I upgraded to Tiger last night. The installation went extremely smoothly. I’m using a single 1.8GHz G5 with 2GB of RAM.

Digression 1: I still think it’s funny that the entire contents of my 1st Mac’s hard disk could fit into memory on my current Mac. Digression 2: Yes, I am a loser for being home on a Friday night upgrading my operating system.

INSTALLATION This is all I did: backed-up all my data to an external firewire drive, after I was sure it was safely backed-up, I stuck in the Tiger DVD, chose upgrade and an hour later I was done. Simple. Don’t believe the geek-hype: you don’t need to erase the disk and install clean. Of course, it’s good idea to keep things running smoothly. I just didn’t have time to deal with re-installing all my apps, preferences, etc, etc.

DASHBOARD Dashboard is phat. P.H.A.T. Look for an MTAA widget of some sort soon. Not sure what, but it’s gotta be art. Since I use a 3 button mouse, I set the 3rd button to launch the Dashboard.

SPOTLIGHT I’m kinda torn about Spotlight. I’ve used Quicksilver for a while and like it very much. Spotlight is similar. I guess they can live together happily, but I would like to use one or the other for simplicity. One thing that bums me big time about Spotlight is that it doesn’t seem to index iTunes playlists. It indexes song files, but not playlists. Which sucks. What doesn’t suck is that it indexes text inside email, PDFs and other documents — which I don’t think Quicksilver can do. Maybe I will need to use both…

SAFARI Safari RSS hasn’t done much for me, I use NetNewsWire and will continue :-) One nice thing is that you can set the default app for RSS feeds within Safari, so one click can subscribe you within NetNewsWire.

MAIL I wish you could configure which side the sidebar appears on. I hated the drawer (hopefully the whole drawer idea will die, it’s always been extremely dumb) as much as anybody, but I got used to it being on the right. Now the sidebar is on the left. Also, I don’t think it’s as clear as the old drawer design. It’s not as easy to see which mailboxes have new mail since they aren’t bold. Overall it’s a plus IMO, the design is cleaner and clearer.

FONTS My fonts have been funky for a while. Weird stuff where the wrong font gets activated and renders all crazy in Safari. This doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.

MISC So far the only problem I’ve had is that I needed to configure Apache to use PHP (the Apache config file got overwritten by the default install). That took all of 1 minute. I did have to install the latest version of my mouse driver. Also, I’ve upgraded other apps like BBEdit and Transmit to the newest versions too. Most of my apps are working flawlessly.

Overall a great update! permanent link to this post