On 1/11/05 15:13, Stuart Bell wrote:
The $64,000 question is whether I should, at last, upgrade to 10.4 from
Panther. What would I gain and lose, please?
I get the feeling that I'm one of those people having more bad issues
than most, so bear that in mind when you read this list which reflects
my experiences/opinions after about 4 months use and 15 minutes thinking:
Gains:
------
Dashboard - don't use it much, but being able to grab the calculator or
exchange rate widgets quickly is quite nice.
iCal & Address Book - better than in Panther, but iCal is still too slow
and I've gone back to using Palm Desktop.
Safari - supports more sites, almost as good as Firefox ;-)
Preview - cool, you can now do basic annotation. I can almost go without
Adobe Reader.
Built-in dictionary & thesaurus.
Automator - haven't really used this much, but looks quite useful for
batching together repetitive tasks via point-and-click. I saw an on-line
article explaining how to use it so that, having selected a bunch of
PDFs in the Finder, you could right-click and have them all loaded into
Preview and concatenated without the need for any 3rd party utility. Nice.
Applications seems to be more stable and I get no little graphic
glitches on filenames in the Finder, like I used to under Panther.
Loses:
------
Spotlight - not impressed. I don't find it as slow as many people seem
to (1.25GHz G4, 512MB RAM) but it's just clumsy compared to the old
search mechanism if you're not interested in metadata/contents
searching, just filenames.
But worse than that, I don't trust it. For example, if I know there's a
file called WIBBLE.DOC on my drive and I search for this, but I have the
Finder hiding file extensions on that file, Spotlight will not locate
it. I have to search for WIBBLE, i.e. no extension. Why?
Networking - when I disconnect a shared drive on a SMB shared folder,
the Finder locks up for between 5 and 30 seconds. This is via 802.11g -
not sure about wired ethernet. And as is well known by now, AppleShare
via AppleTalk is no longer supported, so my old NT Server's Services for
Macintosh shares are no longer available - I have to access via SMB,
which results in .DS_Store files, etc. all over the place. Funnily
enough I get no Finder freezes when disconnecting from AFP shares.
Quicktime - if you've got a Quicktime Pro license, it'll no longer be
valid because version 7 comes with Tiger.
3rd party hardware support - my Graphire tablet experience would seem to
indicate that, as usual with major OS upgrades, some things break.
Hopefully you haven't got any legacy SCSI stuff on your machine.
So-so points:
-------------
Backup - about 50% of my .Mac backups (using Backup to save to my B&W
shared drive) fail due to file sharing dying completely on the B&W. Only
Backup running under Tiger does this - any other file sharing/Backup
sessions where Tiger isn't involved run without a hitch. Weird.
Performance - I moved up to a Mac mini from a G3 iBook, which is why I
got Tiger, and though applications definately run faster the Finder
seems to be about the same speed as before so the hardware must be
having to do more work. Maybe the mini's lowly ATi 9200 is at fault -
you also don't get all of the eye candy (like the Dashboard ripples)
because the card isn't pokey enough.
iSync - I had all sorts of problems with iSync under Panther. Tiger
seems to be a bit better, but as mentioned above I've gone back to Palm
Desktop/HotSync and dropped iSync other than for keeping Safari
bookmarks in sync via .Mac - it's useless unless you use the built-in
apps of course and all the time I wasted getting it to work under
Panther has biased me against it. iSync under Tiger was supposed to be
opened up for 3rd party use, but I'm not holding my breath.
There's a really interesting (if you're a geek) article on Ars Technica
<http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/1> covering all of
the new stuff in Tiger. Be warned - it's long.
Neil
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