Round up
I installed Tiger last weekend. I won’t bore everyone (well, okay, no one) with my review of the new Apple OS, but I have to get a few things out.
I’m underwhelmed. If I were new to OS/X, I would be as overwhelmed as I was 18 months ago. But, frankly, Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator does not a new OS make.
Dashboard is more or less intersting — certainly cute. I hope apple goes a step further and adds a means for Dashboard utilities to respond to events and let those events poke through to the main UI.
Spotlight is also intersting, but desktop search doesn’t mean a lot to me. I’m not a pack rat when it comes to digital content, tending to put things where I can find them again anyway. Besides I have had similar functionality with Launchbar for a long time — not as integrated, of course, but similar. Too early to tell if I’m just being stubborn, but so far - ehh.
Automator may be neat. I’ll let you know when I automate something.
Like everyone else, I think the Mail.app UI sucks, but I’ll live in with it.
For the install I performed an upgrade of 10.3 rather than a new install. Unlike many people I experienced no major issues. It was all pretty smooth really. I only had two issues: iChat forgot who I was and Keychain lost a certificate I had imported into my X509Anchors. That last could be significant to a real company, but I simply reimported it.
Yesterday, I needed to use a few new Perl modules I downloaded from CPAN. When making them I got this error:
make: *** No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h’, needed by `Makefile’. Stop.
If you find yourself with this error, it’s because this file and (apparently) other Perl development files are part of the XCode install. This was easy enough to Google up, but don’t make the same mistake I did. When going to install the new XCode 2.0, I went to Applications -> Installers -> Developer Tools and clicked Developer.mpkg. Of course, that’s the installer for the XCode 1.whatever from Panther. The new XCode 2.0 installer is on your Tiger DVD.
Other than that, everything works. Kudos in general to Apple, but I’m not sure Tiger was worth the price.
