It feels somewhat more responsive in general than Panther, except selecting the text field of an item to change its name now takes FOREVER.

I think the font blurring looks a bit better now in general too, except text on the Desktop breaks awfully for any size below 12pt. Of course I'd like to set it down to 10pt. but it looks really bad.

It takes less time to boot than Panther, that's good.

Spotlight won't index disk partitions, just the one Tiger is in...

The Finder is not even worth talking about, they did nothing to it other than messing up the already poor grid we already had in Icon View. Stray scroll bars continue to appear on windows that don't have any more items to show; even after I manually got rid of them, if I log out, some of those unnecessary scroll bars will come back again and again.

Opening a normal window using Spotlight will turn it to metal. I have to put it back to normal manually once again for it to stick the next time I open it. In the same fashion, dragging a non-metal window to the Dock will turn it to metal too. How retarded can this interface be.

Still no method to globally set all my windows to non-metal. Still no method to set them all with the same text and icon size, or to set List View as the default.

Still no Spring-loaded folders in the Dock.

Labels are still retarded.

Dashboard takes some time to update its widgets after a while but it's a nice idea if you don't have anything else to do.

Illustrator and Photoshop CS still fail to remember my Date Modified settings in Open/Save dialogues. I wonder if that's Adobe's fault?

There's a lot of little good stuff too but it basically feels more like Panther 10.3.9.5 than like the next big system upgrade we were expecting it to be. Apple falling short of the expectations once again, what a shocker...

Most of the new and interesting stuff is under the hood and it will mean nothing to us until Adobe...er, developers start to apply it to their applications.

First impressions...

How retarded is including a "Add to iPhoto" button in the slideshow feature in Spotlight, but NO WAY to send it to Photoshop?! I mean.. at least a proxy icon somewhere to grab and drop?!

Wow. I just can't grasp this gigantic flaw. Let me recap: Spotlight offers a slideshow feature for the "images" it finds. Inside the slideshow, it allows the user to add it to iPhoto ... the gigantic flaw is: there is no "open with X app" button!!@# And there is no way to drag the image to an app on the Dock. This will be a completely unusable feature for me for the next year or so. WOW.

Spotlight is slow, just as I thought. It's faster than normal searching in Panther, but not as instant as opening a Finder window and selecting your file. Icons and previews in Spotlight take a veryyyyy looong time to display. Spotlight is cool, but not for mainstream use as it's being advertised.

Finder is unchanged!@#!@#$ How can they completely neglect the unstable metal vs aqua business. Unbelievable. Just as mAxximo pointed out, I'm left with continually resetting windows from metal to aqua. Endlessly. I think we now have strong reasons to believe there is a conspiracy against the spatial Finder.

Preview at last seems to make some more sense. A few things are improved like gradual zooming, and instant redraw (no more pixelated previews). Space is now saved (no white stripes around picts)

Smart folders are completely unusable for images. Previewing takes AGES and one can't set preview size.

On a positive note, search attributes for smart folders are amazing.. there are more than 100 attributes for music, images, emails, etc. Hmm this is worth some experimenting...

quote:

Originally posted by Trifid:
On a positive note, search attributes for smart folders are amazing.. there are more than 100 attributes for music, images, emails, etc. Hmm this is worth some experimenting...

On a negative note, list view can't sort by any of those 100+ attributes. What a useless feature.

One bug found: in smart folders, once you select something you can't unselect it. The only way to unselect is by closing the window. That means that once I select something, and click on slideshow, it'll show that one selection. It won't show the rest.

Nice work Apple.

How the hell did you guys get your copies?

Acquisition/LimeWire? Or are you in ADC?

:/

I believe nothing you say, if it is pirated.

quote:

Spotlight offers a slideshow feature for the "images" it finds. Inside the slideshow, it allows the user to add it to iPhoto ... the gigantic flaw is: there is no "open with X app" button!!@

i had the chance of checking out tiger yesterday and today at a friends house. Groan!

The slideshow-function is nice, a bit primitive, but better than nothing.
When using a massive amount of pics, the idiotic animated transition from fullscreen to index-view is a killer chop-o-rama. (i have a lousy gfx-card)
Is there any way to deactivate these b*****t-animation?

... Dashboad is useless as a broken fingernail, spotlight is nice but wtf.I rarely do searches, maybe once a week.

The UI is (still and even more than before) fucked up, so i don't comment extensively on that.
I've seen no real speed advantages yet.

Automator seems like a nice tool. But hey, scripting isn't that revolutionary in these days.

"Automatic"-Font smoothing means nothing else but a smoothing-profile that matches your screen (just in case X knows your screen-type, cough). It is still possible to deactivate AA, the resulting bitmaps are still crappy crappa in pixel-sin.Nothing new here. :-/

All in all i wasn't impressed very much, seems to me like many bucks thrown out of the window.

OS-X still looks like glass marbles...and still reminds me of 80/90 ies arcade-gfx

This message has been edited. Last edited by: smithz,

I'm experiencing a lot of beachballing and stalls.. -.- I believe the reason for this is the "transparent" indexing of Spotlight. My poor iBook drive is spinning madly. I think Spotlight will kill it before time :-/

quote:

Spotlight won't index disk partitions, just the one Tiger is in...

This is only semi-true. The Spotlight menu won't pull items from other drives, but cmnd-f search will. Seems stupid, but I guess they did it for performance reasons.

quote:

Originally posted by Trifid:
I'm experiencing a lot of beachballing and stalls.. -.- I believe the reason for this is the "transparent" indexing of Spotlight. My poor iBook drive is spinning madly. I think Spotlight will kill it before time :-/

How much RAM, free HD space and how long is it since you installed it?

I'd *expect* it to initially take a while indexing, then just index as you alter files. This is normal, computer science stuff. What OS *instantly* builds an index from multi-gigabyte hard drives or more to the point, how could any OS be expected to magically know what is on disc without first doing so?

Now, I'd assume that they'd do it during the install, that'd be ideal. But I bet your case is one of minimal spare HDD space. I'm on an iBook too. You want a good 4GB of space for the swapfiles.

But feel free to pretend you thought Apple's marketing lingo of "instantly" means "instantly" and not "instantly (after initial setup, with sufficient RAM and disk space and assuming large numbers of files have not just been added)"...

quote:

Originally posted by the mighty johnq:
How much RAM, free HD space and how long is it since you installed it?

768MB ram, 4.06 GB free on HD. Initial indexing took about 2 hours and it was done yesterday. There were stalls obviously while indexing yesterday. But I still have stalls afterwards.

BTW, On my powermac, Tiger did index my external firewire drives, but not my second internal drive.. That's weird.

quote:

Originally posted by Trifid:
On a negative note, list view can't sort by any of those 100+ attributes. What a useless feature.

Are you saying that smart folders are useless because of this? Or the extra attributes are? While it would be good if your search parameters could be added to the columns for sorting, to call it "useless" is a bit of a stretch.

quote:

One bug found: in smart folders, once you select something you can't unselect it. The only way to unselect is by closing the window. That means that once I select something, and click on slideshow, it'll show that one selection. It won't show the rest.

You can also switch to icon or list view, which have normal selection functionality.

quote:

Are you saying that smart folders are useless because of this? Or the extra attributes are? While it would be good if your search parameters could be added to the columns for sorting, to call it "useless" is a bit of a stretch.

Tiger has metadata.. which can only be used inside Spotlight's view. Yes it's useless because I would like to use this outside of Spotlight, on any list view. And as of right now, I don't see any significant usefulness for smart folders. I don't understand why people envision so much about smart folders.

The thing with smart folders is that, you may get a bunch of stuff you don't need, and a bunch you need, and everything sorted in some basic manner, dynamically changing. Seems like a messier mess than a spacial view can ever be. Sure, you can set tight search parameters... but really, I just can't understand how they can introduce smart folders on top of crap .. Finder. I don't think I would have a good use for smart folders until Apple refines the current way of organizing files on the Finder. Smart folders won't solve this.

The desktop still shows funny filenames. For instance a smart folder that I created named as "recent picts.savedSearch" is displayed as "recent" on the first line, and, "picts.savedSearch" on the second. what the heck? I hate two unnecessary lines.

quote:

You can also switch to icon or list view, which have normal selection functionality.

That's a nice workaround for dealing with the bug thanks. -.-

I don't understand, Tiger for developers has been out for a year and they don't catch these sort of bugs that I caught 20 min after installing?

BTW, I experienced some redrawing issues in Omniweb, and some in the Finder. A ghost scroll bar would appear on the middle of a browser window.

Windows media player doesn't seem to work.

Making .img images doesn't seem to work either, at least with current 3rd party software.

On a somewhat positive note, after 5 years of relying on Preview as the default image viewer, it finally remembers the state of the toolbar. So if you hide it, and open new images, they'll show without the toolbar. Also, the toolbar will remember if you set it to show icons-only.

Spotlight.
I don't like how it takes ages to display icons. It takes time to display even default ones. And I don't like the fact that as it searches, content shifts around to accommodate newly found files. I don't like this because if I find my file and attempt to click it, it'll move around to accommodate more search results. Very very bad design. I have to wait for ALL the results to kick-in before I can do anything. This is not designed for instant anything.

OS-X still looks like glass marbles...and still reminds me of 80/90 ies arcade-gfx

I think that’s a clever observation, smithz. And although from first reports it doesn’t seem that much has changed in Aqua, I am somewhat relieved at the look of Apple’s home page at the moment. Subtract those in-my-opinion awful Aqua tabs at the top and it almost looks like Apple is getting back to graphical sanity….or wants to.

quote:

I don't understand, Tiger for developers has been out for a year and they don't catch these sort of bugs that I caught 20 min after installing?

Welcome to my world.

I swear, it's like they don't test. If they DO test, it's like they just accept that they can't fix things. I know when I get my copy, I'm going to install it, and then proceed to find everything they STILL didn't fix in the finder, followed by a real sense of how slow things are. Next, I will determine if any of the new interface elements are actually useful, work, or are well implemented.

Maybe I've just been a beta tester too many times, but it seems like I can defeat OS X at the drop of a hat, just by being me. All I have to do is move through the interface at what I consider a NORMAL speed, whereupon the system completely chokes.

The first thing I always test: Window resizing speed.
That's been terrible for forever. The lag there is really bad. I'd much rather have outline resizing instead of live if it's gonna be that slow. Strangely enough, window compositing (Dragging windows around) is among the more acceptable behaviors of OS X. You can really pound that... grab a window and wail around the screen and it can pretty much keep up with you. Grab the resize widget and it seldom can. Even if you move pretty slow. Concentrate on keeping the cursor on the resize widget. That's how fast the system "wants" you to move. It's ridiculous.

I can shake down OS X in an afternoon and tell you what hasn't been touched. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that what Tiger is, is just another showcase of pretty much four things (spotlight, Core Image/Video, iChatAV, dashboard)... and all the rest are the fruits of spinning gears guys sitting around trying to figure out shit to do.

Go to the Apple site right now and look through the "200+" new features of Tiger. You tell me, if you were a boss, and that was the resume, would you say padded or not padded? Lol.

Sorry, I don't even HAVE the fucking thing yet, all I have to read is:

quote:

Desktop Pictures
Choose from a collection of stunning new desktop pictures, including a vibrant new default desktop created exclusively for Mac OS X Tiger users.

OK, right there? My eyes rolled so hard and fast that my eyelashes caught fire.

The stuff that MATTERS is pretty thin. I thought this bug fix, uh I mean feature made sense, considering that the CLI is really the only efficient way to manage files in OSX:

quote:

HFS+ CLI file commands
Use command line file commands on HFS+ items with proper results. Utilities such as cp, mv, tar, rsync now use the same standard APIs as Spotlight and access control lists to handle resource forks.

Thalo, I sent you some Tiger screenshots of Dashboard, Spotlight, and the Finder.

It took me about an hour to compile these mostly because the smart folders took 10 min each time I adjusted a search query. Yes, it would hang the whole Finder, beachballing abundancy, wow. Amazing. Completely unusable.

On the Finder, when renaming the screenshot files, the cursor would lag!!! wow.

This is on a 1.2 Ghs G4 iBook, 768MB Ram. 4GB free HD.

>Welcome to my world.

>I swear, it's like they don't test. If they >DO test, it's like they just accept that they >can't fix things.

It's funny, i just posted a message to a german mac-forum last week. People were wondering why in the world the 10.3.9 update completely hosed JAVA and nobody at apple seemed to have noticed it. "Don't these guys test their own software ?"

The answer is

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,537093,00.asp

With the takeover of apple, the NeXT guys quickly implemented their, well, special style of doing things. The key paragraph is

"In addition, Mac OS quality assurance—formerly a separate group within Serlet's Platform Technologies group—will be moved under software engineering operations."

Anybody who has worked in software development knows what it means when QA is "moved UNDER software engineering operations". It basically means giving the hackers the green light.

When i read that back then i gave up on apple and OS X. It was clear that it would be downhill from then on.

Good luck faith-keeping, man.

quote:

On the Finder, when renaming the screenshot files, the cursor would lag!!! wow.

OS X is from now on called "Lag OS X", bc. it seems like it's always serving lags, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner... On a 2.7 Ghz G5 you'll get shorter lags, but lags are lags.

quote:

Originally posted by Trifid:
Thalo, I sent you some Tiger screenshots of Dashboard, Spotlight, and the Finder.

Brother Trif, I didn't get anything.
Did you send to thalo@thalo.net, or thalo@mac.com? Either of those should work. I might not have been watching carefully enough when I cleaned out the filtered spam... would you mind trying to send again? All the member addresses should get through my filters now. Sorry about that.

quote:

Anybody who has worked in software development knows what it means when QA is "moved UNDER software engineering operations". It basically means giving the hackers the green light.

Very, very true brother k. Geeks, hackers, and spinning gears types really should never, ever be under QA. For the very reason that they think they're better than everyone. They often confuse SHOULD work, with actually working. And they are so used to solving brain teasers and cobbing and taking circuitous arcane routes to get anywhere that they can never see the forest for the trees. QA needs to have a test bed of real-world use, no ifs ands or buts.

If there was such a thing, we wouldn't be wasting so many useless clicks, and spending so much time twiddling windows to see crap.

Text highlighting really bothers me. I really can't believe it's taking what, eight years to fix. You mean to tell me that the system can't figure out the relative DARKNESS of a color onscreen and ensure that when ANY text anywhere, in any app is highlighted, that the text will drop out to white? Howcum Apple could do that in 1984, and now can't do it in 2005? I don't get it.

I should be able to pick black as a highlight color and have it work. Or 100%B or whatever and have that make sense in the interface. I can't tell you what it does to me to pick a dark color, then highlight text, have the text stay black, and become totally unreadable when highlighted.

You get really weird shit, too... like in Mail. If you choose a dark highlight color, in the mail LISTS that are selected, the text drops out, but not in the body of an email when you select text. Holy crap. That's something any moron would have picked up in two minutes of testing.

The fact is, dark highlight colors where the text drops out are more visible and higher contrast than light highlights where the text doesn't drop out. That's why in the dark ages people did it that way.

quote:

Originally posted by Trifid:
I don't think I would have a good use for smart folders until Apple refines the current way of organizing files on the Finder. Smart folders won't solve this.

Smart folders are really just saved search parameters. While they call them "folders", it's really a different paradigm than static directory organization- I don't see them as attempting to solve any problem. I find them incredible useful and powerful- I already have 3 smart folders that are saving me lots of work, but hey to each his own.

quote:

The desktop still shows funny filenames. For instance a smart folder that I created named as "recent picts.savedSearch" is displayed as "recent" on the first line, and, "picts.savedSearch" on the second. what the heck? I hate two unnecessary lines.

That's because the last text string is too long to fit on one line. Turning off "show file extensions" fixes this (yes, of course a pref to force 1-line labels would be a better solution).

quote:

Originally posted by Arlo:
That's because the last text string is too long to fit on one line. Turning off "show file extensions" fixes this (yes, of course a pref to force 1-line labels would be a better solution).

Hey, but this is a workaround for a bug (or bad design) that has been out for 5 years! That same file shows with ONE line when placed in icon view outside the Desktop. Why should there be this sort of inconsistency? OS9 showed every item the same way whether it was on the desktop or not. It's this sort of non-sense that I'm pointing out.