of 10.4.0 just today. Remember the firewire drive epidemic? Mac users abound were infuriated because the first version of Panther was arbitrarily nuking their boot records (or something), and their data on external FW drives were instantly lost. There wasn’t a pattern of consistency either—it was happening randomly to units across the Apple line, regardless of upgrade or fresh install.
So far I’ve had extremely few troubles with Tiger, though I do share your sentiment about RSS being oddly implemented in Safari (I’ve found an even odder problem—auto-click on the bookmarks bar won’t open in tabs, it actually takes up the entire active Safari window). I also experienced the same frustration of trying to send screenshots via iChat AV to a Panther user. Eventually once the conversation had actually begun, Send File worked fine. I also noticed while doing so that Apple’s native screen capture format is now PNG instead of PDF, as it has been in previous versions. Two thumbs up for that touch.
I did a “Clean Install” - I wiped my PowerBook and installed onto an empty drive.
My reward was the exact same Blue Screen followed by the spinning Beachball - it had me quite nervous for a number of minutes.
In comparison I “updated” my G4-DP without a hitch!
The only thing that was irritating is that the updataed machine also updated Mail.app with all of my mail-accounts. After a “Clean Install” Mail.app wil import all of the old mails from a backup but refuses to recognise mail-accounts…
... does that make sense?
“Apple’s native screen capture format is now PNG instead of PDF, as it has been in previous versions. Two thumbs up for that touch.”
Sorry, but here’s two thumbs and eight other fingers down for that move. PNG’s are bitmapped, and low resolution; the PDF’s that 10.2 and 10.3 saved were of variable resolution, but always high. Much better for adding to text, presentations, &c.