Detailed Review of Mac OS X Tiger's New Features

sammykrupa writes "I have just posted my detailed review of Mac OS X Tiger's new features. The review covers Dashboard, Spotlight, Grapher (Mac OS X's new graphing calculator), QuickTime Player 7, Automator, Safari RSS (2), that cool RSS visualizer, and all that eye candy (iCandy)."

Re:Not detailed

[Reaperducer]

5. My Quicktime Pro is now just regular Quicktime 7 since I upgraded. I figured I'd get to keep the Pro without having to spend an extra $30.

Quartz Composer?

[torpor]

Anyone figured out anything interesting to do with Quartz Composer yet? This seems, to me, to be one of the more interesting new bundled-apps in the OSX package .. really looking forward to seeing what can be done with this app...

For a more meaningful review, see AnandTech

[Zhe Mappel]

Well, we've heard the oohs and aahs of the faithful, and sweet to the ear they are. How about some critical reviewing, now?

Anand, the PC guru who has been extremely positive toward Apple products since becoming a dual-user, beta-tested Tiger throughout its development.

This week his lengthy review praises features, but finds the release version to be buggy and rushed. Performance is also a mixed bag. http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2404&p=1 [anandtech.com]

Two quotes:

"But I have to find it difficult recommending a product that's clearly unfinished, and clearly not without bugs. None of the bugs that I encountered were show stoppers, but I'm not one to support pre-release products that are being shipped as final. So if you're expecting a perfect user experience with Tiger, you'll be close but not quite there. I'm hoping the 10.4.1 update fixes all of my issues, but for now don't expect a flawless $129 experience. "

...

"Looking at today, it's an important day for Apple, a day to celebrate a very impressive OS launch - but I get the feeling that no one at Apple is celebrating quite yet, it seems like there's still quite a bit of work left."

Mac True Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

I get the impression as others do this is just a fanboy page about Tiger. That said, although the Ars page was good and well written it lost the plot when guy started being an apologist for Apple's shocking, and in my view shameful robbery of Konfabulator.

It doesn't matter which way you look at it; whatever excuses you may hear about Desk Accessories and what not; the fact that in the eyes of the Law Konfabulator devs have no real recourse, really you have to ask if it had been the other way round what would Apple's reaction be ? And is what Apple did right?

Anyway, back to the topic, I don't so much go on what tech articles or fanboy articles say but what actual users say. It's interesting that if you actually read many of the Mac specific forums when people got their copies of Tiger early they were distinctly underwhelmed by the experience.

And why shouldn't they be ? Tiger has been the most overhyped, overcooked OS in the history of computing. Sure it's got some nice stuff, some old, some 'borrowed', some new but overall it's just not that exciting.

Additionally, for every positive thing there is probably a negative and there is no doubt that Tiger exposes the underlying weaknesses of Apple in recent years as well as it's strengths.

Notably Apple's once proud reputation for Human User Interface design has got badly badly lost in a sea of half baked chrome and inconsistent window widgets which is a shame.