Today, Apple Computer officially releases Tiger, also known by the more prosaic title Mac OS X 10.4. Its $129 price makes the operating system upgrade more than a casual purchase; however, we think it’s worth it. Tiger lets you find files faster, it opens files faster, and it’s just nice to look at. In a world where time is money and attention to detail is scarce, OS X 10.4 is a welcome addition to a creative pro’s toolbox.
Spotlight Sheds Light
Think of the new Spotlight as Google for your Mac. No, Spotlight is better than Google — and that’s coming from a Google addict.
Far more powerful than the previous Find commands, Spotlight lets you search files and applications with breathtaking speed. In Panther, you could search for file name, content, date modified, date created, kind, label, size, extension, visibility, type, and creator. Tiger indexes every item’s metadata, so Spotlight can search for many more criteria, including dimensions, device make and model, profile name, color space, edit history, and keywords. If you’re unsure of the specifics, you can fudge it by using terms such as “Date: Yesterday” or by typing in the first few letters of a name.
The results of the search appear in a window that’s much more visual and descriptive than previous Find windows. While Bridge in Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 also displays thumbnails and metadata, Spotlight is always on (no need to launch another processor-hungry app). And did we mention speedy?
Let’s say you’re working on labels for a produce company. You need to find versions with one iconic strawberry, but the files are spread willy-nilly across your hard drives. Just go to the Spotlight menu, type in the word “berries,” and up pops the Spotlight window with the results.
Spotlight is much more visual than the old Finder search window.
Because the results include previews of the Adobe Illustrator files, you quickly locate the one-strawberry labels. You select those labels and right-click to open them all as a full-screen slideshow. At the bottom of the slideshow is a control bar that lets you stop, play, and display the images as an index sheet. You can roll over images in the index sheet to see their names.
You can create a slideshow from Spotlight search results.
Click on a file and Spotlight launches the correct application, then opens the file.
If you think this search is one you’d do often, save yourself even more time by making it a Smart Folder. As you add or delete files that match the search’s criteria, the Smart Folder automatically updates. Note that this isn’t a real folder, but the results of a search. That means that your files remain in their original locations.
Automator: Robots Rule!
At its core, the new Automator is a macro generator that automates repetitive, complex tasks. Bored yet? Then think of Automator as Photoshop Actions or ImageReady droplets for the rest of your Mac. Apple likens it to having a “personal robot inside your computer.”
In the Automator interface, you select individual commands and drag and drop them to form a sequence that Apple calls a workflow. Say you have to leave the office to meet a client and don’t have time to read your email. Automator comes with a workflow that copies unread mail to your iPod’s Notes field, so you can catch up on mail as you travel. (We hope you’re taking the bus, not driving.)
In Automator, you can build your own macros or use workflows from other sources.
Tiger doesn’t ship with many Workflows, but you can easily build your own. And you can share these things as easily as you trade bubblegum cards — check out AutomatorWorld for a slew of free, downloadable workflows.
Preview Grows Up
The Preview application can now open many more file formats, including JPEG 2000, OpenEXR, DNG, and RAW files. Preview opens them so quickly that you won’t have time to add sugar to your coffee, much less walk to the kitchen to pour a cup.
This index sheet, which is made up of 76 6-megapixel Camera Raw files, opened in less than 30 seconds. That’s fast!
Other improvements include better PDF support (you can now annotate a PDF file and fill out and print PDF forms). Preview still lacks many of the features of Acrobat Professional and even Acrobat Standard, but it’s catching up. And Acrobat is many, many times slower when launching and opening files.
Dashboard’s Instant Gratification
The new Dashboard gives you instant access to miniature applications in a space-saving way. Tiger ships with 14 mini apps, called widgets: Address Book, Calculator, Calendar, Dictionary, Flight Tracker, iTunes controller, Phone Book, Stickies, Stocks, Tile Game, Translator, Unit Converter, Weather, and World Clock. Many more widgets are coming for .Mac subscribers, and they’ll doubtless pop up everywhere soon.
Some of these widgets are simply fun, but some can make a designer’s life easier. Take the Unit Converter. If you’re designing a package in millimeters but the client gives you specs in inches, the length converter translates the numbers for you. Or say you’re writing a headline and aren’t sure how to spell something. It doesn’t matter if the program you’re in has a dictionary, because you can call up the Dictionary widget with one click.
Dashboard widgets appear and disappear with one click.
All of the widgets have well-designed interfaces. They’re a pleasure to use.
Other Goodies
There are many other new features in Tiger, some of which will be lifesavers for certain markets.
For example, QuickTime 7 includes the H.264 video codec, which produces very high-quality video at very low data rates. (That video codec’s superior compression is also responsible for the improvement in iChat video quality and for four-way video chats.)
Creative pros without font managers may want to look at the improved Font Book.
Safari finally lets you archive Web pages (and even includes animated GIFs). Given the Web’s mutability, archiving is handy when you want to save a site for your portfolio, or stash away a useful or inspiring page for future reference. Safari also seems to load pages faster, and it includes an RSS reader, which lets you find and digest news quickly.
In general, Tiger feels polished. The Apple engineers have paid attention to details large and small. You may still want to wait for 10.4.1, as small glitches and incompatibilities are inevitably found and fixed after a major upgrade such as this. But don’t delay too long — this Tiger is guaranteed to make your Mac purr.
Berry images are registered trademarks of Driscoll’s Strawberry Associates.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on April 29, 2005
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