Shiny Tiger things
I’ve been living with Tiger for a few days now, tinkering, and reading more about Spotlight, Automator and Dashboard, so here are my thoughts about the new operating system.
- Preview has some great and long-awaited features. I find myself reading quite long articles and manuals as PDFs now, so the new bookmarks are a great feature. However, I think it would be better if the Bookmarks menu only showed bookmarks for the currently open document or documents. One other nice but slightly hidden feature is that you can set a preference to open a document at the last viewed page. That’s great if you quit a document accidentally and want to just get back to the page you were on. The annotations are quite nice, but I haven’t checked whether they also appear if you view the document in Adobe Acrobat. Not that I do that unless absolutely necessary, because it’s so slow and crashy.
- I love Spotlight, even though I think that the interface could do with a bit of tweaking. It can be a bit slow (if you’re used to Quicksilver), though it’s a world away from the awful Finder searching in Panther. I wish that there was a ‘stop’ keyboard command, because I often see what I’m looking for flashing by in the results list and want to just stop the search there. But it seems that you have to wait until it’s found and displayed everything, which is a bit of a drag. I was delighted to discover that when you get emailed an attachment, the system stores the sender in the metadata for the file. This—-on its own—-is massively useful to me. Very often I get sent some form or another from admin, which usually has a very cryptic filename, but now a search on the sender pops the document up. No excuse for ‘forgetting’ about these things now. Damn.
- Smart mailboxes and folders. I love these too, and have been wanting something like this for ages. I’ve got smart folders set up for documents in my home folder last opened since yesterday, and documents labelled red (which are things I have to read, edit, or otherwise deal with). I used to have a special folder for these kinds of things, but then I had to think about where to file them once I’d dealt with them. Now, I file them straight away, safe in the knowledge that they will appear in my ToRead smart folder. In fact, I’m seriously wondering if filing is necessary at all now. Which brings me to smart mailboxes… I’ve taken the plunge now and am filing all my mail in one big folder (which I’ll move into yearly archives as necessary). I haven’t quite got up the courage move all my old messages out of their folders and into the new one yet, but that will come. I can set up smart folders for things I want to group together very easily, and because it’s only a virtual hierarchy, I can even set up temporary smart folders for projects that I happen to be working on at the moment. When they are over, I can just get rid of the smart mailbox. I’ve also got a ‘flagged’ smart mailbox. When mail comes in that I have to deal with, but can’t sort out within the two minute GTD time limit, I flag’n’file them, knowing that everything I have to deal with is listed in the Flagged smart mailbox. When it’s done, I unflag it, and it’s already filed in the main mail folder. I have an empty inbox! And a rather full flagged mailbox, but let’s not worry about that too much…
- The command line commands, mdls and mdfind are rather interesting to play about with, particularly if you want to know what kind of metadata a particular file type provides. I’ve also found that you can add qualifiers in Spotlight after your keywords, like ‘wombat Date:yesterday’ to find all references to wombat yesterday. I’m sure that I’ll be playing with mdls and mdfind a lot more when I’ve got some time.
- I really like Dictionary. Particularly since I saw this hint which shows that you can hover over any word in a Cocoa application (or at least those using WebKit or NSTextView) while holding down Command-Control-D to get a very cool little definition popup. I don’t spell too badly most of the time, but I like to make sure that I’m using words like ‘evanescent’ properly.
- Dashboard. This is much cooler and more useful that I thought it would be. I like having all those useful little tools off screen and out of my way, but then instantly summoned when I need them. In fact, I’m actually using Stickies for little notes now, when I avoided them before because I didn’t like them cluttering my screen. The dashlicious widget is particularly useful for posting to del.icio.us. Basically, many of the widgets (like weather, conversion, dictionary and world time) have replaced quick visits to particular websites for me, and make the process much quicker and more transparent.
- Automator. I’ve only had a quick play with this so far, but it looks quite promising. I think that it will be much more useful when more third party developers produce Automator actions for their products. You can see the potential, though. Frasier Spiers has built a nice flickr uploader using Automator. It’s only a start, but it’s already very useful.
Overall, I’m very impressed with Tiger. It’s much more speedy all round, and the new features are mostly great. It’s true that there are a few rough edges, but I have no doubt that they will be gradually ironed out with updates over the next few months. In particular, Spotlight (in all its incarnations) has already significantly changed the way I work.
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I share most of your opinions here
The one thing I don't get is Dashlicious. I really can't see why it was made. I can already click on the "Post to del.icio.us" bookmarklet in Safari and have a popup with the same boxes to fill in. What's the benefit of having to go to the Dashboard to do it? Furthermore, I have a "Mark to read later" bookmarklet which automatically bookmarks the current page with 'read_later' to add to my del.icio.us composting pile.-----
mdfind and mdls are just awesome 
by David Smith @ 04/05/2005 6:06 pm • Permalink •
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bsag, I recall you saying earlier that you were having what sounded like rather major problems with Mail. Did that just sort itself out or did you have to do anything? And if so, what?
I like Tiger muchisimo but on my PowerBook at home iCal exits instantly that one opens it, and on the PowerBook at work (oh, the luxury!) iCal is fine, but Mail crashes immediately one tries to look at a message.
I'll admit I did the lazy man's upgrade, so I may have to try a complete backup, erase and install to see if it cures the problem. Now which machine first?...
Thanks for a useful write-up, BTW.
by Jolyon @ 05/05/2005 5:05 am • Permalink •
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Peter Cooper: I agree that the bookmarklets offer much the same functionality, but for me I just prefer hitting F12, adding a comment, hitting enter and then F12 again. It's just a preference. I also used to find that the various bookmarklets I tried resized the whole browser window, and that irritated me. I'm sure it could be fixed.
David Smith: They are indeed.
Jolyon: I had a couple of problems with Mail, both of which were caused by conflicts with non-Tiger compatible software. The first was that Mail quit all the time because I had forgotten to disable the extra Mail Bundles (in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles) like Mail.appetizer and so on. So the first thing to check is that you haven't got any extensions to Mail running. The second problem, which manifested itself in Spelling not working across the board, and none of the buttons like Reply, Send, Forward etc. working in Mail, was down to cocoaAspell. I hadn't removed the aspell.service from ~/Library/Services. Once I did that, everything was hunky dory. Do check that Mail imports all your old mail though. I had to go back and get the mail from my Sent box manually, which then imported fine.
As for your Mail and iCal problems, Joe Kissell's advice in my previous Tiger entry is the best bet: try logging in as an other user and see if the problems persist. If they don't, it's most likely a problem with your user preferences, and trashing the prefs for iCal or Mail (the latter will involve setting up your accounts again), might solve the problem.
by bsag @ 05/05/2005 6:06 am • Permalink •
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FYI - Acrobat 7 is mucho faster and not crashy, major improvement over version 5 or 6! I have to still use it for eBooks that are encrypted.
by James @ 05/05/2005 9:06 am • Permalink •
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Thanks, bsag and Joe Kissell. Mail now works fine, thanks to your tips.
by Jolyon @ 05/05/2005 12:06 pm • Permalink •
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Tiger. Hmm. Ordered April 12 from Amazon UK but still not yet dispatched or delivered as of this afternoon. Gives me a bit more time to tidy up the disk, I suppose, and to read helpful articles like yours!
by pete @ 05/05/2005 12:06 pm • Permalink •
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James: Oh, that's good to know. I'll probably download it at some point.
pete: Poor you! I'm such an impatient thing---I would be climbing the walls by now!
Jolyon: No problem.
To all: Actually, if you're just about to install Tiger, it's well worth buying a couple of the Take Control books. Joe's a friend, but I would have bought his Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger book, even if he wasn't. He knows his onions, and it's a great confidence boosting thing to follow the advice of someone who has installed Tiger 43 times (and counting). I also bought Matt Neuburg's Take Control of Customizing Tiger at the same time, and that had lots of juicy nuggets about Automator, Spotlight and Dashboard that I wouldn't have guessed.
by bsag @ 05/05/2005 5:05 pm • Permalink •
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I don't know if this is common, but I found Tiger seemed rather sludgy and slightly flaky for the first 2 days after doing an "archive and install" upgrade, but now everything seems to have settled on its own without other intervention by myself, and everything is nipping along very nicely. I don't know whether this was to do with preferences gradually becoming updated or Spotlight indexing the disk, but it was very noticeable, and there was a lot of disk activity.
The only thing that makes me slightly uneasy is that Disk Warrior does not work until Alsoft issues an update, which they say will arrive in a day or so. I have hardly ever had to use it, but it is my computing 'security blanket' and feel much happier if it is there to fall back on.
by ThoughtBadger @ 06/05/2005 9:05 am • Permalink •
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You mentioned marking all of your "ToRead" mails with red... how do you do this?
Thanks!
by sassafras @ 25/05/2005 12:06 am • Permalink •
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sassafras: There are two different things here: one is that I flag my emails that I need to deal with (Message > Mark > As Flagged), then file them. I have a Smart Mailbox that just collects messages which are flagged. Then I mark files and folders that I need to deal with with the a red label in the Finder (bottom of the Find menu), which on my system I have re-labelled 'ToRead'. A Smart Folder in the Finder then collects all items in my Home folder labelled 'ToRead'.
What you can't do out of the box yet is to use a Smart Folder to collect emails and files, but I believe that it's possible if you monkey with Raw Queries.
by bsag @ 25/05/2005 4:06 pm • Permalink •
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