A Sheep in Tiger's Clothing

I'm a pretty big Mac fan. If you search my blog for "Mac OS X" you'll probably find plenty of times where I've praised Mac OS X for one reason or another. Maybe for its powerful UNIX underpinnings. Or maybe for its sweet, gooey aqua interface. Admitedly, I'd drank my fair share of the Apple "kool-aid".

But I think someone must have been spiking the "kool-aid" at Apple when they released Mac OS X Tiger. Surely you've heard all of the hype about "200 new features" and "the world's most advanced operating system". Let's take a look at a few of those:

Spotlight - This is one of the big features that Apple has been getting really excited about since the announcement of Tiger last year. What it does is keep a database of all of the files on your computer. Metadata, if you will. Then, whenever you need to find a file on your computer, you can use a handy little search menu in the upper-right of your screen to instantly find any file on your drive. The idea is good...except that plenty of other software companies already have a product that does this. The one I've been using for months (Quicksilver) does just about everything that spotlight does, and much faster. Plus, I don't have this weird search button in my menu bar all the time. I hate cluttering up my menubar. It feels like Apple saw Google coming out with their desktop search tool and said "Oh hey, we can do that, too!" They've probably done a better job than Google, but it's still not anything to write hom about. A blog maybe, but not home.

Dashboard - Dashboard is a feature that when you press a special key on your keyboard, it brings up a layer of mini-programs on top of your desktop. These mini-programs each have different functions (calculator, weather, stock quotes, etc.) and can be written by almost any decent programmer (they're mostly CSS and Javascript). Ok, so it's a neat feature. But for me, it's not at all intuitive to use. Let's say I want to know what the weather is for tomorrow. My brain is trained to click the "Weather" menubar favorite in my web browser. But even if I wanted I use Dashboard, I would have to take my hand off my mouse, press F12, move my hand back to my mouse, then wait a second or two for the weather Dashboard widget to update itself. Calculator? I already have the calculator app icon in my dock. Calendar? Click the calendar icon in Entourage which, by the way, is actually usable - not just widget eye candy. Not to mention that there was a little program called Konfabulator that Dashboard seems an awful lot like. Oh, and it's been out since late 2000. Another case of "me too"?

My other big complaint with Apple this time is that it really seems like they didn't do enough work testing the OS before they shipped it out the door. Sure, they've been working on it for many many months. But there are a ton of bugs and broken stuff. Granted, some problems are as a result of 3rd party software, but I've never seen this many problems when a new OS is released. Not with Panther. Not with Jaguar. Puma and Cheetah don't count - they were basically beta anyway. :D

One thing I will give Apple credit for is Quicktime 7 with its H.264 codec, clearly paving the way for kick ass HD content on computers, cell phones, etc. From what I've seen so far, 2005 is going to be a big year for HD. Too bad I don't have it yet. :(

I upgraded my 1.67ghz PowerBook to Tiger Sunday night. And I wish I would have waited a little while longer. Watching my CPU load (using MenuMeters) over the past fe days, I've noticed my CPU getting thrashed way harder than Panther ever did. And my PowerBook runs noticably hotter than it did before. I've heard my cooling fans turn on more times in the past two days than in the past two months.

For $129, I really feel like Tiger just wasn't ready for prime-time. And even after today's 10.4.1 update, I haven't noticed any significant changes that make me, well, think differently.

At least Longhorn is still more than a year away.

Posted by Jeff at May 18, 2005 12:09 AM