Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger first impressions

[mmcirvin]

(10.4.1, actually...)

Graphics operations do seem faster; I'm currently running at a resolution that taxes my video card, and things like full-screen QuickTime VR panning are noticeably faster now.

Now that Spotlight's indexed my drive, it's pretty remarkable. I haven't used it enough to know how usable it is, but it sure is fast. I don't like the use of grayed-out labels and icons in the search results dialog; things that look like they're inactive aren't.

The idea of Dashboard is interesting—an environment for extremely easy-to-develop tiny little apps—but did the user interface for these things really have to be totally different from, oh, everything else in the entire system? Keyboard shortcuts don't even seem to do what you'd think they do.

It really feels half-finished, and also a little like Apple is trying to invent desk accessories again after gradually erasing the distinction between them and everything else years ago. I'm a little uneasy about the duplication of services that results. The new dictionary feature has a dictionary application, a dictionary service and a dictionary Dashboard widget. The iTunes miniplayer widget now coexists with the minimized iTunes app and the iTunes dock-icon controls. There's a Stickies widget as well as the original Stickies app (unless that's gone from a pristine Tiger installation; I don't know). It all seems a bit redundant. I will grant that Stickies do seem like a natural thing to put on a separate worldsheet that shows up with a magic keystroke.

That said, I think my favorite widget so far is the Yellow Pages one, with its one-click integration with the system address book; I can see that being immediately useful (I just got my dentist's contact information in there with a couple of clicks). I wish you could change the size of the thing, though; it's tiny. And I wish the map link brought up Google Maps rather than Mapquest; it seems like these widgets usually allow extremely little customization.

The new features generally seem to violate established UI standards in wacky ways, and it's going to take a while for me to get used to them.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Apple seems to reinvent UI standards every so often. But who doesn't?

Do you still have to check a special option to be able to tab to things like checkboxes and pull-down lists?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The option's still there; I checked it a long time ago. I don't remember what the default setting is.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...The change that bothers me the most is just functional buttons being displayed in a manner that, ever since the original Macintosh in 1984 (and on Windows and Unix too), has screamed "this is a disabled option that does not do anything".

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

They did change the behavior on keyboard-driven accessibility, for the better. For example, the only way to navigate the finder menu in the past was with the arrow key. So say you wanted to do Finder->View->Clean Up. In the past that was Ctrl-F1 (or whatever you chose for 'open Menu' in the keyboard accessibility settings), then hit the right arrow key FOUR times to get to 'view', then hit the down arrow to get to 'Clean Up'. Now it actually responds to letter presses, so now it's just Ctrl-F1, 'V', one down-arrrow press, then 'C'. Sometimes when the down-arrow part involved going past lots of options that didn't have key combo equivalents, the old way could involve as many as thirteen or fourteen keystrokes. This new way really cuts down on that.