I was extremely surprised to see M$-Office being ranked above the iLife suite - for one, the Office apps are definitely amongst the ugliest on the Mac and secondly,(barring Excel) they have excellent replacements from Apple. Of course, to remain connected with the Windows community, the Office apps are reqd. But that doesnt justify a No. 1 slot. The iLife apps are definitely #1 on my list because they enhance the "personal" space of your life, which is what the Mac is all about.
Living in India,I also rate VLC and Toast titanium very high in importance because most movies are still available only on VCDs and many people still have only VCD players. So I have to create VCD movies from Toast and watch them on VLC.
Omni Graffle is wonderful (though I dont like some of things they have changed in their latest version).
I have also used Audacity and Audio Hijack a lot and found them very easy to use.
Oh - I have a question here. There are times when I quikly want to manipulate an audio file - just lower the "hiss" etc. I found the CD-Spin Doctor that comes with Toast very nice for that. There is no big complication there. A couple of scroller moves and you get improved audio. But this app supports audio from input lines only. Is such an app available to edit existing audio files ?
Thanks.
- To me, the biggest plus in Tiger is the leap in performance. Startup and login is much snappier.
- Working in an office with a secure .pac file for Internet connection, SafariRSS works now against such a file. I have had to rely on Firefox for my browsing on Panther. So this is a big plus for me on Tiger.
My biggest grouse is with Mail. I think the UI changes here are *all* for the worse.
- The toolbar buttons with their grey wrappers look gross.
- I also liked to have the drawer for my mail folders which allowed me to have a very compact view of my inbox. Now, the window is huge and Entourage-like.
- Whats with the pale blue shade to the folders section ? It does not gel at all with the mailbox.
- Another big let-down was the so-called-UML support in XCode 2. There's a farce if ever there was one !
On the whole, I like Tiger's snappier feel. But there is nothing there which is going to change the way I work in any great measure (Exposé did just that in Panther)
- Sathya
Interesting article, but I dont bet on it.
I am a guy who believes in specialized products. There is *something* a product is meant to do and it should aim at achieving it better and better. To me, an iPod is a portable music player and an iPod Photo a portable music-and-photo slideshow player. The small bonuses they provide, like calenders and contacts and games are just that.
The purpose of a cell phone is to be able to communicate wherever you are, wireless. A digicam is expected to take still pictures. A handycam is expected to capture movies. There are lots of things that each of them provide beyond what they are meant for - camera phones for instance. But I bet that you will not go on a vacation carrying just your camera phone to take the pictures !!
An iPod is great because it just makes the music listening experience so much better. As you said, there were portable players before. But none had the ease of synchronization of an iPod. So a great product is one which creates new dimensions in its field.
I cant imagine to what extent can Apple innovate in the already heavy watch segment. But IMO, iPod is still in its early days - it carries a huge potential of further innovations and keep expanding Apple's presence in the market.
Hi Gregory,
Let me start by saying that I agree with you on Tiger. The feature list (barring Spotlight to an extent) does not excite at all. It might just as well be Mac OS 10.3.15 or something. Onward however, we cease to agree.
When I first started on Macs, it was almost the final days of Mac OS 9. I remember that "bombed" dialog that used to appear every few hours forcing a restart. I cant say I miss it ! I *never* have had Mac OS X crashing on me in the 4 odd years I have been working on it. I have heard of Kernel panics but never experienced it. The high availability of the OS means that we are much more productive and highly satisfied.
I am also surprised about your take on the time to login because I think the time to login compares very well to OS 9. It was confessedly bad in 10.1 and even 10.2. But Panther boots up within 8 seconds or so (when I actually restart it that is)
Its also my opinion that the iLife apps have been getting better with each release - iPhoto and iMovieHD in particular.
I am more of a Java application developer on Mac OS X - just comparing between what Java was on Mac OS 9 and what its now OS X is enough to make me forget everything about Mac OS 9.
I believe Mac OS X provides the best of many worlds and hence is a much more attractive OS to a much larger user community. I certainly would not have been inclined to buy a Mac if Apple had continued with Mac OS 9. Now, I have an iMac and a Powerbook with a dual G5 to boot.
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