Tiger Has Arrived: A Necessary Evil?
5/3/2005 – 11:58 pm | by Emile“What need you note it? pray you, keep your way.”
– QUEEN KATHARINE; King Henry VIII, Act II, Scene IV
In all the news & notes that are popping up with Tiger’s arrival, is it safe to ask the more daring question: do you REALLY need Tiger?
Without getting into the economic arguments and philosophies on the Modern Productivity Paradox, I’ve been debating on updating to Tiger for host of reasons.
First off, do we really need it? Spotlight offers indexing at the core level of every document. Sweet! But I can already find pretty much everything I need on my multiple Macs. I’ve setup a pretty decent folder hierarchy, with descriptive filenames, which helps me find just about everything I’m looking for. The Finder’s Find function complements and fills in the gaps in functionality. UPDATE: Of course, fate would have it that as I’m writing this I suddenly need to find a couple of Word documents in a certain folder that have the word ‘photography’ instead of ‘pictures’ - Spotlight would have worked well and is designed for just such a query. I currently use Entourage 2004 and not Mail, so while I don’t have to tolerate the awful new Mail toolbar (perhaps they spent too much time in front of Netscape 8.0), I do have to deal with the downside of Entourage’s dead-snail slow search.
Dashboard is sweet but basically it’s a stylization of mini-web apps built into the OS. For all intents and purposes, I’m comfortable with logging in to the FedEx website to track packages or to using Meteo 1.0 to check the weather in my toolbar. Konfabulator, would suit the rest of the whiz-bang features currently available in Tiger. Though I honestly imagine the widgets currently being developed around the world will quickly outweigh any and most Konfabulator apps.
RSS needs are easily met by NetNewsWire (though it’s definitely nice to have RSS integration in the browser), which leaves Automator left after all of the major features. Automator looks to be awesome and is one of the major reasons I hunger for Tiger.
But, in the end, doing a clean install and making sure that Photoshop/ImageReady 7, Office 2004, Studio MX 2004, FileMaker 7 Pro & Developer, REALbasic (I’ve read about some troubles here), BBEDit 7, Extensis Suitcase X1, and obviously the iLife suite requires a bit more time than I have or am willing to dedicate.
There have been some reviews I’ve scoured of Tiger, but without question, ARSTechnica.com’s blows them all out of the water with more in-depth analysis than any other site, magazine, or article I’ve come across. Two more worth noting are below:
- http://assortedgeekery.com/archives/2005/04/20/tiger
- http://mjtsai.com/blog/2005/05/01/random-tiger-notes/
If anyone has any experience with any of the above mentioned apps and how their own Tiger upgrade went, please chime in and let me know.
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