Apple OS X 10.4 - TIGER- first impressions

elektro80

This is not a review as such, but if you plan on updating right now.. then read this.

The new OS is great. Apple?s Dashboard, an overlay space in the Finder that lets you access various small apps called widgets, is just great. The RSS fetaures in Safari are really promising. Safari 2.0 is also pretty good. Overall speed has improved but you will mainly notice this if you have a fairly recent mac. However, there are issue still. Tiger is now 64-bit and if you have a recent mac you will be able to throw in as much ram as the box can hold. 8 gigs or more? No probs. Midi timing and audio core seems to have been improved. This combined with the latest Logic update means that a Mac running Logic is one extremely hot item right now. DP seems to work fine too as well as Cubase SE. Some 3rd party plugins might misbehave though.

But, many plugin installer apps seems to have problems, as well as various Adobe installers. Diskwarrior won?t work well and the same goes for many 3rd party system level tools. Please don?t update your mac if you are using it as a DAW. be prepared to wait a few weeks until all your registered software has been proved to be Tiger compliant by the software manufacturers.
Bottom line: Tiger is great.. well worth the upgrade cost, but you really shouldn?t do it now unless you are absolutely sure the installed software will behave OK.

The list of "new" features is pretty long and you can read more about this at http://apple.com . Everything seems to run OK, but I have yet stil to check out how the Server version plays. I haven?t recieved that box yet.

So, it is up to you to check out all the software you have installed right now, and look for compatibility info and updates. That said, there are a lot of fairly old apps that run just fine.. perhaps better.. on Tiger.

After the installation, Tiger will seemingly be very sluggish. This is because at initial startup Spotlight, the "new" disk indexing and search engine, will perform a full indexing of everything it can get its dirty little fingers at. You might want to disable Spotlight indexing if you are using your box as a DAW. Actually, my old advice about having a tuned boot volume for DAW only use is still valid. OS X won?t make a mess of your disk, but some system features should be disabled on a DAW. This goes for various Dashboard widgets, Spotlight indexing, iCal syncs, automatic system updates and more. However, Dashboard offers a very convinient interface for various audio utilities and Spotlight is really cool.

seraph · Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 6:44 am Post subject:

I am not feeling the upgrade frenzy yet so I'll just wait a little looking at the corpses of the adventurous ones floating on the Upgrade river Twisted Evil

elektro80 · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 4:25 am Post subject:

Our member Hyde just reported some Tiger midi problems.

elektro80 · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 7:36 am Post subject:

Apple is now seeding the 10.4.1 update. It might be out officially as early as friday/saturday.