Os X 10.4

Introduction

Os X 10.4.8
Amazing That A Computer From Circa 2005 Is Still Functioning. Your Best Bet May Be To Google For Browser For Mac OS 10.4 Although I Am Not Sure You...
Os X 10.4.9

Mac OS X 10.4.10 was released on June 20, 2007. It has the build number 8R218 for PowerPC and the build numbers 8R2218 and 8R2232. The following improvements apply to both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs unless otherwise noted. Apr 28, 2005 Tech — Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Apple's latest OS X release (10.4) is about to hit the streets. Tiger brings a John Siracusa - Apr 28, 2005 4:20 pm UTC.

Back in early November of 2003, I introduced my Mac OS X 10.3 Panther review with some concerns about Apple's OS release cycle.

It's strange to have gone from years of uncertainty and vaporware to a steady annual supply of major new operating system releases from Apple. But do I really want to pay US$129 every year for the next version of Mac OS X? Worse, do I really want to deal with the inevitable upgrade hassles and 10.x.0 release bugs every single year? Is it worth it, or is a major OS upgrade every year simply too much, too often?

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In the end, I concluded that I was okay with yearly releases, but that some sort of adjustment for 'normal' customers would be nice.

If there's going to be any consumer backlash, it's not going to start with me. I think Panther is worth the cost, but I consider its price to be an investment in the future of Mac OS X—something I obviously have strong opinions about. I'm probably not a typical user, however. If Apple wants to help ease the burden of the larger Mac community, decent upgrade pricing would be a good start. With a yearly release schedule, that is nearly the same thing as a simple price reduction, but if so, so be it.

So convinced was I of the inevitability of the Mac OS X yearly release juggernaut that I never even considered the possibility that relief from the $129-per-year Mac OS X tax might come in the form of an extra six-month wait for version 10.4. 'Let's do this again next year' were my exact words at the end of the Panther review.

Well, here we are 18 months and 6 days later, finally getting a look at Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Windows users patiently waiting for Longhorn may not be sympathetic, but the longer wait for Tiger is something new to Mac OS X users.

Tiger's longer gestation doesn't mean that the rate of change has slowed, however. Tiger includes updates that are at least twice as significant as any single past update. Mac OS X is now getting to the point where significant improvements require a larger time investment. As far as the core OS is concerned, most of the low-hanging fruit has been harvested. Now it's time for Apple to get down to the real work of improving Mac OS X.

Tiger also represents a milestone in Mac OS X's development process. Apple has promised developers that there will be 'no API disruption for the foreseeable future.' Starting with Tiger, Apple will add new APIs to Mac OS X, but will not change any existing APIs in an incompatible way. This has not been the case during the first four years of Mac OS X's development, and Mac developers have often had to scramble to keep their applications running after each new major release.

Despite its NeXTSTEP roots, Mac OS X is still a very young operating system. Most of the technologies that make it interesting and unique are actually brand new: Quartz, Core Audio, IOKit, Core Foundation. The hold-overs from NeXT and classic Mac OS have also evolved substantially: QuickTime, Carbon, Cocoa.

It's tempting to say that Tiger marks childhood's end for Mac OS X, but I think that goes too far. A more accurate analogy is that Mac OS X versions 10.0 through 10.3 represent 'the fourth trimester' for Apple's new baby—a phrase used to describe the first three months of human life, during which the baby becomes accustomed to life outside the womb. As any new parent knows (yes, I am one of them), this is not an easy time of life, for the baby or for the parents.

It's been a rough journey, but we've made it through intact: Apple, Mac OS X, and Mac users everywhere. Tiger has arrived. Let's see what this baby can do.

Os X 10.4.8

When you start using an upgraded version of a familiar piece of software, the first things you notice are the changes. In those initial sessions, it’s hard to tell whether those changes are for the good or not—all you know is that they’re different . But then, slowly, you begin to form judgments about the new features, to appreciate small touches that originally escaped your notice. This is where I am with Tiger.

Spotlight’s Shades of Gray

Spotlight is undeniably cool. It’s Tiger’s most important feature, and it’s miles beyond any of the old search features in the Mac operating system (yes, Sherlock, I’m talking to you).

That’s because Spotlight doesn’t just search text inside of your files. It also knows about your files’ attributes —who authored a Microsoft Word file, for instance, or which camera snapped a JPEG. Different apps can define their own descriptors, but Apple is distributing a list of “common attributes” that it’d like programs to share.

I also really like the Smart Folders feature, which Spotlight enables in the Finder. Smart folders have solved one of my own workflow problems: Spotlight can sort through my folder of e-mail attachments to find all the Macworld stories I need to read, and it puts them all in one convenient place.

However, Spotlight also has a major limitation: at this point, it works only on a file-by-file basis. It won’t find e-mail messages, for example, in programs (such as Entourage) that save messages as individual files. Apple and software vendors need to find a fix for that, so we can truly uncover all the data on our Macs.

Still, I like Spotlight. In a year, I think it will be seen as the most important feature ever added to OS X. If you deal with an avalanche of files, be they Word documents, images, or whatever, Spotlight alone will make upgrading to Tiger worthwhile.

Dashboard in Progress

As a paying user of Konfabulator, I like the idea of small, single-purpose application widgets. And some of Apple’s new Dashboard widgets are very useful. The Dictionary widget is perfect, letting me look up a word quickly without launching the new Dictionary application.

However, some of Apple’s widgets are not as useful as they could be. The Calendar widget doesn’t integrate with Apple’s iCal. And the way you add new widgets to your Dashboard—clicking on a rotating X symbol at the bottom of the screen to reveal a strip menu of available widgets—is clumsy. As the number of widgets grows, it’ll just get clumsier.

Moving widgets off of the Dashboard layer is also awkward. If a widget would work better for me on my desktop, why can’t I move it there without resorting to Terminal? (It would have been nice if Apple had let us deploy widgets more flexibly.)

More Feature Favorites

Among my other favorite new features:

Multiuser videoconferencing works surprisingly well in iChat AV 3.0, and group support in the Buddy List window is excellent. But I wish it were easier to start a multiuser videoconference. Right now, you and your friends have to figure out whose Mac is fast enough to host the conference. iChat should do that for you.

Safari 2.0 ’s support for RSS feeds should help bring RSS technology into the mainstream. But putting RSS feeds in a Web-page interface makes me think that Apple missed the point of Web-site syndication. And the new Private Browsing feature fails to wall off Safari’s previously stored cookies, so Amazon.com will not only greet you by name, as usual, but also track any pages you visit in a supposedly private session.

Finally, a few words in praise of Automator. It’s exciting to see the power of Apple’s scripting technologies being placed in the hands of millions of Mac users who will never, ever write even a single computer program. Now the impressive automation features of AppleScript are available to the rest of us. That’s great news.

Amazing That A Computer From Circa 2005 Is Still Functioning. Your Best Bet May Be To Google For Browser For Mac OS 10.4 Although I Am Not Sure You...

Should You Upgrade?

Os X 10.4.9

Let’s be realistic here: if you’re an active Mac user who plans to continue buying new software and hardware on a regular basis, Tiger is a necessity. If you’re not planning on buying any major upgrades and your Mac works fine just the way it is, you can probably get away with skipping it. If you’re somewhere in between those two groups, Tiger is probably in your future. Once it’s been prowling the Mac world for a few months—time enough to shake off the bugs—you’ll start to get the itch to upgrade. And you’ll be glad you did.