Technology

The Tiger Within

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:

Tiger Desktop

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.

Tiger Spotlight

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!

Tiger Dashboard

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!

Author

Originally from the UK, David is designer and wanderer currently based in Kamakura. Prior to this, he lived in China and longs to explore more of this vast and varied land. He started Randomwire in 2003 to chronicle his travels and occasional musings. Feel free to drop him a line.

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