Friday, April 29, 2005

MacOS X 10.4 Tiger

Some of you are probably surprised that I haven't mentioned Tiger yet despite that fact that, as I'm sure everyone knows by now, it was released today. However, unlike a lot of people I haven't gone Tiger crazy, I wasn't even hanging off the edge of my seat as Apple accidentally shipped Tiger early.

The entire 10.4 release has curiously left me unmoved. Perhaps it's the knowledge that I can't really justify the money to actually buy myself a copy. Perhaps it's the knowledge of the huge disruption it'll cause when I do upgrade, as all the applications I rely on break. I know, for instance, that Desktop Manager isn't yet Tiger compatible yet and I wouldn't want to try and get any work done on my 12" Powerbook without that. Or perhaps it's the knowledge that Apple have already scheduled the 10.4.1 release for May. No matter what it is, I'm not as excited as most people are expecting me to be...

This will probable change when I finally see Dashboard and Spotlight, my guess is that like Exposé or Rendezvous (sorry, I mean Bonjour) they may be one of those things that while it sounds like an okay idea, turns out to be a ground breaking UI improvement that I can't live without. With that in mind I'm planning my upgrade for August, after OSCON, I'm sure I'll see lots of Tiger boxes there.

Anyway for those of you desperate to see inside the box, Ars Technica has an excellent 21 page walk through of OSX 10.4, look there for perhaps the best review of the new release I've seen so far..

Also, presumably in an effort to get us all to switch to Tiger, Apple has announced that many of the newly improved features of their .Mac service will be exlusive to Tiger. As a .Mac user myself I'm not sure this makes me particularly happy, or more likely to upgrade. I don't like being leveraged (extorted), perhaps I'll just cancel my .Mac membership instead...

Update: There are of course other reviews, and predictably Slashdot has the story...

Update: Wired has more on the hype surrounding the Tiger launch.

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