Mac OS X Tiger 

Mac OS, whether Tiger or Panther (rumors are that the next one's called

leopard!) is without doubt one of the most beautiful looking OS bar none. The

release of the OS update, however, was uncharacteristically delayed this year.

This was a surprise because normally you can set your watch to Apple's

timeliness in releasing updates. 

The looks of it



The first thing you will notice in the OS is the change in the Apple logo,

it now sports a flashier brighter blue. The other icon you will see is a

magnifying glass about which we will learn in a bit.

The second change in the interface is the toolbar, which has been integrated

into the title bar as one bulky toolbar. Though it looks a little odd, it's

convenient. The strange thing is that this toolbar is not uniform. Some windows

use it and some do not. There was no clear pattern that we could find, for

example, Preview does not use it, but it is right there if you were to open up

'System Preferences.' Though it's a little strange, but it doesn't cause

any hindrance in usability.

The rest of the interface is pretty much the same as it was in Panther,

except if you look at the Mail's interface, which is decidedly difficult to

use and even the shades of greys and blues get a little irritating once you get

over the initial cool effect. The buttons were a lot better in terms of

usability in Mac OS X Panther. Here, the buttons are small, un-separated and

more often than not, you will click on the wrong one because they require

significantly more precise mouse movements. Let's just hope that Apple comes

out with some sort of an update to change the interface skin to something better

and more usable.

The functionality



Despite Apple's claims of over 200 new features, only a few are really

worthwhile.

Perhaps the biggest feature in the OS X is the search feature called

Spotlight. Going back in time, there was a huge outcry when Apple discontinued

support for Metadata (which is the data about data). There was a huge uproar

even from the developers of the original Mac system as the whole point of

incorporating it was to free users from any kind of worries about file types,

locations, what's saved where. Apple learnt its lesson soon enough and in

early 2004, there were a slew of releases which indicated that Apple was

thinking of putting it back inside its OS. It was just as well that Apple put

Spotlight into Tiger because if Vista Beta 1 is anything to go by, Spotlight

already faces serious competition from Windows Search. We will later see how

Spotlight relates to metadata but first we need to digress for a bit into

indexing.

Both, Spotlight and Microsoft Search work on the concept of indexing. This

means that every file on your hard disk drive is scanned and stored with a

reference to its location in an index file. The file content is indexed as well

so when you search for a particular file, it's immediately retrieved by

checking its location. Every new file created goes through this indexing

process.

Now with Vista, MS has 



allowed you to add ratings to the file, as well as store custom keywords to

help you look up the file later. This makes searching a lot easier and

structured. This data that you enter apart from the file name is termed as

Metadata. 

There are two absolutely brilliant things about Spotlight. One is that the

search is real time in the sense that the minute you start typing for a file, it

starts filtering the entire list to give you results that match your query. You

can specify additional parameters like file size and date of creation to filter

the results even further. Since Vista is still in Beta 1 release, we cannot

categorically state whether or not the final version will support this kind of

searching, but the Beta 1 version does not support search as you type. Score 1

for Apple, for now.

The second thing we absolutely loved about Spotlight was its seamless

integration into the entire OS. You can use Spotlight for your contacts, Music,

E-mail and of course the regular documents. The Spotlight bar is stationary at

the top right corner, much like the search bar in Firefox and is constant

throughout the OS, meaning it doesn't come or go depending on which window you

are opening.

We can just wonder what the next step will be. Maybe un-structured, facial

recognition based search for photographs, which is closer to reality than you

might think. At the recent IDF Intel did showcase all this and now that Apple is

partnering with Intel for the processors, perhaps collaboration on other

technologies won't be far behind.

Dashboard and its widgets



This is something similar to the Expose utility that Apple introduced in the

10.3 version of the OS X and got Apple into legal trouble with the creators of

Konfabulator, which has extremely similar functions.

Hitting the F12 key gives you a thin translucent black screen over your

present open windows or the desktop. There are several (by default 4)

utilitarian apps, which reside on this screen such as the Calculator, World

Clock, Calendar and Weather. These applications are called Widgets and you can

download more to give you whatever functionality you desire. In tems of quick

access, the dashboard is a neat way of doing things but hitting the F12 key

everytime does get a bit irritating. It would've been a lot nicer if Apple had

incorporated a mouse gesture to activate it like it has done for the Expose

function. 



However, once you get used to it, the feature is so sorely missed on Windows
that you would want to go buy yourself an iBook at the very least! Apart from

the above two completely new features that Tiger sports, the earlier utilities

and apps have gone through an upgrade as well and now feature some new

interface, or functionality, or both.

Mail 2.0



Apart from the newer interface which we have spoken about above, this is one

program which has gone through the most changes, In fact, in an ironic turn of

events, something from Apple has started looking like something from the

Microsoft stable. The mail clients sliding draws have been taken away for a more

traditional line up folders akin to MS Outlook.

In terms of functionality, the buttons at the top are completely hideous and

can most certainly be designed better. 

It has the Spotlight to search through your mail and contacts easily. A cool

feature that it sports is the Smart Mailbox feature which is basically similar

to Save Search feature in Vista so now you can search for a particular type of

mail and store the search as a separate mail box for accessing it later. Very

nice! Wonder if the next version of MS Office will sport this?

The mail client is also now endowed with basic image resizing functions so

that you don't need to open photoshop for simply resizing and emailing your

holiday pictures, quite thoughtful.

The new layout in the OS X mail client is akin to Outlook Express except that the buttons could've been better  The all-new ichat AV now supports H.264 compression which is about as near DVD quality as you will get in chatting clients

Burn folders



Burn Folder is ultra convenient if you have some files that you burn quite

regularly (for backup, syncing, etc) You can create a Burn Folder in the same

way you create any other folder and then simply drag and drop your files into

it. Now heres the brilliance of it, it simply stores links to the file in there

and NOT the actual files, so as and when you update those, you 



needn't re add them everytime! 

iChat AV



The new version of iChat is nicely updated with a teleconferencing feature

that let's you perform high-quality video chats with upto three people! This

is couple with a brilliant update to Bluetooth compatibility so you can use

Bluetooth headsets for chatting without any problem! Of course, you can use

Bluetooth to transfer files to and from your portably devices.



Bottom Line: Despite Apple's mind numbing promos about how Mac OS X Tiger will
change computing as we know it, it's not really a big or comprehensive an

update, but it is a step in the right direction, and if Tiger is anything to go

by, one can't wait for Leopard or whatever Apple chooses to call its next

update.

Varun Dubey