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