Tiger arrived at my house just as we were leaving for work. I have yet to delve into it too thoroughly, but I can already tell that its Spotlight search function and Automator, um, automating function are going to be very big.
And Dashboard, a layer of handy gadgets that you can call up or hide any time you want, could be amazing. But at the moment, too many of them aren’t that useful to those of us on the north side of the 49th parallel.
There’s a weather widget that told me it was 59 degrees and raining in Vancouver… Washington. And a phone book widget that can’t find anything in Canada. (And various other widgets that would work nicely with Apple Mail and Address Book, except that I’m using Entourage.)
The vast majority of Apple’s North American customers are in the U.S., of course. It’s oh-so-Canadian to respond to something like this with a gripe about how we’ve been marginalized.
Then again, you might think Apple would be a little more sensitive to people who feel marginalized… or as their marketing department calls them, “our user base.”
Update a few minutes later: Mmmm. Words.
Turns out I can get Canadian weather. Key in the city, then select it from the pulldown menu.
Meanwhile, Tiger has kindly changed the default program for opening .doc files from MS Word to AppleWorks. Yeah… thanks, but no thanks.
One more thing that’s been covered on the various Mac user sites, but bears repeating: Tiger upgrades QuickTime to Version 7. If you’ve upgraded a previous version to QuickTime Pro, and you want to keep it, then haul out your credit card, buster; you’ll have to pay another upgrade fee.
It’s interesting just how thoroughly Apple is integrating its various apps with the operating system, and with each other. Mail, for instance, has a handy little trick for saving attached pictures to iPhoto.
Further update: The RSS integration in Safari is very, very nice. It outpaces Firefox’s RSS offerings completely. The ability to create a bookmark that filters a collection of RSS feeds is just plain lovely.
