Mac OS X 10.4 Preview
- Article 27 of 53
- iCreate, April 2005
A major new version of the Mac OS will arrive any time now. Rob Buckley brings you the inside story on Apple's exciting new OS and finds out if Tiger will burn as brightly as its predecessor, Panther.
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Burnable folders are a similar innovation that allows you to create CDs without having to duplicate your files or locate them every time you want to burn the same CD. Create a burnable folder, drag your files onto the folder and then when you open the folder in the Finder, a burn option will appear with the files to create a CD of the folder’s contents.
.Mac syncing is going to be big in Tiger. No longer restricted just to bookmarks, Address Book contacts and the like, .Mac syncing will be available to any developer that feels like incorporating into their programs. A number of Apple’s own programs, including Mail, have had .Mac syncing added to them.
Parental Controls are a new feature designed to give parents peace of mind. As well as allowing them to restrict what programs their children can use, they can also restrict which web sites Safari can visit.
Just in case everyone was getting used to their applications, Apple has also done some cosmetic surgery to some minor apps. Keychain Access has been completely renovated with a brushed metal look; Printer Setup Utility now has most printers in a single panel; most of the system preferences panes show signs of Apple tinkering.
The big guns haven’t been left untouched either. iChat is now up to version three, and for the first time it supports an instant messaging system other than AOL Instant Messenger. Unfortunately, the new system is Jabber rather than something useful like MSN Messenger, which is a shame. iChat also lets you set up more than one account, but you can’t use them both at the same time.
QuickTime is now whacked up to version 7, which normally would suggest lots of new features. However, there are actually fewer features for most people since QuickTime Pro 6 licences won’t work: you’ll have to buy a new licence to access really quite ordinary features such as having two movie windows open at the same time, which is an odd move by Apple. Just to really rub it in, QuickTime Player shows all the menu options available to Pro users but greyed out and with “Pro” written next to them. Here’s what you could have won…
Mail has a completely new look. It now has a creamy, brushed metal look. The old mailbox drawer has gone, replaced with a simple left-hand column of mailboxes, making the whole layout the same as most other mail applications – a change for the better, we think. .Mac syncing will now sync mail accounts, rules and even smart mailboxes (a new feature that similar to smart folders in the Finder). And one particularly nifty idea we think all mail clients should have too is the ability to resize image attachments on the fly within Mail, without using an outside program. Goodbye large attachment problems.
Safari is perhaps the most enhanced of all the standard Apple applications. As well as parental controls, it can now browse RSS news feeds and can roam around the web “privately” – refusing to accept cookies, record a history or leave any trace on your Mac or on web sites of what you might have been up to. An Internet archive facility similar to Internet Explorer’s lets you store web pages complete with images, movies and anything else on the page, so you’ll always have a record of how the site looked when you visited it.
Now, despite these extras, you might be forgiven for thinking that Tiger isn’t really that exciting. And to a certain extent you’d be right: the big features really aren’t that big and you can certainly live without most of them. In conjunction with all the little extras (Steve Jobs reckons there’s 200 new features dotted around Tiger, but some of them are really well hidden), they do add up to something worthwhile however.
But the key to understanding Tiger is to note that for once, Apple is relying on developers: it’s been doing its level best to get everyone developing for Tiger, to a degree almost never seen before at a company that once had almost terminal “Not Invented Here” disease.
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