Kipworld

Like most other Mac heads out there, I took the plunge on Tiger this weekend. I didn’t participate in any Apple Store hoopla on Friday, but I went out first thing in the morning on Sat to score a copy.

Had to wait for my AlBook to frantically backup everything before popping in the Tiger DVD. Took 4 hours, but I took the time to write a story and putter around a bit.

Went through the install very smoothly. I didn’t even Archive and Install, just upgraded, since I don’t have too much crazyness installed.

It came back up, and for a second, I thought I’d royally messed up. Safari crashed right off the bat trying to display an RSS feed. I also popped a week or two worth of email into Mail. It also crashed. And kept crashing every time I tried to view a message. turns out you need to update GPGMail for Tiger. I should’ve guessed that.

RSS screensaver is so sweet. Even sweeter is the fact that Apple provides a tool so that you can make your own (Quartz Composer). I want to spend lots of time with this program.

Dashboard is also cool, although I can’t really think of anything I want to make (besides a calendar widget that has my upcoming events on it, but I’m sure better people than me are on it). Maybe a comic strip reader (although that seems like it would take up a lot of space…). I use Dashboard really gratuitously also… my parents called from LA and I made them give me their flight number so that I could track it.

I also did the Google Maps hack to phone book. So sweet.

New iChat isn’t that exciting, although I’ll hold off on dismissing it until I try multiperson audio chat. I also need to convince my dad to get a G5 for multiperson video chat.

Automator looks sweet, although I don’t know what I’ll use it for. I was thinking of streamlining the bull and bunny process, but Fireworks doesn’t really support it yet (although I guess I could use Applescript, but then again, I never felt the need to Applescript the process before).

RecentTunes doesn’t work anymore, so recent music on the side is sorta broken. Bleah.

So, that’s about it… overall a cool upgrade, but not $130 cool. In the near future, when hordes of hobbyist and shareware devs make spiffy widgts, workflows, and Quartz screensavers, it will be.