OSX Tiger Cometh
Wow, Mac OSX Tiger is going to be released on the 29th. Very nice. I wonder if my two new Macs get the upgrade for free? I just bought the Mac Mini in January and the PowerBook last month. Knowing Apple, I'll probably have to shell out the cash for the new release regardless.
I wonder if Tiger will fix the delete problem on the Mac? It's completely non-standard at the moment. Click the delete key in the Finder and nothing happens (it's shift-backspace), click the delete key in Mail and nothing happens (it's command-backspace), click the delete key in iTunes and it works as expected, you get prompted to delete which ever files you've highlighted. It'd be nice if this was a bit more organized.
Also, I wonder if Tiger will fix the multi-tasking issues. Expose is great for finding windows that are open, but it doesn't show hidden windows or windows that are minimized. I don't know how many times I've been searching for a window (usually Entourage) and found that one window is open, and another window is minimized so it doesn't show up. Also, like the delete key, I'd love some standardization when it comes to what happens when I click an icon in the dock. If the application is already running, I want it to maximize and come to the front when I click the icon. Some apps do this (iTunes) a lot of others don't.
I tried burning a .iso last night again using the Disk Utility (this time on my PowerBook) and it died just like it does on the Mac Mini. Urgh. Will Tiger fix this as well? That'd be great.
I wonder if Spotlight is going to replace Quicksilver as my quick-start function or whether it's more like a desktop search? Does it have a control-space pop-up like Quicksilver I wonder? Spotlight looks nice, but I wonder how well it works. Maybe it's like Microsoft's indexing service where using it slows your machine down by 30% because it's always cranking at your hard disk and using memory and processing speed. Hmm.
Everyone in the mobile world is waiting for the next version of iSync to see if it syncs with their new mobile phones like it should. Hopefully Nokia Series 60 phones are supported from the start. This will be great if I can easily sync my phone to the mac using SyncML, it'd be a huge step forward for that standard and for the Mac. From what I've heard this has been ready to go for a while, but needed the rest of Tiger to be ready first.
What is upgrading a Mac like? I'm about to do it twice, so I hope it's painless as you would expect an Apple upgrade to be, but I don't know. Is it one of those things where you're better off wiping the drive? Hmmm. I guess we'll see in a bit.
-Russ