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(More customer reviews)I'm a convert from the Redmond tribe, but the conversion has been painless and actually quite enjoyable. Like many, I use Windows machines on the job, but come home to an iMac at the end of the day.
Mac OS X Tiger goes about its business with a quiet composure that barely hints at all the magic happening behind the Aqua user interface. The blocky Apple System font has been replaced with eye-pleasing Lucida Grande Sans Serif. Window control buttons use color to convey their meaning: Red for close, yellow for minimize, and green for zoom (similar to Windows maximize).
In place of the Windows Start Menu and Taskbar, OS X Tiger provides the Dock, a zoom-able home for frequently used applications. Drag an icon from the Application folder to the Dock, and then click it to open it. A small triangle appears below each active application. You can right-click a Dock icon for a list of application windows or select Quit and shut down all of the windows at once, leaving the icon in the Dock for the next time you need it. And yes, I said "right-click," one of the ways OS X Tiger makes Windows users feel right at home.
For the first hour or so of operation, OS X might seem a bit sluggish, especially if you've dumped a folder full of files on your Mac. It just means Spotlight is at work indexing the hard drive, all the way down to the name "Hephaestus" in that fantasy novel you originally wrote in Microsoft Word for Windows on your old PC. If you can't remember where you saved a document or its filename, just type a word that appears within it and Spotlight will display every file containing your search term. Change the dragon's name from "Hephaestus" to "Fafnir" and Spotlight knows about it by the time you've saved it.
Other helpful technologies include the Dashboard. Click the Dashboard icon in the Dock and an assortment of mini-applications called widgets zoom into view. You can check the current temperature and see a 7-day forecast on AccuWeather's widget. Add up a quick list of numbers with the calculator widget. You can even add widgets to track your investments. When you're finished, the widgets disappear and your desktop is exactly as you left it.
If your Mac has a dedicated video card with a programmable graphics processor, Quartz Extreme and Core Image take over the graphics-intensive tasks and use gaming-grade technology for everyday effects like resizing, scrolling and moving windows. The result is faster, rock-solid performance. Listen to your MP3 collection in iTunes while Mail downloads messages as you organize and enhance pictures from your trip to Lake Tahoe in iPhoto. OS X Tiger keeps things moving along without audible or visible stutters. Based on UNIX, Tiger recovers from rare application freeze-ups without a reboot, leaving everything else intact.
If all that hard work has left your desktop a shambles of open applications, Expose' will shrink every open application until they all fit on the screen. Mouse over each shrunken app and its name appears in big type. Click on the one you want and it zooms to screen size. You can also see only the windows of a single application. Expose' will even push everything aside to let you click on something on the desktop.
For home and small business users, Mac OS X provides greater safety from the perils of a connected life. OS X Tiger turns up its nose at ActiveX and other potentially troublesome Windows technologies. Macintosh viruses are rare, so if you don't open suspicious files and unsolicited email attachments, you can get along without anti-virus software. It's also more difficult for a website to plant adware and spyware on your Mac. OS X Tiger is smart enough to know when you're connected to the Internet through a router and shuts off both its software firewall and file sharing. You can enable only those services you need while optimizing system performance.
If you use your Mac every day (and who doesn't?), Apple recommends that you put it to sleep instead of shutting down when you're finished. Even a Tiger needs some sleep to keep at its best. Shut down your Mac only if you're going to move it or if you're going on vacation.
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Apple Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.6 (Mac DVD)Simply put, Apple Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.6 will change the way you use a computer. Breakthrough search technology, stunning graphics and media, unparalleled connectivity, an intuitive user interface and a virtual toolbox chock full of cleverly integrated features -- all atop a rock-solid UNIX foundation -- give you the most innovative, stable and compatible desktop operating system on the planet. Period.Dashboard: Get Info in a DashThe new Dashboard hosts nifty mini-applications called widgets that appear instantly and keep you up to date with timely information from the Internet. View stocks, check weather forecasts, track flights, convert currency and units of measure, even look up businesses in the phone book. Similar to Exposè, the Dashboard zooms across your desktop at the click of a function key. Your favorite widgets appear with up-to-the-second information, then disappear just as easily, so you can get back to what you were doing. Dashboard is home to widgets: mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide you with fast access to information. With a single click, Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world of information -- real-time weather, stock tickers, flight information and more -- instantly. Dashboard lets you play, pause, skip forward and backward through songs in your iTunes music library using a simplified controller. You can view weather conditions around the world or check temperatures, expected highs and lows, and a six-day forecasts of cities around the world. A translator widget lets you translate words and phrases instantly between English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Russian. And you can use Dashboard to search the phone directory by name or category to display the phone numbers and addresses for publicly listed U.S. businesses in your area. And best of all, Dashboard disappears just as easily as it appears, so you can get back to what you were doing. Tiger includes a suite of widgets to get you started, and you can add more anytime. With so many widgets at your disposal, the Widget Bar comes in handy. Click the plus sign and Dashboard launches a Widget Bar displaying every available widget. Drag widgets from the Bar to the Dashboard and watch as they appear with a cool ripple effect. Once you have your widgets where you want them, just close the Widget Bar with a single click.Spotlight: Find Anything, FastTiger introduces Spotlight, the lightning-fast search technology that illuminates every corner of your Mac, displaying results as fast as you type. Search everything on your system: Files, emails, contacts, images, movies, calendars and applications appear instantly. Just as you find songs on iTunes by name, artist or album, Spotlight results take you way beyond mere filename and location: they include all the metadata inside files, including the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size and many more details. Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger lets you blaze through your files and applications and see results as soon as you type the very first letter. That's because Spotlight indexes files on your computer transparently and in the background, so you never experience lag times or slowdowns. And when you make a change, such as adding a new file, receiving an email or entering a new contact, Spotlight updates its index automatically, so search results are always up-to-the-moment accurate. When you search via Spotlight, you're actually accessing a comprehensive, constantly updated index that sees all the metadata inside supported files -- the "what, when and who" of every piece of information saved on your Mac. Most documents, including Microsoft Word documents, Photoshop images and emails, already contain rich metadata. And because Spotlight indexes content as well, your search results include what appears inside a file or document, not just its title. You can also use descriptive words to get amazingly targeted results, even across thousands of files. For example, to find everything from a colleague, type the person's name. Spotlight returns documents she authored or edited, images she emailed, messages she wrote (and messages you sent to her) and her contact information. You see results in sorted categories for easy browsing, picking and clicking.Tiger: Your Communications CenterTiger turns your Mac into a communications hub. Safari RSS for Tiger features built-in RSS feed detection and display. Mail and Address Book incorporate Spotlight technology to help you organize your contacts and correspondence. And iChat AV lets you video conference, audio chat or send instant messages with friends and colleagues. Add a .mac account and make the most of Tiger connectivity with iDisk storage, a mac.com email address, your own home page and powerful syncing capability.Works Well with OthersMac OS X Tiger boasts better compatibility than any other desktop operating system in the world. You can share files with Windows users, connect to any network and communicate automatically with other Macs using Bonjour technology. And thanks to its solid UNIX foundation, Tiger offers a powerful security architecture that protects your data from prying eyes. Experience Mac OS X Tiger for yourself, and see how it changes the way you work, play, search and share on a Mac. Can't find what you need? Spotlight makes fruitless searches a thing of the past. Think you can't write an automated script? Try Automator and think again. Want to share media with friends and family? Tiger's integrated features make it simple. In fact, Tiger offers a feature for every reason you use a computer and then some.
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