9 Comments on “Upgrading”

1. Spiffy. I’d have been a day ahead of you, if my Mac Mini hadn’t done a spontaneous hard drive suicide last week. (Got Tiger, just nothing to install it on.)

   The fact that it runs faster on the same hardware is one of the things that drove me to upgrade so soon. The other reason was this one widget.

2. My favorite part, oddly enough, is the Dictionary.

3. Agreed, Apple-Ctrl-D is amusing (put the pointer over a word first). As a programmer NSTextView’s ability to handle tables almost made me cry. (OK, not really, but it did make me happy)

4. Especially cool about the dictionary is that you get a context menu (right click or control-click) item for looking up the selected word.

   You can have that bring up the application, or you can have the definition and synonyms displayed in a cool little floating panel under the word.

   To turn on the floating panel thing, you need to open Dictionary and go to the Preferences.

   A neat thing about the panel is that it works even without the Dictionary program working.

   One other thing I like about the dictionary: some entries have line drawing diagrams. If you click on one, an enlarged version is shown in a new window.

5. Have fun with Tiger. Make sure to repair disk permissions before and after the install – it’ll make everything run smoother.

   For me, the killer app is spotlight. Nearly instantaneous searching of my entire hard drive. Made studying for finals this semester much easier (I know we talked about that in class. When was that?? Who cares. Just look it up in Spotlight.)

   Good luck with the install.

   K

6. And for those of you not using Tiger, this here Dictionary we’re referring to, it’s on the hard drive. No Internet access required. Which, aside from being useful for the 5% of the day when my laptop is offline, also means you can scrub across a paragraph of text with your mouse and get definitions back in nearly real-time.

   But my big thing is Spotlight. I was pulling up old messages (with serial numbers in them) while I was still importing my old mail, and getting results faster than I could figure out what I was supposed to be clicking on. Nifty.

   If anyone here is looking for the “how do I add my own Spotlight keywords to email messages” button, it’s not there. But I’ve got some software on my website that does that, so hie thee hence.

7. Actually, I’m finding Spotlight and Dashboard, the two most-hyped new features of Tiger, to be distinctly unready for prime time. In particular, Spotlight needs a lot of work.

   What I’m liking about Tiger are the general performance improvements and the many, many fixes to old annoyances.

8. Tiger has helped improve one of the things that has bugged me since buying my shiny PowerBook last year: my weak wireless signal. The Airport equipment is all in my husband’s home office, just down the hall from mine, but the metal casing doesn’t allow the signal to be picked up as well as my old Pismo could.

   I haven’t found a need for Spotlight yet, but I like Dashboard and think it will, as more apps are developed, be a fabulous thing.

9. PNH:
   Actually, I’m finding Spotlight and Dashboard, the two most-hyped new features of Tiger, to be distinctly unready for prime time. In particular, Spotlight needs a lot of work.

   Curiosity: what are you finding wrong with it?

   Still haven’t got the Mini back yet, but I read the insanely long review over at Ars, and the only thing that sounds very wrong about Spotlight is the lack of complex Boolean queries. And that’s something you know third-party developers will be racing to solve by five minutes ago; the functionality’s there, Apple just decided not to build an interface to it.