Apple MacOS 10.4 (Tiger)

I’ve had both the Tiger and the new iLife ’05 on my PowerBook G4 for a few weeks now. Mostly I’m impressed with 10.4, less so with the changes to iPhoto (which is pretty much all I am using from the iLife bundle at the moment).

I was upgrading from Jaguar (10.2), so I had all the new features of the Panther (10.3) release to get used to as well. The upgrade itself was painless. I chose to reinstall clean on the hard drive and then use the migration support software to pull applications and data from my firewire backup drive.

The biggest annoyance I had with 10.2 seems to have gone too: whenever the system became very busy under 10.2 the mouse pointer movement would become unpredictable making it very hard to do anything at all. I was told that this was not a problem with 10.3, so I was expecting it to go away when I upgraded. Still nice to see it did 🙂

Dashboard is great. I tried Konfabulator early on, but was annoyed by its resource consumption (I frequently had to kill it just to be able to move my mouse pointer smoothly again!). It was also difficult to work out which of the stacking planes to associate the applets with. Dashboard’s approach seems much cleaner (and has impressed every Windows user I’ve shown it to!).

My experience with the new iPhoto however is not so good. I have a lot of photos now (almost 14,000 photos, or about 50 GB), but that is only just over half the number it is supposed to cope with. I either need a lot more memory (which might be true), or this software needs some serious reworking! I would also like to see some support in there for multiple photo libraries. That way I could keep some of my older photos on an external hard drive and only open them when I want to (rarely), but keep my commonly used photos on the laptop HD. I have download the iPhoto Library Manager, but haven’t had a chance to try it (expect an update when I do!).

Would I recommend the upgrades? Tiger is a definite yes. iLife is a definite maybe! The reason I upgraded was to get full support for my Canon EOS 20D camera (I could upload the JPEG versions of the photos using iPhoto 4 by setting the camera to PTP mode, but I couldn’t get the RAW images). For that it is useful, but I think that there remains a lot of work to do before this application is really useful.

One thought on “Apple MacOS 10.4 (Tiger)

  1. now i see why you went with tiger.

    for me, running osx 1.3, tiger is not that compelling. i don’t want dashboard at all but have yet to learn how to completely remove it from the os. i was also hoping for some real progress on the finder, but apparently there’s been none.

    i was also really put off by the extortion of the quicktime upgrade. they keep that up and the inept windows media player will have their lunch.

    i’m vaguely thinking instead about upgrading to adobe cs2 wherein a photo library app can be found. i’m still awaiting a review that compares it to iphoto (which i use but dislike) or the nikon picture project, which is sorta inadequate.

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