Computerworld - When Mac OS X 10.4, better known as Tiger, was released three weeks back, I was eager to try it. I had heard about several of the new features and thought they would be worth the upgrade. So last weekend, I backed up my laptop and installed the Tiger desktop software. While the installation itself took about the same time as previous OS X versions, the boot-up time was significantly faster.
For the first two days, I cautiously used the computer in the same manner I always do, making sure that all of my applications worked properly, and that I was able to perform all the functions I had grown to expect from my trusty 15-in. PowerBook.
The system was stable, fast and offered no surprises from a usability standpoint. In fact, I could have continued to work without taking advantage of Tiger's new features, and my impression would have been, "fast and stable upgrade ... great." Then I began to experiment with some of the new services and features offered in Tiger, and I was completely blown away. The value this upgrade delivers is truly amazing!
The most significant change in the operating system, and the one most users are likely to take advantage of, is Spotlight. Apple's new systemwide search function -- accessible from the upper-right corner of the menu bar or by a keyboard combo -- essentially provides file-level indexing of titles, content and metadata for all of your files, even PDFs and pictures (see story).
Unlike, say, the Google desktop, which offers some content indexing, Spotlight is always up to date because it's integrated at the file-system level. In addition, Spotlight captures metadata that no other indexing engine even attempts. So if you want to search your pictures for bit-depth, your music by tempo or your documents by author, Spotlight allows you to do so. Even better, Tiger's new "smart-folder" feature lets you save searches as permanent "views" that can be accessed any time. In other words, you can create a folder that shows Word documents created today, and it will always be up to date -- showing only that date's Word documents.
Spotlight releases the computer user from having to worry about folder structure and hierarchy, which is a huge change over the way we've been navigating files and folders in the past. I now have multiple smart folders that group my documents differently and let me view them in ways that a standard hierarchy could never do. It's difficult to explain how much this
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