I’ve spent last week updating to Tiger as well as changing e-mail client from Entourage to Mail. My hard disc was pretty crammed and I wanted to redo partitions so I backed everything up and did a clean install. Boring boring boring.
So far I’m not impressed neither by Mail or any of the supposedly great new features that’s supposed to sell Tiger.
Spotlight might eventually become useful but it has a number of serious flaws at the moment. Most notable and annoying:
- When searching if I take a look at a file mail or similar I can’t use CMD + TAB to bring Spotlight back in focus. I first thought I had to hide all other applications than Finder to get it back in focus until I saw a hint on the net that CMD + SPACE will bring it back to the foreground. Either Spotlight should be registered as a separate application or it should come to the foreground when Finder is selected.
- Boolean search is so limited that it’s hardly a joke. AND is permitted but not parenthesis or OR.
- Im’ not impressed by the speed.
- Spotlight starts searching as soon as you start typing. I would have prefered it to wait until I’d typed all of the search string.
As for Mail it might be that it takes a while getting used to. Here’s some annoyances so far:
- No keyboard shortcut for bringing the Message Viewer to the foreground.
- Importing took horrendously long (several days with my rather large mailboxes). It turned out that Mail’s transforming all mailboxes into separate files for each mail apparently in order for Spotlight to be able to search them. I’m wondering how much extra disc space this costs. It also implies that Thunderbird and other mail clients at current are not able to import mails from Mail.
- The pane at the left side of the window giving an overview of all mailboxes has a major latency when shifting to new mail boxes. If I open a mailbox (I’m filtering a lot of mails) scan quickly through new mails and then jump on tot he next mailbox the number of unread mails in the left pane often doesn’t update. Stupid.
- No way of importing rules. This seems to be a general issue with all mail clients I’ve investigated in the last week: Entourage X Mail Eudora Thunderbird. C’mon it can’t be that difficult to read a XML file.
- Importing the address book was a major hassle. In the end I ended up exporting from Entourage editing the text file importing to Thunderbird from there importing to Mail… Really stupid
- I can’t find a way to remove quoting when composing mails. Gotta be a way of doing it though.
- The most recent Max version (4.5.5) added this great feature where you can copy all or parts of your patch and paste as text. The most obvious use of it is for reporting problems or posting questions at the max mailing lists. But then Mail decided to be “helpful” and instead of pasting the text that was copied it creates a TIFF image file and attach to the mail instead. To avoid this I first have to paste the selection in a text editor reselect the text copy and paste into Mail. This is ***REALLY*** stupid.
- When I’m replying to or forwarding a mail that has been opened in a separate window the original mail is closed. Excuse me but what if I need both to reply and forward? I hate this kind of “user-friendly” assistance.
The best thing about Mail so far is that if it crashes it remember what mails were open when started again. But then again I’d rather prefer it not to crash. Also the spell-checking works well.
I’ll give Mail a go for a while more to see if the impression improves. If not I hope that a simpler way of porting mails to Thunderbird will become available.
As for Dashboard/Widgets it basically boils down to having a lot of not very important applications running in the background taking up real and virtual memory estate. They are supposed not to do any processing when in the background but some of them still keeps running (check Activity Monitor). One of them ToDo Tracker also seems to have a serious memory leak. Having run for 2 days doing basically nothing it had chewed more than 2 Gb of virtual memory. Checking the Console Log it seemed that it was in debug state creating huge logs about nothing. When I first started using Tiger it felt very slow and non-responsive as compared to Panther. All of that improved substantially when I shut down that widget. A widget for quick notes and ToDos will be helpful but it’s not gonna be this one.
Once I got rid of the ToDO Tracker widget and Spotlight had been index all of my discs the core of Tiger itself seems to be good though. Having reduced the number of widgets to an absolute minimum (I’ve only got 512 Mb ram installed at the time being) it also feels a bit faster than Panther. And I’m looking forward to the ability to use more than one sound card at the same time.
I’m starting to think that macOSX no longer is able to handle Norwegian characters æøand å properly. They got screwed up when imported to the address book and I see the same thing happening in other progrems as well.
Just to end up on a grumpy line in mood with the rest of the post: I’ve been reading lots of reviews online on Tiger as well as the various applications and features of it. The most silly thing about a lot of Mac users is that they are more concerned about what it looks like than how it’s functioning. It’s really lame when reviewers start explaining how the scroll bar has changed color-wise from blue to grey to a bluish gray. What do I care?
Hrmfff.
