[ManOfSteal]

I don't get overwhelmed by an operating system unfortunately. Darn!

[chris v]

I'm just whelmed.

Actually, I like it fine. I keep finding little things, and it's stable and the addititons ae for the most part very useful.

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by ManOfSteal

I don't get overwhelmed by an operating system unfortunately. Darn!

tr.v. o·ver·whelmed, o·ver·whelm·ing, o·ver·whelms

1. To surge over and submerge; engulf: waves overwhelming the rocky shoreline.
2.
1. To defeat completely and decisively: Our team overwhelmed the visitors by 40 points.
2. To affect deeply in mind or emotion: Despair overwhelmed me.
3. To present with an excessive amount: They overwhelmed us with expensive gifts.
4. To turn over; upset: The small craft was overwhelmed by the enormous waves.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

I've never felt "overwhelmed" about an operating system either
Nor have I found computers "sexy" or have any combination thereof "blow my mind away".

I also score very low on nerd-tests and high with girls

cheers

W-Y

[wataru]

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

.. did you mean to write something more or did your mind just fall blank there?

cheers

W-Y

I quoted your pointless tagline at the end of my post. I don't think it's too hard to figure out.

salut

w

[Maflynn]

Originally Posted by Apple Pro Underwear

i bought a dual g5 and tiger came with it... works great but i'm not overwhelmed. more happy with my new hardware though.

That's really the bottom line, does the OS and hardware live up to your needs and expectations.

Depending on one's apple experience (recent convert vs. long time user) will also color one's opinion. I've been using Macs since the SE days and I think OSX is a huge improvement to OS9.

The difference between 10.3 and 10.4 is very small for consumer, so much so that I think its tough to justify the price tag. While I agree there's a lot of changes under the hood that may pay dividends in the future I'm not really concerned or jazzed up about the new Kernel APIs.

Tiger seems to be stable and the speed is fine, so overall I'm pleased that its not a step backward. I'm not liking that Safari prompts me about every .sit or dmg file download warning me that it may contain a program but blindly install widgets - What's up with that One huge advantage that Apple had over M$ was active-x (lack there of). That has been a huge and ongoing headache for M$ yet it seems Apple in a small part has fallen into the same problem.

Finally, I did put my money where my mouth is and I purchased the family pack of Tiger and to be honest have been pleased but there were a lot of things Apple could have done to make Tiger a little more cost justifable for the consumer, i.e., redone the UI to be consistent.

Peace
Mike

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by wataru

I quoted your pointless tagline at the end of my post. I don't think it's too hard to figure out.

salut

w

There was nothing there when I quoted you.

Regardless, I can't really answer your question unless you formulate it more specifically. I'm just not sure what you mean.

cheers

W-Y

[wataru]

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

There was nothing there when I quoted you.

Regardless, I can't really answer your question unless you formulate it more specifically. I'm just not sure what you mean.

cheers

W-Y

It wasn't a question; it was merely an observation.

salut

w

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by wataru

It wasn't a question; it was merely an observation.

salut

w

Perhaps you shouldn't concern yourself this much about me and partake in the discussion at hand instead?

cheers

W-Y

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

Perhaps you shouldn't concern yourself this much about me and partake in the discussion at hand instead?

cheers

W-Y

Children

[powertrippin]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

You are an Apple apologist.

The ripple effect is the result of extensive user testing by Apple. It is important that the user understands that the Dashboard floats above the regular application layer. The ripple – making the Dashboard widgets look like being dropped into water – makes it intuitively obvious to the user that these widgets are floating.

Exactly. I heard all this bitching and moanign both directions, and I hate to break it to you, but you're both fanboys. I saw it, said 'huh... that's it?" and then went on with my life.

[Randman]

I thought the ripple was to help mask the delay a widget takes in loading.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Randman

I thought the ripple was to help mask the delay a widget takes in loading.

[CaptainHaddock]

I also score very low on nerd-tests and high with girls

Oh come on, your screen name is an obscure Alien reference and you score low on nerd-tests?

[clarkgoble]

I have to agree that for the average consumer the shift from 10.3 - 10.4 is underwhelming. Even 10.3.9 gave the rather significant Safari speed increases. (Apple could have made those 10.4 only)

I tend to think that 10.2 was the first usable version of OSX. The 10.2 - 10.3 change had a lot of significant and useful UI features.

1. Fast User Switching -- if you shared your Mac with say your wife, this was huge and a big catchup with XP

2. Expose -- so nice with a four button mouse that it is the #1 thing I miss under XP

3. Improved Finder -- probably the biggest improvement over 10.2

There were other things, but those were the biggest. (Plus the refining of the UI so it wasn't so "in your face")

With 10.4 we have

1. Dashboard -- useful for the weather, but not that useful. Kind of a memory hog too.

2. Spotlight -- not yet fast enough to be the Google on the desktop many were hoping for. In many ways better than equivalent PC offerings. In other ways worse. It definitely needs some maturing. Good, but not akin to the big improvements in 10.3.

3. Umm.... Automator? Useful, but probably not used by most people. (I've not had a need for it yet) RSS in Safari? Nice, but not that nice.

Where the big advantages for 10.4 will come to the user are in applications. I'll predict that many applications will be 10.4 only in the future. Thus if you want improved applications you have to buy Tiger. I also predict that around 10.4.4 we'll have a new Finder that makes a lot more use of metadata.

[mitchell_pgh]

It's a little funny because in Longhorn... people won't see all that many end user enhancements. 95% is under the hood.

[leperkuhn]

new keychain man, don't forget the new pimp ass keychain. bling bling

[barrysharp]

I certainly like Tiger and 10.4.1 did resolve my issues with Widgets consuming much CPU and knocking my AirPort base station offline whenever I configured 6-day weather forecast for London, UK. Things are much better now under 10.4.1.

While there are numerous user-level goodies in Tiger I believe the real benefits goto to the Mac developers. They now can tightly couple their Apps to Tiger and its APIs much more so than under Panther. In the long term we the Users will also benefit.

Any new system delivers on promises - some kept and some to be kept. Of course there's always a slew of new bugs as Apple + Seed developers simply cannot catch all of the software bugs. The ultimate QA is for us early adopters primarily. Find the bugs and report them to Apple to benefit the Mac community, I say.

[umijin]

Originally Posted by osxisfun

all i know is that i showed my latest work for my client last tues and in passing used:

expose
spotlight to find old email
slideshow from finder (wow)
open file from spotlight

on my powerbook.

they drooled....

Well, in 10.3we have expose, and a find file that you can open files from, and you can do a search for an old email within a decent email app, so I'm underwhelmed. Slideshow from finder? Yawn. I do slideshows from apps that I make presentations in. Then again, I don't use iWork or waste time with the Apple Mail app.

I guess people think it's cool (or necessary) to do everything from the finder, instead of opening the app or hitting Apple-Tab to switch to that app.

Oh well, we stone-age Panther users will have to suffer.

[clarkgoble]

Didn't the old email client do pretty speedy finds? I don't see why everyone is making a big deal of Spotlight for email. At best you now can search it outside of your email client. But if anything, it seems like ranking is slightly askew in Mail 2.0.

[resuna]

Originally Posted by mAxximo

Can't disagree more.
I think the platform switch from the Mac (System 9) to OS X was the most underwhelming experience I have had in my whole life.

Going from 9.1 to 10.1 (let alone 10.2, which totally blew 10.1 away) turned the Mac around for me. Even software running under Classic was more reliable and responsive than it had been under OS 9.

There's a lot more overhead under OS X. And I'll happily grant that some of that overhead is just plain unnecessary, but even under 10.1 the ability to confidently switch from a busy application to another more than made up for it. Under OS 9, I simply didn't multitask, at all. Even sharing files was risky, but switching between apps on a regular basis was just begging for a crash. And that limited me in ways that someone who'd only ever used a Mac could probably never appreciate, but to me a GUI where I'm effectively locked into one application is barely better than using MS-DOS. Cooperative multitasking is a horrible tradeoff... it gives you slightly less intra-application overhead, at the cost of simply abusing the user. Putting a real operating system under that creaky old kludge made ALL the difference.

[alex627]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock

Oh come on, your screen name is an obscure Alien reference and you score low on nerd-tests?

Well done.

[Kazrog]

I think Tiger is a very worthy upgrade. I haven't found any bugs. I wish people would be more specific...

[alex627]

Originally Posted by clarkgoble

2. Expose -- so nice with a four button mouse that it is the #1 thing I miss under XP

Before 2 of my friends switched to Macs by buying Minis when they would come over and use my computer they would continuously hit the buttons on the mouse that activated Expose. I think it is one of the most simple and usable things to ever be done in a GUI.

I myself could not go back to using a one button mouse or a pre-Panther OS.

I'm sure that after using Spotlight and Automator for a while I will not be able to go back to Panther.

What most people do not realize is how much they miss something when it is gone. No matter what that thing might be. Our culture is so incredibly spoiled that we are simply unable to appreciate much of anything anymore.

So this entire thread is basically a childish waste of time. Go back to being productive members of society already.

Why did I read this thread? I haven't upgraded yet.

[mAxximo]

Originally Posted by resuna

Under OS 9, I simply didn't multitask, at all. Even sharing files was risky, but switching between apps on a regular basis was just begging for a crash. And that limited me in ways that someone who'd only ever used a Mac could probably never appreciate, but to me a GUI where I'm effectively locked into one application is barely better than using MS-DOS.

I did multitask heavily in OS 9. I used to beat the crap out of my Mac and it would deliver time and again, week after week. I could squeeze so much performance and reliability out of that single 1GB of RAM that you wouldn't believe. Now I need at least 2GB RAM in OS X to sort of have a usable setup, with the system still lagging behind me a lot of times. I can't wait to install Tiger at work. Even during massive After Effects renders or during big file transfers OS 9 would still let me do a bunch of other things. It sucked at times, obviously, but so did OS X pre-Panther.

I wonder why you'd get locked into one application in System 9.
I usually hear that one from the typical X-men trying to re-write history to try and put the new system under a better light.
I predict that the day that OS X will live up to its hype for everybody, the true Mac stories will begin to be told.

[ASIMO]

Originally Posted by wataru

I quoted your pointless tagline at the end of my post. I don't think it's too hard to figure out.

salut

w

W, it is pointless. Let go. And go have yourself a good weekend.

[JEB]

slideshow from finder (wow)

--> Cool! didn't know you could do that!!

(select a group of photos in your Finder window / under the "gear" menu, select "Slideshow")

[JEB]

Originally Posted by clarkgoble

Didn't the old email client do pretty speedy finds? I don't see why everyone is making a big deal of Spotlight for email. At best you now can search it outside of your email client. But if anything, it seems like ranking is slightly askew in Mail 2.0.

"It Seems" is an okay assessment; however, I just did a review that I didn't expect about Mail 2's capabilities. The Search feature is a great change (takes advantage of Spotlight, too) . . .

I know, it all depends on the user's needs. Some people don't need to upgrade; that's fine. But if you do, it's well worth it, too.

[pololoq]

I think Apple should have left Dashboard with it's Wigit stuff to third party companies or programmers. It brings nothing interesting for me. Spotlight is far to slow if you have large harddisks stuffed with a lot of information (even on my G5 2.5). Panther search worked fine for me...

[jarod]

People that are not overwhelmed are usually those that aren't too technical or geeky to understand the huge achievement has done with Tiger. Most people expect fireworks on their desktops or visual special effects, and that's what they associate with OOOH and AAAHS. Get real people.

Then again, there are those that say they aren't overwhelmed, but what they're really saying, is that they're too cheap to upgrade/

For those that really aren't overwhelmed, then you deserve to be on Windoze. You'll sure get a lot of overwhelming there.

[schuster]

Though I didn't think I'd use it, I've loved Dashboard. Spotlight has been cool too. For all the critisism it's taken, I haven't had a problem with the new mail.app. To me, Tiger is the first version that really exploits what Mac OS X is capable of. Probably big thing for me though is the speed of 10.4.1. It finally, at least for me, elimates all the swapping problems that plagued previous versions. Yes, they shouldn't have been there in the first place but the fact is they're finally gone. That means that I can truly enjoy working with the OS now and with the problem out of my head, it's made 10.4.1 a dream to use and that has overwhelmed me. Oh yeah, and I've enjoyed using Automator as well.

[jasong]

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

I've never felt "overwhelmed" about an operating system either
Nor have I found computers "sexy" or have any combination thereof "blow my mind away".

To add, neither do I find them "lickable"

[sixthring]

Why would any one want to be overwhelmed with their mac OS? The word has a negative connotation as can be seen by the definition:

overwhelm |ˌōvərˈ(h)welm| verb [ trans. ] bury or drown beneath a huge mass : the water flowed through to overwhelm the whole dam and the village beneath. • defeat completely : his teams overwhelmed their opponents. • (often be overwhelmed) give too much of a thing to (someone); inundate : they were overwhelmed by farewell messages. • (usu. be overwhelmed) have a strong emotional effect on : I was overwhelmed with guilt. • be too strong for; overpower : the wine doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the trout.

Definition provided by Dictionary app in 10.4. I have been overwhelmed by the flaws in Windows versions. Mostly I have been impressed with the improvements in OS X.

[crooner]

I've yet to install Tiger. I have it, sitting there, calling to the "Upgrade Feverish" portion of my mind... seductively reminding me that I'm not currently on the cutting edge.
Still, I'm holding back for many of the reasons stated above. Chief among them is that 10.3.9 is a great, stable OS.

Once I have three solid, reliable backups (yes, I am neurotic about backing up - I once had to resort to DiscSavers and believe me when i tell ya, they don't come cheap - I think I'll dive in and see how the water is.

I feel an urge to add my 2¢ regarding labels. Under Mac OS 9 (and pre Mac OS X systems) I found labels extremely useful. Upon any installation of a new System Folder (clean installation) I had a little AppleScript that would place the first label on every item in the new System Folder. This made troubleshooting very easy. Anytime a problem crept up, I could see with the naked eye what files were Apple installed and what were third party. This little script became standard use at the Mac repair shop I used to work at and I miss this ability in OS X. I suppose I could do something similar now that labels are back (in some form), but there are just SO many more System related files in SO many different places that I don't feel the visual clue would help enough to make things less complex in terms of distinguishing what is from a virgin install and what isn't. If I'm wrong on this and someone can offer some help on re-writing this lil' diddy for Tiger, please chime in and I'll gladly send you my old Mac OS 9 script. (I think I feel a new thread coming on...)

Oh... one other thing (and i mean this seriously - no sarcasm).l. One thing I like about this thread is that it's one of the few I've read lately that folks allowed for disagreement without resorting to becoming whiny toddlers. There are far too many threads that, based on one disagreement, turn into pissing contests that hijack the whole thing. Kudos to you all for allowing friendly discord to better educate us all on Tiger's strengths and weaknesses.

[slider]

I am not sure if one can be overly blown away with Tiger if all one does is check email, write work doc, and surf the web. I have had some issues with Tiger, but have been resolved with the latest update. Since then I have installed it on two other computers, one PowerMac QS upgraded to a dual 1.25 from a single 867 and ati 8500, no issues at all. And an eMac, prior model to the current one, no issues. I am also enjoying many of the little things, i.e. RSS, it changes the way I browse and take in news. I had been waiting for automator, so I am happy about that. I also manage a mixed network which seems to appear more quickly on my PB. I think my only complaint is that I have far less battery life than before. Prior to tiger I could tweak out close to 4 hours (BT off, display lowest, etc) Now I can only get two hours out of her.

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock

Oh come on, your screen name is an obscure Alien reference and you score low on nerd-tests?

LOL

Good point. I blame the nerd-tests for not including obscure Alien trivia

[analogika]

Originally Posted by pololoq

I think Apple should have left Dashboard with it's Wigit stuff to third party companies or programmers. It brings nothing interesting for me.

The whole point is that they DID leave it to third-party companies and programmers!

The stuff that they included is just demo material. It took me about fifteen seconds to realize that Dashboard would be absolutely indispensible once the appropriate widgets were written.

German phone book lookup, IMDB lookup, Amazon.DE, eBay.DE, and Apple Support search widgets are a couple that I use ALL the time. Of these, the latest came out TEN DAYS after the release of Tiger.

Apple merely created a very, very effective platform for just about anybody to write tools that they themselves (and thus, probably others, as well) NEED.

They provided a couple of examples (some of them actually quite useful) to show what could be done, but then, they left Dashboard to third-party companies and programmers...

Spotlight is far to slow if you have large harddisks stuffed with a lot of information (even on my G5 2.5). Panther search worked fine for me...

Panther did not search content, except in very limited local exceptions, such as within iTunes or Mail, or iCal, or...well, that's about it, isn't it.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by umijin

Well, in 10.3we have expose, and a find file that you can open files from, and you can do a search for an old email within a decent email app, so I'm underwhelmed. Slideshow from finder? Yawn. I do slideshows from apps that I make presentations in. Then again, I don't use iWork or waste time with the Apple Mail app.

I guess people think it's cool (or necessary) to do everything from the finder, instead of opening the app or hitting Apple-Tab to switch to that app.

You seem to have missed that this works from within Spotlight, and within Mail - you know the app you don't wish to waste time with.

I prefer to save time by hitting the "slideshow" button when somebody sends me pictures via e-mail to get a good look at the material, and directly import the ones I want to keep into iPhoto via the iPhoto button at the bottom of the screen during the slideshow.

Of course, I turn right around and waste the saved time explaining that to somebody who has no idea what he's proud of missing.

[I was David B.]

I won't upgrade to 10.4, at least not now.

I have used OS X since public beta and I have payed for every upgrade. Its high time to become pragmatic.
For me java performance is most important. So I borrowed ( ) a version of OS 10.4 and made some evaluations (read my results here ). Disappointing is the best word to describe the results.

So I won't upgrade. But - its only because 10.3 is such a great OS. With all my shareware apps (Launchbar! etc.) I have a system that perfectly fullfills my needs. A little more performance would always be nice, but - looking at 10.3 performance - 10.4 is not worth 129$.

One important point in my decision is that I don't like plagiarism. Apple, if you copy Konfabulator, please give credit to the people who had the idea. Otherwise you end up with an OS that has no developers except apples coworkers. That will be very bad for your customers and thus also for you.

[osxisfun]

>One important point in my decision is that I don't like plagiarism. Apple, if you copy Konfabulator, please give credit to the people who had the idea.

Konfab people copied apple's desk accessories.

google daringfireball and konfab for a the best post regarding this myth.

[ibugv4]

I just reinstalled Jaguar on my iMac. It seems to like Jaguar more, and I do not miss the features of Panther ... but my home needs have not changed since 2002: organize/upload photos, chat online.

[todddixon]

After I did a clean install with preserve settings with 10.4 (versus a failed 10.3.0-10.4 upgrade) I was hooked. Not for the widgets (boring after a while - maybe I'll write one just for fun). Not for spotlight (very impressive but I know where my stuff is for the most part anyway). Not for RSS, Automater. The thing that hooked me was a phenomenal speed improvement. My machine went from a 90-120 second start time to approx 25-30 secs to the desktop. I am on a 733MHz G4 and that just won me there and then. Other programs seem to fly when before they ran. I can now run twenty programs at once now instead of 10

Only problem was my MOHAA Breakthrough seems a little less robust (but it was never 100% anyway.)

If you haven't done a clean install from .2 or .3 do so - even if you successfully upgraded it - do a clean install anyway.

[resuna]

Originally Posted by mAxximo

I did multitask heavily in OS 9. I used to beat the crap out of my Mac and it would deliver time and again, week after week. I could squeeze so much performance and reliability out of that single 1GB of RAM that you wouldn't believe.

Oh, so that's the answer. A gigabyte of RAM. It would never have occurred to me to stick a gigabyte of RAM in a desktop computer just to make it reliable. But that's because I was used to running 40 users on Xterms on a system that had less RAM than that.

I wonder why you'd get locked into one application in System 9.

Probably because I sized my system based on what UNIX and Windows systems required. I mean, I thought OS X was pushing the limites just because it required 256M to get acceptable performance with a browser and a couple of minor apps when FreeBSD and Windows 2000 were happy with 64M in that role. But while OS X was happy with 360M and a G3/400, I'd need a GB to satisfy OS 9.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by resuna

Oh, so that's the answer. A gigabyte of RAM. It would never have occurred to me to stick a gigabyte of RAM in a desktop computer just to make it reliable.

I was thinking the same thing.

Well it makes sense that the only solution to what can only be called disastrous memory management is to throw huge amounts of money (five years ago, 1 gig of memory was *expensive*) at it to make sure that there is nothing to manage.

Of course, that still won't stop the pinnacle of user interaction from allowing Internet Exploder to eat into another application's memory stack, causing a complete freeze and loss off all unsaved work in all applications.

But at least that made for a decent coffee break every once in a while - indispensible, as we all know, to *real* pros.

[eddiecatflap]

i've had two crashes with tiger , both spotlight related

before that , only 10.1 was unstable , jaguar and in particular panther were utterly awesome in every way

i'm a wee bit disappointed in tiger , to be perfectly honest

imo panther was the single biggest os-x leap and the best , i'm thinking of going back to it until i get faster hardware

[Apple Pro Underwear]

i actually discovered the power of Dashboard today

i downloaded 2 or 3 that are real difference makers for me and I my estimation of Tiger has been upgraded!!!

[mAxximo]

Originally Posted by resuna

Oh, so that's the answer. A gigabyte of RAM. It would never have occurred to me to stick a gigabyte of RAM in a desktop computer just to make it reliable. But that's because I was used to running 40 users on Xterms on a system that had less RAM than that.

Probably because I sized my system based on what UNIX and Windows systems required. I mean, I thought OS X was pushing the limites just because it required 256M to get acceptable performance with a browser and a couple of minor apps when FreeBSD and Windows 2000 were happy with 64M in that role. But while OS X was happy with 360M and a G3/400, I'd need a GB to satisfy OS 9.

So you were happy doing your job with a G3/400 with 360Mb RAM in OS X? I guess you weren't asking too much from it...

The fact is, doing the same type of work I do requires AT LEAST 2GB RAM in OS X to get kind of the same responsiveness and reliability OS 9 had on just 1GB on a much slower machine. I do motion graphics design and special effects for film and TV so I can tell you what happens when you really try and push your system to the limit. OS X's overhyped memory management couldn't do sh!t for me with just 1GB of RAM, I would bring the system to its knees every afternoon, forcing a restart to make things sort of responsive again. Talk about coffee breaks sponsored by the spinning beachball of death. 2GB seem to have solved that to an extent and as a result I'm restarting my dual 2.0Gb G5 box every two days or so instead.

[mAxximo]

Originally Posted by analogika

Well it makes sense that the only solution to what can only be called disastrous memory management is to throw huge amounts of money (five years ago, 1 gig of memory was *expensive*) at it to make sure that there is nothing to manage.

The same applies to OS X. Read the post above.

Of course, that still won't stop the pinnacle of user interaction from allowing Internet Exploder to eat into another application's memory stack, causing a complete freeze and loss off all unsaved work in all applications.

I guess I had a really well configured Mac since I hardly ever crashed using Explorer. The real and only danger for me came when using the biggest piece of crap ever, Real Player.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by resuna

Oh, so that's the answer. A gigabyte of RAM. It would never have occurred to me to stick a gigabyte of RAM in a desktop computer just to make it reliable. But that's because I was used to running 40 users on Xterms on a system that had less RAM than that.

Probably because I sized my system based on what UNIX and Windows systems required. I mean, I thought OS X was pushing the limites just because it required 256M to get acceptable performance with a browser and a couple of minor apps when FreeBSD and Windows 2000 were happy with 64M in that role. But while OS X was happy with 360M and a G3/400, I'd need a GB to satisfy OS 9.

Win2k is nooooot fun with 64 MB. 192 MB is alright for your daily needs (e-mail, browsing, that sort of thing). 512 MB is fine with OS X. Unless you do video editing or whatever

[chrisutley]

System 7 was a great upgrade!

[analogika]

Originally Posted by mAxximo

The same applies to OS X. Read the post above.

I'm not going to continue the argument, but I do want to point out that 1GB of RAM is available these days for less than $150, while it was ten times that when OS 9 was still of interest.