Next Friday (29th) sees the release of Apples next generation operating system, Max OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’. I’ve been having a play with it today and must say I’m deeply impressed. If you though OS X was cool before just wait till you see the tricks the new version has up its sleeve! At a glance you’d be forgiven for thinking that not much has changed but dig a little deeper and you’ll see a whole world of new functionality. Below I’ve highlighted what I feel to be the most significant, of course the official site lists over 200 enhancements:
Spotlight – Probably the biggest single reason to upgrade. Spotlight indexes all your files and associated meta-data, making them instantly searchable; Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications can be found in a flash tasking the hassle out of looking for stuff. Seriously useful if like me you have hundreds of gigabytes of stuff.
Dashboard – Creates a handy extra ‘dashboard’ over your existing desktop which is accessible at a click of a button. You can then add widgets to your dashboard including useful things like a dictionary, stock ticker, weather forcast, translator, etc. Really neat and exceedingly flashy!
Safari RSS – Now you can manage all your news feeds within one of the best web browsers going. Its stupidly easy to do and presents all your feeds in a neat interface within the browser window. An even cooler extension allows you to present your feeds within a system screensaver which shows all the news posts flying around making them instantly available.
Of course with all this comes in a graphic designers dream interface good enough to make Windows bow its head and stand in the corner – there simply can be no comparison. A lot of whats new in this version boils down to more efficient handling of information and the ways we access it – whilst it’s still early days this is the future of computing.
If you’ve got a mac I’d strongly suggest upgrading. If not I’d think about getting one!
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