Now that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has been released into the wild, many users are looking for things to do with their new operating system. Apple has you covered.
Apple offers treats for Tiger users
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Are there any plans from Apple to release a “Tiger-enabled” version of Mac Mini?
probably in the WWDC we might see an update, yes.
If by “Tiger-enabled” you mean a mini with Tiger pre-installed, that should happen within the next week or two as they clear inventory that has 10.3 installed.
No, I believe he means a MacMini that supports the latest stuff of Tiger, like CoreImage. The current macmini hardware does not support it, as the Core technologies require a Radeon 9700 or GeForce 5200 and above (macmini comes with radeon 9200).
I don’t have an advanced graphics card, but the information about CoreImage not being supported is actually listed in my Display settings.
It’s a TFT but it’s listed as a CRT, no kidding.
Tiger… OMG, it is DA BOMB! Christ this stuff is great.
I’m fiddling in all the nooks and crannies to find new stuff to play around with.
If you thought you might want it but maybe it’s not that much of a difference, don’t think twice, it IS!
The Mail interface isn’t THAT bad is it, Spotlight you have to see to believe.
Best time to have a Mac, ever!
Personally, the price alone for Spotlight is worth it
After reading the last review of Tiger, it seems that Apple will be pushing development for their next version back further. All the APIs are now stable, there is now that kernel interface kit which has made many coders happy, and the only thing now is adding new APIs as required.
I’d say over the next couple of years, development will probably get pushed back to every two years, and the main focus of Apple will be expanding their software portfolio so that they’re less reliant on Mac and iPod sales – sure, they’ll be important, but software has nicer margins than the hardware – and if they continue embracing open source components, the cost of development will drop even further.
as “Apple offers threats for Tiger users”
It’s a TFT but it’s listed as a CRT, no kidding.
You’ve probably connected your TFT with an analogue (D-Sub) cable. The names in the OS are quite misleading, because it’s not really about display technology, but about display connection (same in Linux – nvidia-settings for example reports all monitors with analogue connectors as CRTs).
If possible, use DVI. It makes a difference in image quality (although if the A/D converter in the monitor is decent, you might not notice it).
Well it’s either install tiger and hvae fun with my computer, or play around trying to get windows reinstalled for the 8 time since it went down. At 2 hours per time, I have invested 16 hours, for a computer I use only to play the occasional game.
or plan C
do a hard drive install of mepis which is sitting in the cd-rom and only requires a bootup to use and install
Yea at least there is one good OS and One very useful OS/distrubtions to counter the effects of dealing with Windows randomly deleting drivers.
Linux is ok for those who don’t have specific applications needs or are technically inclined – heck, I used FreeBSD for many years, quite happily along with KDE/GNOME. The problems only start to arise when you need to use a specific application.
With that being said, I’d love to see Wine and some developers geting wine working on Solaris and FreeBSD properly.
Just to bring it back ontopic; Tiger includes *many* features that Linux can learn from – not necessarily “lets copy” but the way in which they’ve been implemented and provided to the end user.
… is a free upgrade to QuickTime Pro 7, or an upgrade for a little fee. I bought 6.5 Pro some months ago, and after installing Tiger, I just learned that I have to buy 7 Pro full price.
Other than that, I’m overall satisfied. I would have a suggestion about Spotlight : allow to create smart folders from the direct access in the menubar. I go to the menubar whenever I want to search, and if I want to create a smart folder I have to do the search anew from the finder. Not practical.
tiger enabled? WTF is that? Im running tiger on my 00 MHz iBook which is lower speced than a mac mini and everything works with no problems.. I do not get the ripple effect when I add a dashboard widget.. but so what?
umm.. heck yea it is worth it.. the UI responsiveness is perfect!!! infact, I have to readjust my mousing now because of it
well.. that is a customer service thing.. but you will probably not see anything on that front because QT7 is a product and buying a product at the end of a development cycle is not a wise choice.. though it would be nice f you get a free upgrade to the next pro version… heck, they could bump the price up a bit for that even. Make it a choice for the buyer, pay 30 for pro, or pay 40 for pro plus a free upgrade to the next major version of pro.
I agree with the smart folder thing too… though, spotlight search is not as powerful as the smart folder Boolean interface and that might be a reason for that.. they could offer an advanced option wen the search is done and allow you to booleanize the search though.
I’m down in north carolina for the weekend and the closest apple store is 3 hours away, can anyone tell me where else I can buy Tiger 10.4? Compusa, bestbuy, etc? Thanks in advance. I want to start coding some dashboard widgets.
@bonjour
I’m a resident of North Carolina. I think its going to depend on where you are at. For me the closest Apple store is in Raleigh/Durham at the Southpoint Mall. Thats about 45 minutes away. Greensboro has a CompUSA and a Best Buy about 20 minutes away, but BB doesn’t sell Mac stuff, CompUSA does.
Hi,
ist it possible to turn spotlight completly off?
You guys really have to see H.264 in action to believe it. The new Quicktime HD gallery is amazing… It’s a bit choppy on a G4, but G5 owners will be able to watch 1080p movie trailers silky smooth.
You can select which folders you don’t want indexed. While I haven’t tried it, you could select the root folder as the folder you don’t want indexed.
It’s not actually possible to turn the service “off” though, it’s integrated right at kernel level. It may be possible to remove some of the format-specific file-handlers if you’re worried about I/O speed, but I don’t think that’s a major issue. It’s certainly not a non-trivial task.
It’s a bad day for me, literacy wise. That should be “It’s certainly a non-trivial task”
Well, I got Tiger installed on my mac mini (1.42Ghz, 512Mb) and it’s running great! No problem at all and Spotlight is realy a good feature, I still can’t beleive what it can find on my HDD. As for Dashboard, it’s cool but it’s not THAT usefull, a nice gadget.
BUT, I downloaded the Serenity HD movie trailer from Apple Quicktime site and well…. It’s not usable. SLOW, lots of lost frame, jerky at best.
So the mini does not have the CPU or Video power to play those HD movies. You would be better off with a iMac G5 with a better video card. It’s probably going to be the same with iMovie HD, not something you want to use on a mini.
So this is the only downside of Tiger on mac mini. Everything else work great!
why? I see no performance hit on my machine at all from spotlight. you might not use it now, but you should play with it some and see if you actually can integrate it into your workflow.. besides that, it is a system API and developers will be using it in their programs.. it would be unwise to turn it off.
plus, after the initial indexing, the only indexing that happens is when a new file is added or a file changes ect. that is not going to slow our system down. not like if you had a system that needed to reindex every few hours.
@ everyone,
It says right on the front page that you need a G5 to watch the HD quicktime movies.
Some of the dashboard stuff actually looks handy. I like the free package tracker & wifi locator.
Well, I had Quicktime 6 Pro installed with Panther but after upgrading to Tiger, I only got QT 7 standard…
Is it possible to upgrade to PRO at a lower cost?
Apple Europe told me that I had to buy a new license, and they didn’t offer any rebate.
I don’t have this problem with software – check out Crossover Office, win4lin, or even VM Ware (only listed 3rd because of its somewhat prohibitive cost). All are viable. As a longtime Mac and Linux user, I can honestly say there are very few times I feel more crippled by Linux than by Mac when it comes to software. Both platforms are second class citizens where pay-for-play developers are concerned.
That being said, the Mac desktop pwnz any of the linux desktops. It has plenty of its own problems, which I hope have been cleared up by Tiger, but it is still TEH WIN for most things (k3b kicks the shit out of Disk Utility for cd/dvd stuff though, and amaroK is catching up to iTunes VERY quickly). Personally, I am going to wait at least two weeks to install Tiger – I know way too many people who got bit very badly when Panther came around.
Is it true that 10.4.1 is already out?
Im running tiger on my 00 MHz iBook
Now thats what i call minimum requirements!
That’s bad… Even MS Media Player can do full screen without paying EXTRA money for it.
Once you buy QT Pro, the key should be good for any future version of the software…
Buy Panther and then buy QT Pro 6.
Buy Tiger and then buy QT Pro 7.
Buy Another_cat and then buy QT Pro 8 ???
What the hell….
I’ve got it here and it’s definately more responsive than 10.3.9 (which itself was an improvement).
Spotlight is like BeOS queries but much more useful, type in a word and it’s amazing what it finds.
Dashboard may seem gimmicky but I find it quite useful and I think it has a lot of potential.
Safari is faster and the RSS is great (there’s also an RSS screensaver).
Mail is a bit odd at times but overall it’s fine. I’ve no complaints about the looks.
There’s not much for core image but if you install the development stuff there’s some fun examples of it and other stuff to play with.
Pretty much everything I have works though I had to reinstall a few things as I installed from scratch.
The only thing which has broken is CodeTek Virtual Desktop (Lite), I’m using Desktop Manager for now but it’s missing a few things.
Camino must has some compatibility issues but I haven’t see any – there’s a new version (0.8.4) anyway.
There’s a few glitches here and there but Apple usually do a good job of sorting out problems so I expect any issues will be fixed fairly soon. Overall I’m well impressed
Oh my god . . . all you can say.
Here are my system specs:
Giga Designs 1.8GHz (Freescale 7447A) upgraded Power Macintosh G4 (Digital Audio), 1.5Gbytes Kingston PC133 CL2 SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128Mb), Western Digital 80GByte (8MByte cache) DMA100 7200RPM IDE hard drive, and MacOS X 10.3.9 (Panther)
I was able to play the “Serenity” video (as well as “Fantastic 4”) at full screen width (being letterboxed) with very little perceptable frame skip/drop.
Need a G5? No. You can get useable HD movie preview capability out of a G4 just like mine, it you stack it to the hilt. Not sure if watching an entire move like that would be entirely acceptable, but…
I bet Tiger makes my system even… F A S T E R !
Luposian
I don’t know if it’s the same in the new version of QuickTime, and I’d even suspect it’s not, but if full-screen playback is all you’re after, you don’t need to QuickTime Pro to do it.
Instead, open the AppleScript editor, and type the following lines:
tell application “quicktime player”
present
end tell
Then, save it as an application. Start a movie in QuickTime, and double-click on your new application. You should get full-screen playback without spending $30.
I installed QT 7 on my 1 Ghz G4 iMac running Panther yesterday and I’ll say that the HD videos run smoothly once they’re done loading (a little choppy while the download is taking place). I have now decided that I will never buy another DVD until they are in HD. Amazing.
It’s great! Spotlight is, quite simply, amazing. I’ve never really put much thought into the Windows search or the Panther (and below) find utilities. They work well enough, they just weren’t impressive enough to me to really stand out. Spotlight is an entirely different beast! Finding phrases in PDF documents is an amazingly useful feature that I’ve used quite a bit already. I’m also impressed that Spotlight’s functionality didn’t make my system feel any slower, actually my system is noticeably zippier (using a 933 MHz iBook).
Dashboard is a nice feature. The widgets being right there when you need them is great and I am already using this feature much more than I thought I would. It’s too bad I can’t get the ripple effect on my laptop, but, what the heck.
I like the new Mail look. I don’t have any problem with the brushed metal look, however, I didn’t like the default icon placement (having them centered in the screen), it just looked odd. I rearranged them to start from the left side of the window and now it looks fine to me. I like it better than the previous one.
Safari is great! Integrated RSS is awesome. As someone stated above, the RSS screensaver is pretty cool.
I get some choppiness on HD content with Quicktime, but regular video is fine.
I haven’t played with Automator a lot but from what I’ve seen so far, I am going to be getting plenty of use out of it.
Is it worth it? Hell yeah! As I stated in another post, if you’re a student, you can get Tiger from Apple for only $70.00 with a student discount at:
http://www.apple.com/education/store
if you rename youre quicktime player prior to instal, then instal tiger, you will get qt 7 player, but your 6 player will still work and be pro
What is the big deal about dashboard Microsoft released active desktop with Windows 98?
You, sir, or madame, are hilarious.
Post of the day and a cookie for you!
–JM
> Personally, the price alone for Spotlight is worth it
No kidding: it’s one of those “how the hell did we get along with out this?” deals. Between Spotlight and Quicksilver, I may never touch a directory tree again.
I hate hyped-up statements like “this changes everything” (and we Mac fanboys are good at gushing like that), but this sort of search power really will influence the way we interact with our machines.
Not that Spotlight is a new idea. Beagle beat it to market — but, geez, Spotlight is way slick in execution. You non-Mac folk will totally groove on this when it comes to your favorite operating system. And it will.
Overall, I’m delighted with Tiger. I’m even warming up to Dashboard now that I’ve mapped convenient toggle keys.
It’s stupid, but one of my favorite new features is the onboard Oxford American dictionary. I wonder how many times I’ve fumbled with M-W.com’s slow and clunky interface to look up something on the fly. Now I can call the dictionary in seconds via Quicksilver, or pop up the Dashboard widget. What a cool time saver.
I *want* Longhorn to be this good. You Windows and Linux guys would really like some of these toys.
Why doesn’t it pop up a new window when I click on it in the dock? command/alt/n to bring up a window is getting really old, really fast.
Arghh! So I guess they didn’t fix Terminal’s Dock behavior either, and clicking its Dock icon won’t open a new shell?
Dont get me wrong, spotlight is great. Its very very fast at what it does. I however am used to using launchbar for many things. At finding files and launching apps spotlight wins hands down. Here is a whish list for spotlight. I would hate to be running spotlight and launchbar at the same time because they basically do the thing. I would love it if one day I could chose what app to open a certain file in spotlight ie: open an html file in text edit instead of jsut safari. Also it would be great to just access address book phone numbers and data from the list without opening address book. Users of LaunchBar 4 know what I am talking about. Again this is just a wish list. I am all for supporting developers but I also think the less apps I have to download and install the cleaner my system runs. Other than that Tiger absolutely rules. The new Safari is blazing fast. Mail is a 100 times better than before. The whole system is so much snappier than before and I am only on a 12″ 800MHz iBook. Way to go Apple.
what the heck are both you talking about? I have neither mail.app of terminal.app windows loaded but the apps are running… I click on either icon.. <lyrical voice>pop goes the app windows</lyrical voice>
I think they’re both morons who dont understand the difference between an app launcher and the dock. its not supposed to open new windows of an already open program, thats not what its designed for