Tiger

Yesterday Apple introduced a new operating system called Tiger. Walt Mossberg, in a column on Thursday in the WSJ, said the new OS rocks. He is right. I got it and installed it. Here are some things that I noticed immediately. #1 - Dashboard - allows you to find all those little programettes that you use but don't want consistently - things like your address book or weather or translation. It has a feature that will keep the dashboard handy in the program you are using if you want to toggle back and forth. #2 - Mail is revised - the mail program was redesigned to look better but also to perform better - and it seems to do just that. #3 - Smart Folders - in iPhoto and iTunes you have always had a function where you can group information logically - all the things that go with X - all the photos that have a picture of your dog or all the tunes with Bach in them. Now that is available in the finder - so you can group all the things you have in a particular project or set of issues. #4 - Spotlight - this allows you to search for all those things on any source in your environment - any disk that is loaded - for anything. This is NOT a find command - it is much more. It finds everything - any type of file and does it with context - so any word file you you have with the keyword gets grouped. With the size of hard disks now and the range of places that I store stuff - this feature alone is worth the price of admission. There is a beefed up version of iChat that allows video conferencing - I bought the camera they sell but still have not used it to its full potential - but when I have used it - it was slick - now I can hook in three people.

What you cannot see is some additional beefing up of the security features of the operating system. There are loads of other features yet to be discovered.

The best thing I have seen about the whole OSX environment (this is the fourth generation of OSX) is its stability. In the time since I used the OSX beta - I have never had the system crash on me. Windows has the blue screen problem but OSX just continues to rock on.