Tiger Excitement
I hate to get caught up in pre-release hype, be it for a movie, a piece of hardware, or heaven forbid an operating system. I have to admit though that Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) is starting to look really really cool, and since it’s actually shipping at the end of this month I feel like some amount of anticipation is OK (I’ll also be getting a new 15″ PowerBook from work to run it on, which will be sweet).
Apple has made some major tweaks to their website, but one of the best pages they have lists over 200 new features in even the smallest applications, several of which look like they will be extremely useful:
- Address Book Auto-Update LDAP Cards - Keep your server-based Address Book contacts synchronized with an LDAP based directory — perfect for mobile professionals. (This will be great for work)
- Birthday Calendar - Always know the birthdays of everyone in your Address Book with this automatic calendar in iCal. (Finally!)
- Bluetooth Headset Support -Use your Bluetooth headset as an input and output device, enabling hands-free audio conferences in iChat AV and more. (Going to be fantastic for Skype)
- Smart Folders - Take the results of a Spotlight search and save it as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add or remove documents from your Mac. (This is going to revolutionize my personal workflow)
- Secure WebDAV - Get support for the Kerberos and https protocol when accessing WebDAV volumes. (Yay I can safely mount my volumes remotely without having to tunnel through SSH!)
Wow, I would pay the price for Tiger for each one of these features individually, and they’re all coming in the same package, with at least 20 other things that I’m really excited about having integrated in to the base OS. Better yet, Amazon is currently offering a $35 rebate on a single-user license ($50 for the family pack). Accepting pre-orders now.
