OS X Tiger

I have used the new incarnation of Apple's Macintosh operating system for about a week. A few initial impressions:

The Finder, the Dock, and other features of OS X that I have learned to rely on are still there. You don't have to learn a new way of doing things if you do not want to. The new "Dashboard" and its "Widgets" are cute and handy. Widgets are a flavor of desk accessories - a calendar, calculator, dictionary, yellow pages, phone book, yellow sticky notes, etc. Eventually, third party developers will come up with some creative and unexpected accessories.

"Spotlight" the new search engine to find anything in your computer is excellent, but not the quite the birth of a new age in computing that the press has talked about. I did not have a very hard time finding things in the past. Spotlight might be a big help for Katherine though.

From my perspective, the major improvement is in "Mail", the e-mail program. It still has the same deceptively simple user interface. However, it has secretly become a full scale contact manager. It will print envelopes from Mail's address book. It will print labels. (Every conceivable Avery label sheet is an option.) It will dial the telephone number of your contact using your cell phone. It will send the telephone numbers of your contacts to your cell phone. It is not readily apparent, but you can create different categories and labels for your contacts to find and sort them. In short, it will do everything that my old contact manager (which is an OS X version of Claris's "Organizer" of fifteen years ago) can do. I can now migrate completely to "Mail" and stop maintaining two address books. This is worth the price of the upgrade all by itself.

(Converting information from your old address book, phone book, contact manager, etc. is much easier and error free than you might think. Veterans of yesteryear's computer wars can remember trying to convert by exporting text files in a certain order and then importing in the same order. That never quite worked perfectly. Then there were conversion programs. They either did not work quite right or the conversion program for your particular brand of address book was not available. The vCard standard changes all of this. Export the contents of your old address book as a file of vCards. Then import the vCards into "Mail". Everything is converted seamlessly.)

Are there any drawbacks to Tiger? I have only noticed one. Sometimes there is a very brief delay in opening a new window with a list of files. I did not notice this in the Panther or Jaguar operating systems that preceded Tiger. I suspect that a future free operating system upgrade will take care of this.