Starbody

Although I don’t generally think of myself as a geek, I did have to grab Tiger as soon as it came out (in fact, I pre-ordered … wait, I AM a geek). I was pretty certain the new version was going to fix some small, yet horribly annoying things about Panther.

My new number one favorite thing about Panther is not Dashboard or Spotlight (and definitely not the latest version of Mail). It’s the automatic connection to my wireless network! Clicking to connect to my wi-fi network seemed reasonable, re-connecting to it each time my PB went to sleep seemed utterly annoying. Running a close second in the fantastic department would be Spotlight. It’s so damn handy to be able to run real time searches for anything on your machine (not just the title, the contents too). I just need to spend a little more time with the little seach formats (beyond the find: …). I’m already finding myself annoyed by the search capabilities in XP. And although Longhorn is rumoured to contain the mother of all search capabilities, who knows when it will be out?

And then there’s Dashboard. Dashboard operates a little bit differently than I had thought. For some reason, I had the impression that the widgets would be similar to Konfabulator and remain on your desktop for all eternity. If you haven’t seen them yet, Dashboard is a separate application that requires a (configurable) keystroke or click on to the dock icon to activate and bring them forward. It makes sense now that I’ve gotten used to it. There aren’t a ton of widgets available for download (yet) but I expect that to change very quickly. Apple boasts that if you know HTML, you have all the skills you need to write a widget. Apparently, you don’t need computer hacking skills, nunchuk skills, etc.

Now on to the not so hot. Mail 2.0. I broke up with Mail 1.0 shortly after its release for several reasons: the way the mailboxes were arranged, the fact that I could never quite get the rules to work the way I needed them to and mostly because overall I thought the interface was clunky. That said, I’m giving Mail another chance. It’s promising things will be better this time. I really want to believe it. So, I waved goodbye to Entourage (but left all my mail accounts there just in case) and imported all of my mail into Mail 2.0. I was able to pull all of my mail in, but there seemed to be no way to import my actual accounts (of which there are many). No matter, I was not going to be judgemental … yet. All of my mail came in fine and true to the original folder structure I had been using. Now here’s the part where I am on the verge of breaking up with Mail again and running back to Entourage. I tried the whole Smart Mailbox/Smart Folder thing. Very handy. Except I’m not sure how that’s different than just creating a rule to move things to specified folders but with the annoying twist that these are actually virtual mailboxes. I typically have rules created to automatically move specific mail from my Inbox to folders. Smart mailbox will collect just what I need by my specified criteria, but the mail still just hangs out in my Inbox until I move it … and then if I want to move it, I need to create a folder for it since the Smart Folders are only virtual. Do you get what I’m saying here? I need to read more of Mail’s documentation because it’s a very real possibility that I’m just misunderstanding the intent for use. Um, hello, usability.

That’s really my only gripe. Overall Tiger is much faster, which I really like. The widgets are graphically stunning. Safari’s RSS reader is okay (but I’m still not being wooed from my handy Mozilla extension Feedview. FYI you can get Feedview within Mozilla from Tools > Extensions > Get more extensions > select News Readers from the category on the left). I played a bit with Inkwell, but am not really an adopter to the idea of writing stuff on your computer with a pen. The fancy thing about Inkwell is that you can write and it will automatically ‘read’ it and convert it to typed text. This assumes that you have a Wacom tablet and are handy with the pen (which takes some getting used to). Overall, I just don’t see the point.

Oh and I almost forgot, I can automatically accept/receive meeting invitations generated from Outlook in iCal. I don’t think this was available before, but I could just have missed it (I broke up with iCal as well in favor of the Microsoft approach of all-in-one calendar, contacts and mail). So much for fact checking.

Now go grab some coffee and get back to work!