Mac OS X 10.4 Preview

• Article 27 of 53
• iCreate, April 2005
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Why is the Mac so appealing? Well, apart from its impressive design, there’s this thing called the Mac OS. Just as you might use Windows to operate a PC, so the Mac OS lets you use your Mac. It lets you organise your files, open programs, access the Internet, print, scan and just about everything else. It puts the dock at the bottom of the screen, the menubar at the top, an Apple in the corner and pictures and icons for your files, folders and disks on your desktop. It’s easy to use, fun to work with and beautiful to look at. It’s what makes a Mac a Mac.

But in the computer world, what was fashionable and cutting edge two years ago is slow, out of date and inadequate. A computer with built-in CD and DVD burning may seem an obvious necessity now, but less than a decade ago, no one even thought a CD drive in a computer was important. So Macs – and the Mac OS – have to move with the times.

The biggest change to the Mac OS, almost since 1984, was the move from OS 9 to OS X. With its “lickable” buttons and rock-solid stability, OS X revolutionised the Mac OS. But unbelievable as it may seem to many, that was nearly five years ago. Since then, there have been three big updates, the last of which was OS X 10.3 (codenamed Panther), released in October 2003. All of them added new features, refined existing ones, and made the Mac faster, more powerful and even more lickable. Now a new version is due: OS X 10.4, codenamed Tiger.

Tiger has a lot to top. Panther not only brought OS X up to the same level as OS 9, it was a huge leap forward technologically, too. After releasing a new version of OS X almost every 12 months, Apple will have had 18 months to work on Tiger since Panther’s release so the expectations for Tiger are even higher than for Panther. Can Tiger possibly trump Panther?

In preparation for Tiger’s imminent release, we’re going to shine a spotlight on Tiger and highlight the best of the new features, as well as let you know whether Tiger is worth the inevitable upgrade cost.

Tiger isn’t going to be for everyone, unfortunately. Just as Jaguar and Panther cut off support for some older Macs, so Tiger is going to cut off a few more old-timers. Tiger’s official minimum system requirements are a G3 or better, a DVD drive, built-in FireWire, 128MB of RAM and most importantly, at least 2GB of disk space.

Once you’ve installed Tiger, a quick restart and you’ll be using the setup assistant. One big change in the set-up assistant is the Migration assistant. Familiar already to G5 owners, the Migration Assistant will help transfer your files, applications and settings from another Mac or another disk drive or partition. It’s surprisingly easy to use and takes a relatively short time, but if you choose to transfer applications, you’ll probably find quite a few third-party applications don’t survive the transition and will require re-installing. Nevertheless, it’s a welcome addition.

Another new arrival is VoiceOver. This is perhaps the biggest selling point of Tiger for those with visual impairments, since it effectively means they can use OS X again. Imagine trying to point and click on icons and run your Mac without being able to see the screen and you’ll have some understanding of just how vital a tool narrating your Mac’s interface and your actions is for the blind. The last “screen reader” for Macs was discontinued last year so VoiceOver effectively jumps OS X over Windows, which while having a plethora of third-party screen readers, does not have one built in.

VoiceOver appears on the scene right from the set-up assistant. An option to activate it at this stage is available and from then on, every aspect of Mac set-up and control is amenable to VoiceOver. It really is outstanding compared to the competition.

Once installed, Tiger looks little different from Panther. The window and menubar colours seem slightly different, the Apple menu now has a blue background and there’s a magnifying glass for Spotlight (more on that later) in the top right-hand corner, but otherwise there’s not much new to look at initially.

Start playing around with it though and you’ll realise that Apple has again pulled off a miracle in the performance department. Unlike Windows, every generation of which requires a newer faster computer just to provide the same performance as the previous version, OS X has got fasterwith every release. Tiger is no different and even with a few programs running, you’ll feel as though your Mac has a spring in its step. That speed boost is even bigger for G5-based Macs, particularly ones with dual processors, so Tiger will certainly begin to pay for itself right from day one. How Apple does it, no one knows.

The introduction of Core Image and Core Video to Tiger should also speed things up further. These provide hardware acceleration for QuickTime and a range of hardware-accelerated image and video manipulation tools for developers that practically amount to Photoshop in a box. But just as Aqua and Quartz Extreme provided a way for every application to have drop shadows, transparent windows and live resizing without any real overhead or development work, so Core Image and Core Video should open up a new world of effects even to applications that were content to sit there and look rubbish.

Tiger is also beginning to show how mature OS X is now. While Jaguar introduced a completely new printing system and Panther messed around with some of the hardware drivers, Tiger has proved refreshingly immune to the “new operating system, new problems” syndrome that has beset previous releases. None of our printers, scanners or other bits of hardware suddenly stopped working once Tiger was on board. Approach a Tiger upgrade relatively confident that nothing’s going to stop working.

So what’s new with this particular pussy cat? Well, Spotlight is certainly one of the high points of Tiger. Spotlight’s instant search facility is pretty much what it says on the box. Click on the magnifying glass, type in what you’re looking for, and almost everything on your Mac that contains your search terms will pop up, whether it’s in an email message, an Address Book contact, a Word file or a PDF. It’s very fast, unlike all previously advertised instant search solutions (no names mentioned Sherlock. Whoops. We just did.), but there are a few limitations.

First, your Mac has to index all your files, going through each one in turn. Unsurprisingly, this will take a few hours if you have a lot of files. However, you won’t need to do anything to update the index – Spotlight is integrated deep within Tiger, so whenever you make changes to files, the index will change automatically.

The second limitation is that it will only work with files that Tiger understands. So developers that have their own file formats and who want Spotlight to be able to search their files will have to create a Spotlight plug-in. No plug-in, no search.

Automator is a nice new tool for the pro user who doesn’t want to learn AppleScript. Essentially, it lets you automate one program, feed the result into another program and so on until the result you wanted is achieved. So you might want to get iPhoto to open a particular album, rotate all the pictures (well, you might…) then send photos via Mail to everyone in a particular Address Book group. A few clicks, drags and drops in Automator and it’s all done.

To a large extent, Automator relies on pre-packaged steps, so you have to hope that it has a step that matches what you want to do. But for anyone that regularly does a series of tasks and wants to take some of the drudgery out of it, Automator will be a blessing.

Dashboard is the most visually exciting new feature in Tiger. It activates when you click on its icon in the dock or press F12, revealing a whole host of widgets such as currency converters, language translators, flight information and almost everything else that was once the domain of Sherlock. You can add widgets by activating a second dock, which appears underneath the real dock, and dragging them out onto the desktop.

While these are the main things that you can show off to other users, there are a lot of little things in Tiger that add up to quite a lot. The Finder now has whole new types of folder, including Smart Folders and Burn folders. Smart folders, which appear like iTunes smart folders, don’t contain files: they contain search results. So if you want to have a folder that contains all Word documents you’ve created in the last 30 days, you can create a smart folder which will show them all; it will automatically update its content as time moves on and you create new documents. Smart folders won’t be confined to just the Finder: Mail, Address Book, Font Book and other Apple apps will get similar functions.

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.

Virtually all the really exciting things are under the surface and are for developers to incorporate into their applications. .Mac syncing will be fantastic once everyone updates their applications to take advantage of it. VoiceOver will require only minimal changes to most applications to make them – and the whole Mac - accessible to the blind once again. Automator will be capable of incredible things, once developers start bundling up some of their AppleScripts into easy to use packages. Core Image and Core Video will revolutionise a whole range of apps, including games, once developers start using them. Dashboard will be a must-have once third-party develop widgets for it. And Spotlight will be invaluable once plug-ins for proprietary file types are available.

So while Tiger may not grab you with the same intensity as Jaguar or Panther did when they first came out, it will be a first-rate platform for others to build on. Soon, any applications worth having will be Tiger-only and the real reason to upgrade will become clear. We would heartily recommend buying Tiger, maybe not immediately, but soon enough after release that any incompatible software will have been updated: the speed improvements and additional features should be justification enough. Jaguar users should certainly be the first in line, since they will get significant speed improvements with Tiger. But Panther users should also be in the queue.

Within six months of Tiger’s release, we’re pretty confident that it will have an overwhelming set of features from third-party software developers that will make Panther seem antiquated in comparison. And iCreate will be giving you the top tips that will help you get the most out of Tiger and the software designed to work with it.

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