Mac OSX 10.4 "Tiger" has arrived

I received my copy of Tiger yesterday, a lovely surprise. I have now had several hours to play with it and I must say that it completely lives up to the hype. It is, surprisingly, faster than the previous release. I don't even want a G4 iBook anymore. It's fast enough for me.

So let's start. Tiger comes in one DVD. You put it in, click on the install icon, put in your admin password and you restart. I decided to wipe the hard drive and perform a new installation to get a feel for the default. After about 40 minutes, it was all done. I restarted and was greeted by the usual things: registration (optional I think but I did it anway, bleah), user name and account, wifi selection, and perhaps a few others.

When the system finally started, the install was complete. I decided to immediately install XCode to get all the development tools. This took a few more minutes.

The first few things I did were pretty standard: set up and distribute my ssh keys (I should have saved the previous ones), move some documents back, setup my power management preferences and a wallpaper and screensaver. Also, I moved my bookmarks to Safari and tested Mail2. Safari is now faster than Firefox. In 10.3 "Panther," Firefox still was faster; not anymore. Mail2 has finally entered modernity and no longer sucks ass (Mail1 was shit, honestly). Also, iChat now supports Jabber.



Dashboard is a tool similar to gDesklets. These are wonderful applets: calculator, flight tracker, weather, translator, calendar, yellow pages, unit converter, dictionary, etc. There are also hundreds more avaiable for download or you can make your own.



Then there's the built-in search feature called Spotlight. This is the main feature and I've already used it. It indexes documents and files and searches its contents. Quite useful and very responsive.



For the newbs, there is also a Spotlight-like search tool in the System Preferences, where you can search for keywords that tell you where to configure the settings.



Fink and Fire, however, do not yet work. It's only a matter of giving the developers a couple of weeks to get them ready.

So far I am very happy. This new OS allows me to do things quicker: the applications have been given new features and the operating system itself runs better on my hardware. These have been the best $69 I've spent on software.

***UPDATE***
Fink has already been updated