Mac OS X Tiger: What's Different
Improving On Perfection
29 April 2005 Justin Williams Skip to comments
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Want to know what's different in Mac OS X Tiger? This article will cover changes to the OS X interface, Safari RSS, Mail, and all the other changes incorporated into your favorite operating system.
Introduction
Like all previous revisions of Mac OS X, Apple has spent a lot of time refining the existing features in Mac OS X to make them easier to use, faster, and better looking. Apple does this because they realize there are better ways to do things. These decisions come internally or from user feedback. If you have ever felt that something didn’t work the way you wanted it to in an application, there has always been a way for you to send feedback on Mac OS X. Every piece of feedback is looked at by Apple and taken into consideration.
Tiger is not unlike previous releases. Ther are several differences that you may or may not notice in the new release. I am going to cover some of the major ones as well as some of the ones that I believe are going to be most beneficial to you. If you want to see the full listing of changes (as well as new features), be sure to visit Apple’s 200+ Features page. It lists almost everything different feature-wise in Mac OS X Tiger.
This article will focus on the user interface enhancements seen throughout Tiger, enhancements to the Finder, Safari RSS, iChat 3, Mail 2, and System Preferences.
If you want to point out other niceties in OS X Tiger that I didn’t mention, be sure to post it in the comments. What you think is most important may not necessarily be the same as what I think is. Your feedback is what helps MacZealots grow.
Interface To The World
It seems that with every new release of Mac OS X, Apple has a new interface to put forth. In the beginning, we merely had Aqua and Brushed Metal. When Apple began releasing professional applications like Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro for OS X, they introduced another interface to the world: Pro. Pro was defined by its small, gray buttons. The type was smaller than on most Aqua widgets and it was only used by Apple’s professional applications team. Pro has never been opened up to developers for reasons that are beyond me.
Mac OS X Tiger introduces two new types of interfaces: Plastic and Unified Toolbar. Plastic is the look that many Dashboard Widgets have. The body of the Widget is two-toned with one tone only being slightly lighter than the other. The interface is sometimes embossed as seen in the Dictionary and iTunes Widget. The back of Plastic interfaces is a noisy black texture. This is to signal to the user that you are in the Widget’s preferences. This new interface is only available to Dashboard Widgets because it is created in Photoshop. Unlike other Mac interfaces such as Aqua and Brushed Metal, the user is in charge of creating most aspects of the interface. HTML entities such as text fields will still be Aqua.
The other new interface was first seen when Apple demoed Mail 2. If you look at the toolbar, you will notice a gradient going from top to bottom. This interface, unlike Pro, is accessible for developers. If you look in Interface Builder’s Inspector, there is an option to make a window have the Unified toolbar/title look.
The Human Interface Guidelines included with Mac OS X Tiger do not detail when to use a normal Aqua toolbar and when to use the Unified toolbar, so expect to see a major influx of developers modifying their applications to take advantage of the new Toolbar. Anytime a new technology or look is introduced, everyone and their third cousin feels the need to implement it. The same thing happened when Brushed Metal was given to developers as an option.
Brushed Metal and standard Aqua are more or less the same. There are some new user interface elements you may begin to notice in your applications. One that made my day was the inclusion of date picker. This control allows developers to easily embed a calendar and clock into their application that lets users select a specific time for an event to occur. A working example of this control is in the Date/Time System Preference pane.
Level indicator is also new to Tiger. If you have ever checked the storage capacity of your iDisk in System Preferences, it is using the level indicator. Level indicator is also used in iTunes for the ranking system.
Segmented control is also new. Segmented controls allow you to group a set of similar controls. Segmented controls can contain images, text, buttons, or menus. Safari’s toolbar is an instance of this. Here’s a preview of what these new interface elements look like:
Finder
In Panther, Apple touted the New Finder as a way to easily get to your most used content. The Finder had a user modifiable sidebar that was the home of your most used folders. The Panther Finder also introduced Brushed Metal to the finder thus throwing out all regard for the Human Interface Guidelines. Before, Brushed Metal was saved for iApp type applications.
Mac OS X version 10.2 provides developers with a new “textured” window appearance. This window style has been designed specifically for use by—and is therefore best suited to—applications that provide an interface for a digital peripheral, such as a camera, or an interface for managing data shared with digital peripherals, such as the Address Book application.
With Panther, the verbage was modified substantially.
You can use a brushed metal window if your application:
- Provides an interface for a digital peripheral, such as a camera, or an interface for managing data shared with digital peripherals—iPhoto or iSync, for example
- Strives to re-create a familiar physical device—Calculator or DVD Player, for example
- Provides a source list to navigate information—for example, iTunes or the Finder
Don’t use the brushed metal look indiscriminately. Although it works well for some types of applications, some applications appear too heavy when using this look. For example, it works well for the iSync application window, but it does not work very well for the TextEdit document window.
I will never agree with a Brushed Metal finder, but I don’t think it is going to go anywhere. The main problem that I have with the Finder is the qusetionable behavior when clicking the small white Tic-Tac in the upper right corner of a Finder window. The interface changes from Brushed Metal to Aqua! How is that logical? I will never understand.
Aside from questionable behavior, there are some new features in the Finder. One of the most noteable new features for the Finder is Smart Folders in the sidebar. If you ever perform a search from inside a Finder window, you can save that search as a Smart Folder. Anytime you open the folder, Spotlight will search for any new instances of data that matches the criteria established. I don’t think there is any caching of these searches, because there is a slight delay when clicking a folder and then getting the results. I hope they allow data to be cached, because some of my folders’day-to-day data don’t change nearly as much as others might.
The Finder also now supports burnable folders. This is a different user experience from previous version of Mac OS X. You used to have to insert a disc, label the disc, drag contents to the disc, and then burn it. Now you can select New Burn Folder from the File menu. A new folder is displayed on your desktop with the cd burning logo. You drag the items you want burnt to that folder and then select Burn.
The Finder also supports slideshows. Select a group of images, go to the Action Menu, and select Slideshow. This feature lets you easily look at the new images you pulled off your digital camera quickly without having to open iPhoto.
A Syndication Safari
Introduced in Mac OS X Jaguar, Safari solved one of the biggest problems with the Mac platform: the lack of a great web browser. Before Safari, many users were still using the quick port of Internet Explorer 5. Camino was available, but it was still new and not ready for primetime day to day use by the majority of Mac users. Enter Apple’s Safari. A fast web browser with several new features: Snapback, a new bookmarks manager unlike any other in a browser, and Google search from the toolbar.
Safari also powered by a great rendering engine, KHTML. A rendering engine is simply the workhorse behind your web browser that convers HTML into a viewable web page. To help make the browser the best it could be, Apple hired David Hyatt away from the Camino project and he began to work on Web Kit, Apple’s implementation of KTHML. As Safari and Web Kit have matured, pages have loaded faster, web scripts have performed impressively, and bugs in the rendering engine have been improved making life easier for web developers.
With Tiger, Safari has released Safari 2.0, or Safari RSS as they like to call it. Safari has support for RSS technologies right in the browser. For those that don’t know, RSS is a format for syndicating headlines. Rather than you having to visit several web pages to grab the latest news headlines, RSS brings the content to you (for more information, read our RSS tutorial from a few years back).
When Safari finds an RSS feed on a website, it will put an RSS button in the address bar letting you know that you can read the site as RSS. By clicking the button, a new view of the site you are reading will be transformed into a quick list of every headline and article summary. From there, you can choose to read more about the topic or move to the next article. This feature is highly customizable. You can specify how long the summary should be or sort content by date, title, or source.
Under Preferences, there is a new RSS tab that lets you specify your RSS aggregator of choice. If you are already accustomed to a third part aggregator like NetNewsWire or PulpFiction, Safari will send the RSS link to your application of choice.
Another new feature to Safari is Private Browsing. Private Browsing lets you cover your online tracks easily. From the Safari menu, select Enable Private Browsing and no browsing history will be collect, nor will any personal information you enter on web pages be cached. Cookies from web pages will also not be saved. This feature will be great on publically accessible Macs such as library kiosks or campus computer labs.
There are a few other features we should note.
- Safari can now view PDFs directly in the web browser instead of downloading them to your Desktop and opening them in Preview.
- You can now save web pages as Archives. An Archive grabs all the HTML, images, and other files relevant to the page and puts them in a nice bundle. This makes it very easy to view a web page offline.
- Parental controls will let you lock your kids (or husband) out of those nasty porn sites.
Safari RSS is a great upgrade, and it made me switch back from Firefox. Its performance improvements are what did it for me. In my personal tests, web pages load much faster in Safari RSS than they did in Firefox. Speed is king for me. I also am in love with the RSS integration. I set my default news reader and can now subscribe to feeds directly from the browser. One word: Awesome.
iChat, uChat, weChat
One of the problems iChat has had since its inception back in Jaguar is that it hasn’t been a totally full featured AIM client. Some of the features that have been missing are as follows:
- Lack of AIM Profile Support
- No groups (Panther had groups sort of. It was a joke in my mind though.)
- Multiple account support
I am here to tell you all of that has been resolved. iChat 3 now supports real groups, profiles, and you can establish multiple accounts. Finally!
The biggest new feature of iChat AV is the actual audio and video support. Using Apple’s U+3 technology, you can now have a video chat with three of your buddies or coworkers. You can also have up to ten people join in an audio chat. How does Apple allow you to have three people in a video chat co-workersand keep the great video quality you’re used to? H.264. H.264 is a video codec that compresses video for transmission over the Internet, but still maintains its high quality. It can also scale the video’s quality based on available bandwidth and what type of Mac you have.
These new video features do have steep system requirements. To have a 4 person video conference you need at a minimum a Dual 1GHz G4 Powermac. To participate in a 4 person conference you merely need a single 1Ghz G4. This limits great support to anyone who has bought a Mac in the last three years. The requirements for one on one conferences is much less steep however: you just need a 600MHz G3.
iChat now has support for the Jabber IM network. Jabber is an open protocol for instant messaging. Jabber is deployed all around the world by thousands of public servers. Support is included to complement the iChat server as part of Mac OS X Tiger Server. Tiger Server’s iChat server runs off the XMPpP protocol that Jabber uses.
Finally, Rendezvous is now called Bonjour. Apple lost a trandemark dispute with TIBCO software over the Rendezvous name.
I still prefer Adium to iChat because of its tabbed messaging window, but for those iChat users out there, this is a welcomed upgrade I am sure.
Mail Gets Ugly
Whoever was in charge of changing Mail to use these type of icons needs to have their head examined. The new embossed buttons are tacky, especially compared to the previous buttons. Aside from those buttons, there are some great new features in Mail 2.
One of the major things you will notice is that the drawer is gone. The accounts and folders are now a part of the main window. This is a new type of design for OS X. Other applications are quickly adopting this look as well. One of the first is the weblog editor ecto.
Mail has been given the Spotlight treatment. All of your mail can be indexed for search through Spotlight. You can also create Smart Mailboxes based on Spotlight search criteria. The functionality is almost identical to that of the Finder. I have created a mailbox that finds all of the MacZealots email I have and puts it in a single location that I can easily reference.
Mail has also added several new iLife enhancements that will make sending and receiving pictures to your friends and family even easier. One of the features that is welcomed by novice users is the ability to easily resize photos. When you drag an image into a new message, a control shows up at the bottom of the window letting you resize the image to Small, Medium, or Large.
Receiving photos in email is also a fun experience now. Let’s say that you receive a stream of photos from your mom. Mail will allow you to view your photos in a slideshow. From that slideshow you can perform several different functions, including creating a contact sheed, resizing the photo to fit to the screen, or adding it to iPhoto.
The only problems I have had with Mail is the Exchange support no longer functions with Purdue’s Exchange servers, so I have had to revert back to using Entourage for my work related email. Other than that and the ugly toolbar, I love the new Mail.
System Preferences
System Preferences has become Switcher Friendly. Thanks again to Spotlight technology, you can search for items in System Preferences using either Mac or Windows terms. For example, if you are from Windows, your desktop background is called Wallpaper. Simple typing in Wallpaper, and System Preferences will point you to the correct location.
One thing I do miss in System Preferences is the customizable toolbar. I liked being able to have my most frequently used preference panes at a single location. Apple wants users to search for preferences now. I am learning to adapt, but it was an abrupt change.
There isn’t that much new to System Preferences, but I did want to highlight its Windows-friendly search technology.
Conclusion
As you have seen, Apple has really modified OS X Tiger and improved their existing features and applciations. I love the speed enhancements that Safari received and the new smart mailboxes in Mail.
If it’s worth anything, I think that Tiger is worth upgrading my grandmother to. I have been cautious with upgrading her iBook from Jaguar because I don’t want to confuse her any. These new features are worth it though. She spends so much time in Safari, the speed improvements alone should make her life easier.
If you still want more Mac OS X Tiger coverage, maybe you should check out our other articles on the subject.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (14)
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#1) On May 5, 2005 10:50 PM
Hi… I swear there was a search box at the bottom of the browser window of safari when I started Tiger for the first time.. it had Highlight and some other features. Now, I can’t find it or any mention of it anywhare. It looked very useful.
Am I crazy or am I confusing applications.
Please tell email me!!!
#2) On May 8, 2005 09:13 AM
Michael, you might be thinking of Firefox!
#3) On May 9, 2005 09:36 AM
You forgot a major feature that was added under System Preferences … Voice Over. Apple has made tremendous advances in higher education in the past 4 years however their K-12 sales have been relatively stagnant if not faltering.
Apple has put a lot of effort into making the Mac OS a better out of the box choice for K-12 by adding the following to Tiger:
Screen reading software can cost as much as a $1000 per copy. Every computer with Tiger includes it for free. This is a huge expense for schools.
#4) On May 18, 2005 04:10 AM
I spend a lot of time on Version Tracker, and have noticed that a lot of apps written for Panther are not compatible with Tiger. Is this merely the developers fault, or is Tiger not back compatible with “old” apps?
#5) On May 21, 2005 06:30 AM
“Mac OS X Tiger: What’s Different - Improving On Perfection”
perfection - hardly
Not until these endless kernel crashes stop!
#6) On May 27, 2005 11:01 PM
upgraded to tiger and now safari crashes every time I close a window, or sometimes when I go to a new web site, it doesn’t work as good as it did before under panther…also mail can’t be searched and spotlight doesn’t let me actually go to a folder and open it so I have had to resort to the original search which is better, nice bells and whistles…but they pulled a “general motors” and released the car before all the bugs were worked out and I always thought apple was the “toyota’ of the PC world.
#7) On May 30, 2005 05:50 AM
I have used a pc for many years, just bought myself a new imac with 2 gig ram. Tiger came with it. it crashed often and programs shut down more times than i can keep count. I started to think apple was far less stable than a pc. I Formatted the hardrive and installed panther…very impressed with it’s stability. I think I will have to wait a year before tiger is ready to be used. I have the latest apple computer.
#8) On June 2, 2005 09:53 AM
I have a very thin black box that has started appearing around the active window or buttun. Do you know where it came from? How do I get rid of it?
#9) On June 5, 2005 07:59 PM
So far Tiger is very shiny and I enjoy it for the mest part but a major problem i have is the search function in a folder. I have some large folders in the range of 15,000 docs and in jag I could use the search bubble in that forlder to find any doc with say ipod in the title now in the same folder the same search of ipod will not bring in the full results. This albeit tiny change is driving me insane I just installed Tiger last week so I am still trying to sort this out it may be an easy fix however if it isn’t I may need to go back to Jaguar.
#10) On June 9, 2005 12:34 PM
Steve,
The black box you mention, is actually a new feature for OS X, if you hit APPLE F5 you’ll turn it off and the boxes will go away. It’s some new speech thing!!
Hope this helps.
#11) On June 20, 2005 10:23 PM
I had several issues with Tiger (Spotlight not finding folder names in my home folder, machine getting hot while CPU was at a mere 5% etc.) when I upgraded my installation of Mac OS X 10.3.9 (archive & install with keeping of settings). I tried to fix things here and there “manually”, but it wouldn’t ever get rid of all the issues.
Then I decided to bite the bullet and wipe my drive completely. After all there was a lot of cruft and mess because of my hacking around in OS X, playing with Fink and other stuff, using too much alpha and beta version of free software etc. Anway the clean install was done much quicker than I expected and I had my old data back on my machine in no time.
I haven’t had any problem whatsoever ever since. Everything works as advertized. So maybe the best cure for a messed up upgrade is, wipe your drive and do a clean install.
Having said that I think Apple can do better than that…
#12) On June 27, 2005 02:28 PM
AM enjoying the Tiger - mostly - Please let us all know if you can help with the following issues. I’ve trolled support and fora all over and find no sutiable answers. TIA.
iCal calendars revert to some type of default color scheme. I set the calendars to color code family members - ubt each time I re-launch iCal re-sets to its choice of colors. Not helpful for glancing at a week to see who ahs what going on…..help?, notes anyone?
Adobe Imageready CS no longer launches…. work around anyone?
Imation firewire tape drive no longer recognized in Retrospect.(yes I upgraded Retrospect for Tiger). chalk it up to ‘too bad, so sad?’ or do you know something I should?
I like widgets but how does one lanch them so that the dock hides itself? I really like widgets, really - they look so yummy!
Thanks all. Look fwd to some wisdom from ya’ll. yer pal, map
#13) On July 11, 2005 04:36 PM
I have the same problem with the iCal color scheme: Every so often (maybe more often after restarts and after waking up from sleep?) the calendar colors are reset to some truncated rainbow: very annoying.
Anybody knows what to do? Guesses are welcome too. Modify some plists? Which ones?
Thanks for any advise!
#14) On July 20, 2005 01:08 AM
Page Setup from Acrobat 6.0.3 has new menu “manage custom sizes” which seems to work fine only i am unable to name any of the custom sizes, they come in as untitled… or untitled1 etc. Anyone else encountered this problem, Maybe Acrobat 7 is the remedy!!