the ryan king

Updates at bottom.

I bought and installed Mac OS X version 10.4 (aka, Tiger) yesterday. Here are a collection of my reactions:

• The new Mail.app interface will take some getting used to. I’m elated that they chose to do away with the drawer, making it a bit easier to navigate around without using the mouse (more about his later), but I think the colors of the left sidebar and the change away from bolding folder names with new messages make it a bit harder on the eyes. Perhaps I just need to adjust, though.
• I was a bit annoyed to see that Spotlight used Cmd-Space by default, since I use that for X-Tunes (and have been using it for such for at least 2 years). Thankfully, I was able to change the Spotlight key to F8.
• I’m amazed that X-Tunes still works, though it hasn’t been updated since 2003.
• The update to Tiger seemed to reset the default browser to Safari. Ok, so Safari’s supposed to be all hip and cool with RSS, but I’m still going to use NetNewsWire and Shiira.
• Shiira is having some problems. Probably something to do with WebKit updates.
• I like DashBoard, but I wish there were a way to move the focus between widgets without using the mouse. Specifically, I want to be able to pull up the Dashboard and activate the calculator, do my calculations, copy the result and put the Dashboard away- all without touching the mouse.
• Why does my scroll-wheel mouse suddenly scroll alot slower? Seriously. That shit sucks- I have to spin the wheel a dozen times now to get anywhere.

Back to the issue of not using the mouse. For me, the more often I have to move my hand between the keyboard and mouse, the worse the interface is. Anything that allows me to key my hands on the keyboard is a win for me. Current tools for this include: X-Tunes, LaunchBar, Terminal and now Spotlight. I hope the Dashboard will be helpful, too.

Update: It appears that Apple has changed their screenshot format from PDF to PNG. Interesting.

Update 2: Upgrading to Shiira 1.0 has fixed most of the problems.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 12:17 pm.