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.
First off, Quicksilver does learn. I know that in older versions it had some major issues with that, but it’s been fixed for a while.
As far as Spotlight, I really don’t think Apple ever considered making it a general purpose launcher. It’s supposed to search, and that’s what it does. If you really want to launch Final Cut Pro using FCP in spotlight, put FCP in the Spotlight Comments field of Final Cut Pro.app.
I can’t really comment on anything else yet as I DON’T HAVE TIGER YET. Grrr.
100% agreed on all counts. I didn’t like the drawers in Mail before, but otherwise liked the interface. Spotlight’s taking some getting used to–I had been using Quicksilver. I want to see it learn actions and guess better about what the top hit should be. But as a systemwide search, I like it–especially the tie in with finding recent mail messages. I only missed my AIM buddy groups for a day or so once the previous iChats made me remove them, so I haven’t reaped many benefits in that app. Anxiously awaiting 10.4.1, which is supposed to fix a lot of beach ball lag. Meanwhile contemplating additional RAM–something I swore I’d do when I got this PB 1.5 years ago and never got around to. Why does Apple always make me want to spend money? :)
Adam: I know that Quicksilver learns. My biggest issue is that it’s guessing engine is far worse than LaunchBar’s. You do have a great suggestion though on working around Spotlight’s limitations.
Scott: I haven’t experienced any lag. This release to me, as with every Mac OS X upgrade, has felt faster.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. For the most part, it’s much faster. There are just a couple times now and then. And the desire for more memory is inherent; it lets me feel like I’m improving something without getting the 23″ ACD I really want to blow my (nonexistent) wad on. Right now wondering why my dock doesn’t magnify. But these are things I can live with. Will be interested to hear what other bugginess, if any, you unearth…. Not too many west coast friends have upgraded yet, but my other half’s powerbook has experienced similar issues in these first few days.
I’m a former LaunchBar user (I even registered it) who converted to QuickSilver. I don’t think QS is any worse. If it doesn’t guess what I want, I can keep paging down to find the item and the next time it will pick that item. The best thing about QS is the plugin support. I was even able to eliminate Sizzling Keys for iTunes by using the iTunes plugin and defining trigger actions to pause/play and switch tracks.
Jeremiah,
Congrats on your Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” (Grrr…) :) Now lets hope that Windows can add secureness + superbableness to Windows by the time it releases Longhorn… LOL :) (Since Longhorn isn’t due out until late next year, most likely, I hope they get off their cabooses and do something productive with Windows) :)
There’s a solution to one of your problems, courtesty of DaringFireball.net:
“Highlighting Spotlight’s Top Hit ★
Go to the Spotlight menu and enter a query. As the results start filling in, hold down the Command key. The default option in the results list will change from the Show All command to the “Top Hitâ€. Thus you can hit Command-Return to select the Top Hit for a Spotlight menu search. “
And I’m still stuck with Windows. :-(
-dl
Desertlama,
So that makes 2 of us Windows dudes… :)… I still long for the day when I can become the next Switcher! :)
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BTW, the Finder making aliases when burning a CD/DVD is by design. It uses aliases because it creates the disk image on the fly rather than copying all the files in. However, it still calculates disk space correctly. When you hit burn, it burns the original files, not the aliases.
It’s a bit confusing at first I guess… I think Apple should have used a little radioactive burn icon instead of the alias arrow. That would have made it clearer what was going on.