Tiger notes

I've upgraded my PowerBook now.

First: It's beautiful. Lots of little things have been improved and shined up. Drool-drool.

• Spotlight is no LauchBar. Great to search your mail and documents, I think. Maybe. Haven't used it enough yet. Not good to launch applications. Fortunately LaunchBar is Tiger compatible. (I'm still using the 4.0beta9 version. There's a 4.0.1 version on their site now).

• The Cisco VPN client isn't supporting Tiger yet, so I didn't upgrade the PowerMac. Graham says it's supposed to come in a few weeks or so.

• Spotlight takes a while doing the initial indexing. While that's going on the computer is a bit sluggish. (The powerbook with the somewhat slow disk is anyway).

• I had trouble with something iSync related crashing. I have Missing Sync installed to sync the Treo. According to the Mark/Space Tiger info page then I'm supposed to start iSync once to make syncing with the Palm device work. It looks like it's much better integrated with iSync now. Yay.

• The AirPort/wireless thing seems flakier than usual. The net just suddenly drops out and then a little bit after comes back full strength.

• I was looking forward to trying the new Mail.app, but it's importing/converting all my mails to whatever new format it's storing them in (and indexing them for Spotlight searching I suppose). I have 327480 mails on the powerbook, so it's taking "some time". (7-8 hours ...)

• The Safari RSS thing is very lightweight. Not much competition for NetNewsWire (as expected), but I'm sure it'll create more interest. Yay for Ranchero.

• There's a new GPGMail for 10.4.

• The new .Mac Sync will be awesome. I can't wait to get the other macs upgraded and for more applications to take advantage of it.

• Be sure to make it do a sync before you start editing data though. It seems to think it's a "first sync" the first time...

• AntiRSI is still working. i still ignore it too often.

• The Battery menu bar thing has items for selecting the different powersaving modes. Excellent; maybe I'll ever use them now?

• Automator looks great.

• iCal now has an automatic "Birthday calendar" (enable it in the iCal preferences) getting data from the address book. Finally! There's also a "automatically retrieve invitations from Mail.app" option. Yes, I know Outlook has had that for a billion years. I hope it'll work better here that it does in Outlook.

• The Addressbook got "smart groups" too. Great for automatically making a group of everyone working in a certain company. Or living in a certain country. Or with upcoming birthdays. I made one with "birthdays within 10 days or in the next 30 days" to see birthdays that just passed and birthdays in the next month. Another neat address book improvement is that it shows when a card was last updated. Don't think you can use that date in a smart group though. Ooh, and a "find duplicates" feature. It offered to merge 80-something of my entries though but didn't want to show me which ones. I don't have that many duplicates. No thank you.

• There's some sort of support for S/MIME certificates in Address book. In Mail.app too? Finally we'll get easy to use standard encryption for our mail? Crossed fingers... (although I doubt it).

• What's the "subscribe to address book" feature about? It wants me to enter someones email address? I can allow people to access my addressbook. How does that work?

• I like how the "sync with .Mac" option is in each application now instead of in iSync. iSync is only for syncing phones and PDAs now.

• Did the X11 server always have a full screen mode? Seems very useful.

• Bluetooth preference pane is much improved.

• As James Duncan Davidson pointed out some weeks ago, that they had to rename Rendezvous to Bonjour is just sad.

• The printer setup thing seems to work better. It's better integrated into system preferences and the workflow in the printer setup utility has been improved. They could have saved us all the "Buy Supplies from the Apple Store!" buttons though.

• Having to pay for QuickTime Pro again sucks. Maybe they do it to to get some money for the windows version and not give mac users an "unfair advantage"?

• Sorting by size in the finder is really weird sometimes. Items just jumping up and down randomly (yes, way after it figured out all the sizes)

• The Dictionary application doesn't seem to access the net. Or at least it doesn't use the proxy settings... Awesome. No more clicking through to dictionary.com all the time.

• System Profiler is giving much more useful information.

• The equation Grapher program looks beautiful.

• The Calculator now has a "programmer mode". Think binary and hex.

• Dashboard is (as expected) all sorts of fun.

• Tons and tons of little new options and improvements. And that's after just playing around briefly...