Tiger Arrived

I ordered my copy just about right after it was available for sale. Mine is still in transit. I doubt it will get here today. I live 3 miles away from an Apple Store. What was the point or pre-ordering if I'm not going to get it on the release date?

I was fortunate enough to have Tiger delivered to my door by Fedex today (Fri 29th) about 1PM local time.

Installation was very easy - no need to hold down the C key to get my Mac to boot from the DVD; installation customization options much simpler; total install time was less than 45 minutes including boot-from-DVD, installation of the OS, optimization of the HD, and reboot into Tiger from HD.

Speed initially seemed disappointing - until I realized that the CPU was getting bogged down by the massive Spotlight index that has to happen the first time you fire up Tiger.

That index lasted about an hour, perhaps an hour and a half (iMac G4/800, 60GB HD, approx 80 percent full). Since then, Tiger has been super-snappy - and Spotlight works just as advertised - instant search - amazing!

As for speed, I'm particularly impressed with the speed increase in Safari 2.0 - especially since the recent 1.3 update was supposed to contain much of the improvements in 2.0. Quicktime 7 is also much smoother.

Mail looks like ass compared to its old self - sort of like that horrible "not quite Windows" pale blue look that some versions of Netscape 7/Mozilla had (and still have? I don't use them anymore). But it's gotten rid of the drawer, is much faster, and overall is a whole different app than Mail 1.x.

Dashboard is also very cool. I was not into it, given the previews I'd seen. But it works very well. It's sort of like another layer of Expose. And I'm already making use of many third-party widgets. Fun and useful.

Compatibility: lots of good news here, at least for my needs. Office apps all work fine, as does Photoshop. Virtual PC prompted me to reinstall some OS components that don't get transferred over when you do an "archive and install" installation. Virtual Switch networking is busted, but I never used that anyway.

Got my two printers - one connected via plain-vanilla USB and the other a laserjet connected via parallel port and LPD through my router - working again very quickly. My USB printer was automaticlly detected and its driver activated as soon as I turned it on. A quick trip to the CUPS Web interface got the LPD printer back online as well.

Other little handy things - OSXPlanet, SwapMenu, MenuCalendarClock and Butler - all work fine. Stuffit Deluxe works as well, but I had to reinstall it (for the same reason as VPC).

The only thing that just won't work now is JunkMatcher, an app-script combo that enhances Mail's built-in junk mail filtering. The installer refuses to install in Tiger. I'm sure the developer will be updating it soon.

So in summary, everything just worked, with a few exceptions. I had to reinstall: Anacron, Stuffit Deluxe, and part of VPC; and Junkmatcher (and Diskwarrior, for that matter) is currently not supported.

Matt

I finally got my copy of Tiger late this afternoon. For those of you that were in the same situation that I was in, give Apple a call. As an apology for the late shipment, they offered me either iLife '05, iWork, or a $30.00 Apple Store credit. It is definately worth your time to make a quick call to their customer service dept.

All I will say is this:

http://www.macwindows.com

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1806371,00.asp

(grrrrr)

For those of you who don't know where I work... well... guess.

I got my copy last Friday.

While I really like Tiger. It leaves little doubt that it is a .0 release. I've had this G4 for 4 mounths and it never missed a beat under Panther. Now every time I shutdown it either hangs or kernel panics. I guess that is good time for it happen though. Hopefully 10.4.1 is not too far behind.

it did the same with my G5. it had something to do with stuffit. i forget what i did to fix it. if i remember ill post it.

It said that on mine but it took 20 minutes.