OS 10.4 Impressions
First, congrats to Apple for a great Mac OS X upgrade! So many great features are included. This is a definite “must have” upgrade. My only criticism is that many new features feel unrefined.
Spotlight
I love LaunchBar because it learns and it ships already smart. LaunchBar’s guessing engine and learning ability are superior to Quicksilver and Spotlight’s abilities. I already outlined why Mac OS X needs a launch application and I welcome Spotlight, but it’s rough around the edges.
Improvements immediately needed for Spotlight:
- Problem: Spotlight does not return Final Cut Pro when I type “FCP” or Dreamweaver when I type “DW” or or Photoshop when I type “PS” or Firefox when I type “FF”.
Solution: Spotlight should recognize capital letters in file names as possible acronyms. Spotlight should also be capable of learning letter combinations for files without intracapitalization or separate words. - Problem: There is no way to disable Show All as the first action instead of the Top Hit, which would save time and a few keystrokes.
Solution: Make it an option. - Problem: There is no way to disable the icons in the results list and this slows everything.
Solution: Besides disabling icons, delaying the icon appearance until all results are displayed would be more logical.
Safari RSS
Safari RSS is frustrating at best. I was hoping to eliminate NetNewsWire, but Safari RSS lacks an option to mark all stories read, does not remove previously read articles (though you can sort by read status), and does not signify which articles have already been read.
Dashboard
Dashboard just rocks, replaces Sherlock (why is Sherlock still included?), and is visually stunning. Apple took an idea and made it better than anything similar.
Mail
Mail looks ugly as sin, but fortunately looks are only skin deep. As with everything in the new Mail, search is drastically faster. The false threading of messages I previously experienced is fixed. Overall, the new options and small detail features make Mail a polished application.
iChat
Buddy groups. Profiles. Jabber support. Like whoa. iChat is great. My only minor criticism is that buddy groups cannot be reordered. They are always in alphabetical order. My solution is to rename buddy groups with numbers. “Family” became “1 Family”, “VA” became “2 VA”, “Boston” became “3 Boston”, etc. Are animated buddy icons supported? I haven’t tried this yet.
Finder
It’s faster, but then again, it couldn’t possibly have gotten any slower. When I burned two data CD-Rs this weekend, I noticed a rather strange behavior. Instead of adding the TIF files I wanted to burn, Finder created aliases to the files when I dragged the files to the CD-R. Why would anyone burn aliases to files on a hard drive? I figured out that if you hold Option, Finder copies the files to the CD-R. This is just stupid and counter-intuitive.
Posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 16:00.