Growling with Tiger

I just updated my powerbook to Mac OS/X 10.4. The machine had 10.3 (Panther) on it when I bought it in late 2003, and Panther was a great OS. I got a lot of mileage out of panther. It was fast, sleek, the built-in apps were stable, and It Just Worked.

But now I have tiger. I did a clean install - reformatted my powerbook hard drive, installed all the apps from scratch, and copied over my files manually. Tiger has support for doing an 'archive and install', that supposedly automatically does the same thing, but I wanted to manually copy over what I needed, and have everything else start fresh. One of the problems of being a developer is that our computers collect lots of garbage on them.

Tiger has got a lot of nifty stuff - which you can read about at the apple site. Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal really likes tiger as well.

I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it. It was really slow when I first installed it, which was a common report, but I think that was just the spotlight system indexing the hard drive. Now that that's complete, it seems perkier.

The new mail app is odd. I don't know that I like it.

More news to follow.