As you may have heard, Apple shipped their newest version of OS X, codenamed Tiger, this weekend. To help hype the release, Apple held big events at all their stores where they were giving away prizes and stuff and were also opened late (until midnight!). Margaret and I went on Friday evening and got a copy of Tiger.

She installed it herself on Friday night without any help from me at all. She said it was a breeze. And then she played around with some of the features. During the day I had started reading a review of Tiger from Ars Technica, but hadn’t gotten through to the end of it. The first part of that article only covers a lot of the low level details that are interesting to people like me, but aren’t that noticeable most of their users.

Some of the more noticeable features include:

Spotlight

This is the unified search tool available in Tiger. It is quite a bit like Google desktop on the PC (which I strongly recommend all PC users to install so you can actually find things like documents and e-mail on your computer…). One of the cooler features I read about Spotlight is the ability to have “Smart Folders”. Basically, you run a search query and Spotlight gives you the ability to save that query as a Folder. And the best part is that every time you go into that folder, you get the latest results on that query.

Dashboard

Dashboard allows you to have cool, easily accessible widgets at your finger tips. Things like a calculator, your calendar, time, weather, etc. Just push a button and up pops Dashboard with all these useful things. And the API to develop new widgets is also available. Apparently you use HTML and JavaScript to program these things, so it should be pretty easy for people to whip out new Dashboard widgets.

Apple lists over 200 new features in Tiger.

Tags: apple, osx // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)