Apple's Tiger arrives with a roar

Apple's new operating system Tiger has been creeping up on us for a while.

Apple users may have been happily riding Panther for almost 18 months, but when Steve Jobs gave a sneak preview of this next major release of the Mac OS X operating system at January's MacWorld, you could hear the roar from the fans.

As you would expect from a substantial new release, OS X v10.4 has some cool new features as well as important engineering changes.

Loading the DVD on my PowerBook G4 took just over an hour. This was because as well as loading all the new features and libraries, Tiger indexed all the existing content on the hard disk.

That is what makes the new search feature, Spotlight, blazingly fast. The search starts as soon as you begin typing into the Spotlight window. I typed in "apple" and had 1551 references in less than five seconds - applications, documents, images, .pdfs, fonts, music, mail messages.

The Spotlight capability is what convinced me to finally give up Eudora and switch to Apple's Mail 2. A better way to search those years of built-up mail sounded too good to pass up.

Mail 2's new features include the ability to send photos received in email directly to iPhoto with a single click; the ability to resize photos in Mail if they are too big for the ISP to take; a parental control system so children can receive email only from addresses deemed safe; greater compatibility with Microsoft Exchange email server configurations; and more ways to customise the look and performance of the application.

Now for the cool stuff. Widgets - press F12 and a bunch of mini-applications pop up on the screen, with more available on a bar below or downloadable.

As well as the things you would expect, such as a calculator and calendar, there is a conversion widget that includes standbys such as miles to kilometres and acres to hectares and is also an exchange rate converter.

A Dictionary widget based on the New Oxford English Dictionary means you no longer need to look up from the desktop when that tricky word comes up - copacetic, it says, in excellent order; early 20th century of unknown origin.

Dictionary also recognises non-American spellings, in case Word is telling you something different.

The Flight Tracker widget includes Air New Zealand information, if you want to keep an eye on when a flight is arriving.

The Weather widget tells me it's 14C as if I couldn't tell, but even colder in Wellington. The Safari browser has been revamped and has the ability to quickly search bookmarks and history.

Adobe .pdf documents can be viewed directly in Safari. There is also a private browsing feature, so is you are using a public-access Mac, cookies, history and caches can be kept private.

Safari automatically detects sites that include RSS (RDF site summary), an XML format that describes news feeds, or other web content that is available for publishing. Safari RSS is a quick way to view these feeds in a simple ad free list.

All the main bundled applications have been improved, and Apple has made some engineering changes that should allow third-party application developers to improve performance.

The core operating system has been overhauled to allow fine-grained locking in the kernel, which means Macs with multi-core processors are now possible.

Apple has promised developers it will not be making major changes to its application programming interfaces in future releases, which means less chance of applications breaking.

Anyone still on Jaguar or earlier should invest immediately in the upgrade - although it won't work on some of the earliest G3s.

Panther users will be pleasantly surprised, and will probably find themselves moving sooner rather than later.

Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger

* Pros: Powerful Unix operating system; great new search features; and useful widgets.
* Cons: Not available for Macs pre-Firewire; users without DVD-capable drive need to pay for a CD.
* Price: $235 plus gst