Charles on… anything that comes along

Get it while it’s late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing)

11 Responses to “Get it while it’s late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing)”

1. Ian Hobson Says:
   May 2nd, 2005 at 9:38 pm

   Charles
   Good job. You provided a review that everyone can read, and yet also gave a few unique perspectives and tips (certainly not just for the geeks).
   I have been following the anandtech site recently - this is (was) a real hard-core windows site. The boss has done his review of Tiger, and I think it is very interesting as it comes from the switcher perspective (and he is more of a switcher than not). I really liked the ars technica review, but this is another interesting viewpoint.
   http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2404&p=1
   And I wouldn’t disagree too much with what he’s saying - it’s not all positive (though mostly).
   I’ve been using Tiger on my old 667Mhz Powerbook for about 6 hours as I write. Generally impressed, but with a few rough edges (why didn’t they give more flexible pop-up blocking in Safari? and I think battery life seems reduced - I added a new battery a couple of weeks ago and was getting 4.5 hours easily, but this seems like it’s dropping to about 3 - 3.5 hours)
   Ian

2. Anna Says:
   May 3rd, 2005 at 2:30 am

   Hi, Charles,

   Just one thing: The keyboard shortcut for Spotlight is ctrl-space.

   I installed Tiger on a G3 iBook, and so far it works fine. I don’t really use this computer much for anything besides web surfing and creating documents with MS Word, and for those, there’s not much to complain about. The G3 processor worried me in the beginning, thinking that Tiger will run really slowly, but it’s at least as fast as Panther. I love Spotlight, and Dashboard is pretty neat; I’ve already installed some third-party widgets. I had some problems with printing initially, but I seem to have “fixed” that by reinstalling some drivers. Funny thing, the epson 5700i prints faster under Tiger than under Panther.

   Will be trying it out on my upgraded Sawtooth next.

3. Ian Hobson Says:
   May 3rd, 2005 at 10:13 am

   Just an update to correct some misinformation I posted.
   My battery life is in fact better under Tiger. I discovered that Mail had gone awry - it was taking up most of the cpu. No explanation and it had to be force-quitted (no apparent data loss). Now everything is very smooth - scrolling, typing, browsing etc - feels better than Panther. On a full charge, I have had more than 2 hours of usage this morning with mail, Safari and Netnewswire usage. My battery is at 64%. So that’s more than 5 hours per charge - up from the 4.5 hours I was getting.
   I’m liking this a lot. Some things though are not quite there. I’ve already mentioned a Safari gripe - and there’s a couple more that mean I can’t replace Firefox entirely. Dashboard is interesting, but things like the train times don’t really seem ready yet, and the free-for-all gui designs may not be a good long term policy.

   I haven’t really tried Spotlight heavily yet, but it seems pretty decent on this old Powerbook. I’ve not found any applications that didn’t work either. I did a simple archive and install. All third party apps seemed to be working fine with proper license codes. I had to re-install just one - Freefall (a really neat satellite orbit simulator that Jobs used to demo last years Powermacs), as it seemed to have got a bit lost, but even here the license code was remembered. Office apps seem to work at the basic level. The changes to Mail are generally positive and fix a few minor gripes I had with it.

   Perhaps though Apple has given us all less incentive to trade up our machines. I definitely think this 3.5year Powerbook will get me through another year or so.

   Ian

4. Charles Says:
   May 3rd, 2005 at 10:57 am

   Anna.. on my machine, I think it came as Apple-space. Or did I configure it that way? I call “Ctrl” the key to the left of the “Alt” or “option” key, and “Cmd / Apple” is the key beside the space bar.

   Personally I’ve set the keyboard prefs so that Cmd-space is Spotlight, and Alt-space is Dashboard.

   I’d be interested in how people see performance moving with longer uptimes. I’ve now been logged in 12 days + 16hrs, and I’m getting quite a lot of slowdowns. (This is with some network-heavy apps like NetNewsWire, Safari, Mail, DevonAgent all running, plus Microsoft Word and Excel, which aren’t kind to the processor). 1.67GHz Pbook, 1GB RAM, but it’s got a treacly feel. I would log out and in but I’m a very reluctant logger-in-and-outer because I have so many apps going at once at any time with loads of open docs. Possibly it’s windowserver feeling the strain.

5. Small Paul Says:
   May 3rd, 2005 at 11:40 am

   I’ve only ever used Firefox’s bookmark folders for RSS, so Safari 2.0 is great: it actually tells me when there’s new stuff! I’ve fully switched back to Safari now: it feels more solid on OSX than Firefox does, and I never made great use of Firefox’s extensions.

   I love Dictionary. The fact that most OSX applications are already set up to allow Dictionary lookups via CTRL-CMD-D, without being re-written for Tiger, makes me exceedingly happy.

   I’ve always been kinda organised, so Spotlight probably won’t revolutionise how I use my PowerBook. But it’s a fun way to find files I’d forgotten I even had.

   Tiger is very cool. It’s a solid platform on which Apple can build the next 5 years of our Mac experience. Let’s just hope they now throw some resource into fixing the frickin’ Finder.

6. Ian Hobson Says:
   May 3rd, 2005 at 12:14 pm

   Charles
   It’s Cmd-Space for Spotlight on mine too, and I haven’t changed the defaults.
   As for performance, a couple of things spring to mind.
   1. One of the reasons I switched away from Safari was that it used to have some form of memory leak. The longer you used it, the more memory it would take up. Applications are supposed to free this memory when they quit etc, but this didn’t happen. I would have the same effect on my 512MB/667Mhz Powerbook as you. Only doing a reboot got the memory back. Firefox didn’t do this (I don’t think Omniweb did either - interesting as built on same webkit as Safari). Apart from the slowness, the symptoms I got included fan being on much more, and I had a little app that showed free memory and this showed it reduced more and more. It is possible that this problem is still in Safari. In my case, I would have to do a restart every few days until I switched to Firefox. OR:
   2. You probably let your Powerbook sleep overnight. This is when UNIX goes and does some housekeeping work. So, it doesn’t get done on your machine. Hence log files etc build up and other such stuff. You can download from Versiontracker something called MacJanitor which is free at least last time round, and runs some simple scripts to do a daily, weekly, or monthly clean up (weekly seems to take the most time, so does the most). I don’t know if this is Tiger-compatible, but it may help blow the cobwebs away.

   I don’t think 12 days is BAD, but with your memory and usage, I agree you could expect more (I use the same apps as you, except for DevonAgent). Have you ever noticed that Word is a hog? Even when you’re not doing anything in it, it uses 10-20% of cpu (on my machine and with Office X first release).

   Ian

7. Anna Says:
   May 3rd, 2005 at 4:52 pm

   Charles,
   I haven’t changed the defaults either. I have no idea why mine toggles with ctrl-space. Oh, well. Whatever works. :)

8. max Says:
   May 10th, 2005 at 5:33 pm

   jusr curious about where you found your driver for the 5700i… I have a g4 with Tiger and it aboslutely doesn’t want to print anything. It just returns an error. And not an error on screen… the red light on the printer comes on and that’s it.

9. Xin Cheng Says:
   May 10th, 2005 at 11:37 pm

   I would appreciate if you could release more info on how you fix your epson 5700i printer problem. Where did you get your updated driver?

10. Charles Says:
    May 11th, 2005 at 12:47 am

    While I don’t have a 5700i, if you’ve got Tiger installed then you could try the “Printer Setup Utility” in the Utilities folder (lives in a side street off Applications Avenue).

    In the main “Printer Setup Utility” menu, there’s “Reset Printer System” which might do the trick. I mean, it can’t make it worse, right? And I’ve seen reports of people where that’s done the trick, though I don’t know if that’s on your model.

11. Gordon Says:
    May 17th, 2005 at 4:59 am

    I was having the same problem as Max under OS 10.4: the little red light. Now I’ve upgraded to 10.4.1, and I no longer get the little red light: it just automatically stops the print queue and won’t proceed with it. It’s such an improvment… :(

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