[DM-MUG] Need another excuse to upgrade?

[Darcy Baston]

Using it right now. I was first in line (I think) at Haddock's. Great  
group of folks there. I got in really early and they let me enjoy  
using their G5 with the massive widescreen Apple display while I  
waited for Tiger to be unleashed.

I laughed myself sore when I saw the...uhm...watches. :) Apple must  
have felt inspired by toys in cereal boxes to come up with those hehe.

Tiger first impressions: Love it, love it, love it. I've already made  
a cool Automator script that zips and encrypts files for backup.

Spotlight is really amazing. It's shaving off so many clicks and at  
times minutes trying to get to content. It even indexes text in PSD  
docs! I love that so much. I can search for a slogan on some graphic  
design, and have my work pop right up.

Widgets are fun, but I don't find myself using Dashboard much yet. I  
may for the calculator to prevent from having to launch the app all  
the time, but when internet syncing widgets are put on the dashboard,  
sometimes there's so much of a delay before they all refresh when  
jumping to DB view (including the clock, annoying), that it's faster  
to launch the calculator app itself.

One problem since Tiger, and it could be coincidence, is that my  
screen brightness isn't consistent. It will suddenly go down two  
brightness notches, stay there for a while, go back up, sometimes  
flicker back and forth a few times and stay low etc. My iBook wasn't  
doing this on Panther and since putting on Tiger, there it is. Moving  
the screen doesn't make it flicker or change at all, but if I let it  
sit idle...twitch...twitch.

I hope this is software amusement!

I'm a little disappointed my iBook 933MHz doesn't have the graphics  
prowess to take advantage of Core Image. This means I don't get any  
water ripples on the dashboard. *sob*

I totally love the new Keychain Access application. I've always used  
it as my internet password manager and for encrypting little pieces  
of text. It's awesome. Anyway, in Tiger, everything is grouped in  
families/categories which makes getting to specific pieces of  
information much easier.

Disk Utility is better. It has an image validation icon in its  
toolbar for keeping an eye on image integrity.

Safari RSS is just amazing. I love it. I know there's a way to get a  
bookmark folder that shows article counts per feed, and I haven't  
figured out how to do that yet, but when I do, it will be amazing^2.

Migration/upgrade adventure:

 From Panther, I put the Tiger DVD in, and clicked twice on its  
installation icon. It got me to reboot. Upon reboot, I had a kernel  
panic. It didn't like my Linux boot loader. :)  So I zapped PRAM  
thrice, rebooted, held down 'c' and off it went without any further  
complaints.

During installation I STRONGLY urge everyone to use the 'custom'  
option and turn off the ocean of languages and printer drivers you  
don't think you'll use. You can cut the amount of space Tiger takes  
on your hard drive tremendously. The default install puts about 4  
gigs on. By turning off languages I didn't need, and printer drivers  
for printers I don't own (I can always reinstall them later  
separately), I cut my install size down to 2.4 gigs.

I wanted a clean, newly formatted install, so I copied my home folder  
to my iPod beforehand (and game save folders). I installed Tiger and  
started to get the information from the iPod unto the new setup.  
Keychain Access has an import menu, but it refused to let me select  
my backed up keychain. So, I had to manually delete the Tiger one,  
and copied over the one from the iPod. That worked great. I'm  
guessing it worked because I used the same login name and password  
with Tiger as I had in Panther.

I had all my contacts, bookmarks etc. backed up to .Mac, so getting  
that stuff back was a snap. However, the first time I launched  
Safari, the bookmarks weren't in there after the sync. I worried a  
little, quit the app, resynced and then relaunched Safari. They were  
there that time. Phew!

For Apple Mail, I just ran the import command from its file menu, and  
chose the Mail folder in the backed up Library folder on the iPod.  
Everything went in except for the INBOX for one of my POP accounts.  
That one I had to select manually on a second import attempt. It  
didn't seem to get collected during the recursive sweep. It went in  
just fine with a little direction though.

Then, I restored some prefs to shortcut software re-registration,  
some application support folders, some plugins, reinstalled apps that  
needed to be and voila! Done. It only took a couple hours to go from  
a new install to right back where I was with Panther. The migration  
tool doesn't let you use the iPod as a "firewire mounted mac". I  
tried. :)

Other impressions:
FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST. This thing soars. It's like having a new iBook.  
But most improved of all, is the startup time. That progress bar just  
races across now during startup. I have no idea how they did that,  
but I sure appreciate it!

Apple's mail app has become fantastic. It's so much faster switching  
between folders, messages and more. Fewer performance pauses.

Airport signal strength has really improved. Because I'm in an  
apartment and there are 3 other wireless networks on my floor, I've  
had occasional difficulties getting a good signal and had to use the  
'robustness' option. With Tiger, my Airport menu bar thing is fully  
lit up and I don't have to use the robustness thing.

If anyone knows a way to get the other networks ignored so that  
they're off my network list, by name or something, let me know?

Darcy


On Apr 30, 2005, at 6:43 AM, Bailey Ford wrote:

> Hey there Muggers,
>
> Unlike that 'other' computer platform, we Mac users have generally  
> enjoyed a little speed boost with each major revision to the OS.  
> The jump from Panther to Tiger is no different, and the excellent  
> site BareFeats seems to have some of the first empirical data on  
> the subject. At first glance, it looks like Apple did all kinds of  
> graphics optimizations and otherwise sped things up on the order of  
> around 5%. If you are interested, check out the real data at http:// 
> www.barefeats.com/tiger.html.
>
> Has anyone on the list gotten their copy yet?
> -bailey
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dmmug mailing list
> Use this Address to send mail to the list:
> Dmmug@dmmug.org
> Use this page to modify subscription options:
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/dmmug
>