The Triangle

Issue date: 5/6/05 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: www.apple.com The Automator

Apple boasts over 200 improvements in its newest operating system, OS X 10.4 Tiger. The two main ones, Spotlight and Dashboard, are more or less Apple's take on existing programs, Launch Bar and Konfabulator. Apple might try to say they have revolutionized desktop searching, but they've only integrated it into the OS.

I've been searching my iMac since I've gotten it with the greatest of ease, all at the touch of apple + spacebar. Certainly it's good that Apple is taking a look at existing software that has tons of users and is offering it free as a part of their operating system. The users rejoice; third party developers: not so happy. Still, it can be argued that Apple is doing a better job with these ideas anyway.

Spotlight is much more full-featured when compared to Launch Bar. Spotlight not only searches through all type of files, including the text within documents and pdfs, but it also integrates with finder to create Smart Folders. These are folders that update themselves automatically, given a set of criteria, like a smart playlist for iTunes.

It is also completely integrated with Finder and other Apple applications like Mail, making it easy to find whatever it is you are looking for. Dashboard uses less resources than Konfabulator, which worked my 933 MHz G4 and 256 MB of RAM to the bone.

Right now, Konfabulator has the advantage of having much more widgets and being able to run on previous versions of OS X. Time will close the gap between the number of widgets, though.

The 14 widgets included with Dashboard are very useful, though, and can increase productivity with the touch of the hotkey to display them.

You can look at the weather and see the date and time, yes, but other widgets also include a text translator, which can translate English into about a dozen languages, a dictionary/thesaurus, which can be incredibly useful when writing term papers or newspaper articles, an iTunes remote, unit converter, stickie notes and even phone phone book.

All of these tools that would normally involve opening up separate programs or going to a different website are available automatically at startup with just the push of a button. It appears that button can't be the same function key as the eject button, but that's fine with me.

These and all the rest of the major upgrades were presented to users who preordered Tiger from apple.com.

Ken Bereskin, senior director of Mac OS X product marketing, walked veiwers of a special Quicktime streaming seminar though how to use these new features.

The 30 minutes was informative, but it would have been nice if it was broken up into separate topics, because quite honestly, I couldn't care less about the new video conferencing features in iChat, the new Quicktime codec, or Safari's RSS support.

In terms of web browsing, I'll just use Firefox now, which loads up considerably faster than before in Tiger on my low-end laptop.

Automator looks to be the most promising of the completely new additions, being able to perform repetetive tasks by itself. It is surprisingly easy to use, despite its power and ability to automate complex tasks.

For example, if you want to do a batch resize of new pictures that you take with your digital camera, you can open up Automator, drag your pictures into it, and click on Preview to perform your tasks through the preview application. These tasks can be used once, or saved for later use as well.

While there are a lot of things it can do, most of them are limited right now to Apple programs. For example, if you want to perform an automated task on some file you've just downloaded, you'd have to use Safari for Automator to recognize it.

Again, as Tiger gets older, more and more Apple developers will write programs to take advantage of Automator, but right now it is slim pickins.

Other changes and additions have been made to the environment as well.

Now, right clicking on a word in any program can bring up it's dictionary definition. By holding control and apple and hovering over words, their definitions just pop up.

The menu bar has also been given a facelift as well. It no longer sports the pinstripes of previous versions, but has a glassy finish, like the OS X buttons.

Overall, Tiger is much improved over Panther in many respects. OS X also continues to offer a better user experience and more stability than Windows XP and much greater ease of use over Unix operating systems.

Tiger represents a leap ahead in operating systems, while Microsoft's next release is still over a year away.

However, given Apple's previous release schedule, by then Microsoft will have to compete against the sweetest OS, Apple OS X 10.5 Liger, which will be pretty much my favorite operating system. Ever take it off some sweet jumps?

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