• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
• Apple Computer
• MSRP: $129.00
• Web Site: www.apple.com/macosx
• Buy it from Amazon.com

Mac OS X Tiger -- known more formally as Mac OS 10.4 -- is a frustrating operating system upgrade that could have (and probably eventually will be) a great one. It includes a bevy of new features that have the potential to save people tremendous amounts of time ... if Apple can just manage to file off the rough spots.

The $129 upgrade, which comes about 18 months after the release of Mac OS X Panther, introduces two major new features to the operating system: Spotlight, a very-fast whole-computer search tool, and Dashboard, which provides access to a suite of widgets that give at-a-glance access to a wealth of information.

Other lesser enhancements include an overhauled Mail program, a beefed-up .Mac sync utility (which lets you sync contacts, bookmarks and calendar items between computers), Safari RSS (which integrates "Really Simply Syndication feeds into the Web browser) and Automator (which even non-programmers can use to create simple programs). Other enhancements can be found buried deeper in the OS, but these are the most notable.

Spotlighting Problems

Spotlight is classified as a desktop search tool, similar in purpose to the desktop search tools from Google and Microsoft. The idea is that the tool indexes every file on your computer, a process that allows it to return lightening fast results even as you're typing in an entry. Spotlight hype -- just like the hype of its Windows cousins -- suggests that you'll be able to ditch such pedestrian, pathetically modernistic conventions as storing files in folders in favor of a new, wide-open style of saving your files anywhere you like, and then relying on Spotlight to find them when they need them.

Having used Spotlight on my PowerMac (dual 1.42 Ghz G4 processors, 1 gb RAM) and my iBook (500 Mhz, 384 mb RAM) I can say that I'll be keeping my folders, thank you very much. Spotlight is exceedingly useful when you've misplaced a file or forgotten where you've filed it and I find it useful to search the many gaming PDFs I have on my computers.

That said, the interface is infuriatingly limited and inconsistent. The easiest way to access Spotlight is through a new "Spotlight" icon -- a small blue magnifying glass icon -- in the upper-right hand corner. Clicking on it brings up a short dialogue box; type in what you want to search, and it expands to list the top results. You can then launch a full-size Spotlight window for a comprehensive results. And here we reach my first frustration: you can't save your searches from the quick search window or the "full results" window. There are no search bookmarks and the utility doesn't even try and guess what you're looking for.

To save a search, you have to ditch the Spotlight interface and return to the familiar old Finder (the Mac equivalent of Windows "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer". Opening a blank "Smart Folder" from the Finder lets you build a customized search based on Spotlight technology (but not using its interface). And here's where I get really pissed: while you can save these searches, they only apply to files and folders. That's right -- even if you want to, you can't use this Finder window or the Spotlight window to do a standing search that incorporates things like e-mail. Actually, that's not quite true; you can extend the search to all sorts of other files and even characteristics of those files if you use advanced options but the one thing you can't have it search is e-mail.

Freaking bizarre. The differences between the Finder interface and the Spotlight interface seem designed specifically to induce desktop head-banging, as each has just enough of the other capabilities to be able to almost what you want it to do. I suspect that these sort of minor bugs will be worked out in a few incremental releases, but I shouldn't have to wait for something as simple as a savable Spotlight search.

Finally, Spotlight introduces a new, non-Aqua interface, which is annoying in and of itself; Mac OS X is starting to feel like a hodgepodge of interfaces thrown together to please a committee of vice presidents, rather than something with a coherent interface vision. It also introduces a striking color of blue that's used as the background color for the search icon and to tinge headers in the Spotlight search results. Annoyingly though, it also took over the Apple icon, ditching the familiar Aqua apple we've had for years.

Cracked Dashboard

Dashboard is a utility that lives outside of the Mac OS X desktop. When summoned using the F12 key or by pressing its Dock icon, it fades out the desktop and displays a variety of specialized "Widgets" that do everything from display everything from the weather to a dictionary to a calculator to sports scores.

Even before its release, Dashboard had been dismissed by some as little more than eye candy, and since its release, a few of those cries have intensified as some argued that all Dashboard does is reprocess existing content that's easier to get via a Web browser.

I disagree. While Widgets may display information that could be accessed via browser, it's far easier for me to hit my Dashboard hotkey and get my weather, TV listings and baseball scores through a widget than it would be to surf to the appropriate Web site. Plus sites like Weather.com and TVGuide.com have cumbersome, overly-complicated interfaces, especially when compared to the clean, simple lines of most widgets. Overall, I find they complement my work style very well; I like having stuff like the dictionary or the weather a click away, but don't need it cluttering up my desktop (particularly on my small-screened iBook).

But like Spotlight, Dashboard isn't quite ready for prime time. Safari originally installed new Widgets automatically for you when downloaded, but after a bunch of security people found problems with this method, it was disabled. Now you need to drag the Widgets into the "Widgets" folder on your computer (ether the main one or the one in your Widgets folder) which will probably exclude many non-power users. (yeah, I know -- navigating the Finder is simple enough, but in my experience, people actively ignore stuff like the Finder). Better would have been a modified install script for adding them to the Dashboard.

At the same time, there's no easy way to get rid of Widgets. You can remove them from the active area in Dashboard, tossing them back into storage, but to remove them from your machine you need to venture into the Finder once more. No big deal for me, but Macs are supposed to be about ease-of-use and saving me time, not making me muddle through Finder windows.

And the Kitchen Sync

Mac OS 10.4 offers incremental upgrades to a bunch of applications. Mail gets a cosmetic makeover that finally ditches the annoying sidebar that used to hold mail folders in favor of a design that integrates it into the larger application window. Spotlight is integrated into Mail, and works very, very fast. It also allows you to do something within Mail that it won't let you do outside of it, namely create "Smart Folders" based on Spotlight searches. Why you can do it here, but not through Spotlight proper or the Finder, mystifies me.

The interface is ok, but like Spotlight it introduces yet another new Mac look and feel separate from the original Aqua interface or the newer (and annoying) brushed steel interface. I realize that sometimes the user interface must change to accommodate new features, but this seems like change for change's sake.

The new Mail program seems more spry than its predecessor, particularly on my iBook. I think this is do in part to how it handles e-mail accounts it can't connect to. Previously, if I was using my iBook offline, Mail would try to access accounts for several minutes before giving up; now it gives up almost instantly.

Safari RSS ups Apple's Web browser to version 2.0. The new browser seems faster than the old one (I don't have any benchmarks to prove that though) and integrates support for RSS. RSS (really simple syndication) is used by many blogs and a growing number of commercial sites to serve up headlines and articles to users without having to have those folks actually visit their site. Once subscribed to an RSS feed, the user just needs to browse that feed to see the headlines. Traditionally, this has required a dedicated RSS aggregator program, but the Firefox web browser can now read these feeds, and Safari offers more of the same. Access to the your feeds is clumsy, requiring users to navigate through the Bookmarks folder to see an index of feeds; I'd rather have seen RSS split out into its own separate window.

Spontaneously checking out a new feed though, is easy. When you hit a site that has a feed, a small "Spotlight blue" RSS icon appears in the web address window. Clicking on that icon brings up the feed and all its headlines. It's a good start, but I wish it had better follow through.

Automator, Apple's new utility that lets non-programmers automate certain routine tasks has great potential, but still needs work. I was able to easily create a small Automator script to update and then eject my iPod (something I do every morning) but creating a script to display all e-mail received within the last 24 hours was problematic. Automator would let me create such a script, but when I ran it, the program would hang. This has stymied my efforts to create a "wake up" program on my Mac that would wake the computer up at around 4 p.m. and get it to check my e-mail, download my podcasts, and generally get ready for my workday, but I'm hopeful I can get at least part of what I want to do working.

.Mac sync has evolved somewhat, allowing for the syncing of password keychains, Mail accounts and Mail smart folders in addition to contacts, calendar items and bookmarks (which Panther could do). None of this is revolutionary and it doesn't do what I really wanted it to do, which was sync a specific folder or application information (in particular, I want to sync my Stickies between all of my Macs). On the plus side, Apple has opened up the sync infrastructure so that third parties can use it, so hopefully we'll see a helper app that'll do what I want.

Upgrade Headaches

All of my Mac OS X upgrades have gone smoothly, but Tiger was the exception to the rule. Bucking geek common sense, which mandates a clean install, I did an upgrade install, same as my last three OS installs. The others went well, and it looked like Tiger would be a breeze too, since I had no problems installing it on my PowerMac.

The iBook, however, proved more difficult. File permissions errors on the hard drive (cryptic I know, but geeks will understand and for non-geeks, this illustrates the depths of my problems) prevented Tiger from installing at first. Once fixed, Tiger went ahead with the install, but after restarting and trying to boot into Tiger for the first time, the machine hung for over an hour. I restarted again, and this time, it booted smoothly. Even with this snafu on the iBook the upgrade went better than it did on my Windows machine, but it wasn't up to Apple's normal standards.

A few days after the upgrade, I discovered that not everything had gone as smoothly as I'd though: both of my printers didn't make it through the update. In both cases the entries for each printer -- a Canon i950 inkjet printer and an ancient HP LaserJet 5P laser printer -- remained, but neither would accept print jobs.

I've since restored the i950 by remove its driver and re-adding it, but the LaserJet is shared from a Windows box, and I haven't had the time to sit down and puzzle out why the Mac can't print to it any more. From reading the various Mac forums, it seems like I'm not the only one with lost printers, so if you do upgrade now, beware.

Final Analysis

In its way, Mac OS X Tiger is the biggest Mac OS disappointment since the original 10.0.0 release, which was pretty to look at, but crap to work with. While no where near as crippled as that release -- 10.4 is quick and responsive and has few of its earlier siblings issues -- the OS shares some of the half-finished feel of its prehistoric ancestor.

One of the best tests of a new operating system is whether or not you miss its bells and whistles when you revert to an older machine. I can say that, despite my frustrations with Tiger, I do miss Spotlight and Dashboard when I'm using my work Macs, which are still running Panther. Then again, I'm a Mac geek, and I don't mind muddling through a few problems if I can play with some new toys. If you're getting a new Mac with Tiger on it, you should be fine -- none of the problems I've had a crippling (or perhaps even apparent to casual users) -- but if you're familiar with Panther and are thinking about upgrading, I recommend waiting a few months for Apple to work out the bugs.