Tiger has arrived!

Since the day Steve Job's introduced the Mac Mini, iPod Shuffle and a preview of Apple's latest operating system called OS X 10.4 Tiger, I have been oogling over the operating system. Since then, it was relentless scouring over the internet, in crave for more information about the latest operating system. The more information I found, the more I want Tiger!

The arrival
Finally, after a gruesome 3-5 months of waiting, the operating system was finally launched on the 27th of April 2005. The operating system arrived at Malaysian shores; but there was one issue - the PRICE. At RM 499 with no educational discount available in Malaysia, purchasing the operating system would mean burning a BIG whole in my pocket.

The wait continued...
On the 7th of May, my family decided to drop by Low Yat Plaza - and there it was, standing tall in the Apple Stores were boxes of Apple's latest operating system. Realizing the fact that I wouldn't be able to purchase a copy, I left for the higher floors and roamed around some stores and see if I could pick up anything.

The lunch
After picking up some items, a USB cable for my phone (which I later found was the wrong cable - long story) and some Pau's, my parents, Stella and I had lunch at this Hong Kong Restaurant (forgot its name - it's right across from Coffee Bean) which is popular for it's HUMONGOUS "Ha Kows". My dad and I was chatting and there I was, ranting about the fact that I couldn't purchase the operating system because of its super high price - and then a magical moment, he said "Why don't we buy a copy now! :)". I was shocked. I gave this grin and 20 minutes later, we found ourselves in an Apple Store, holding a brand spanking new copy of OS X Tiger... joy!

The return of the Tiger
From the point of having Tiger in my hands, all I had in my mind was to get this cat installed into my Mac Mini. The time finally arrived. It's 9pm. Some of my most important files ie. assignments etc were backed-up to my server. 20 minutes later, I was ready... time to bring life to the cat stuck in that beautifully packaged, black glossy box.

The Installation
Upon inserting the installation disk, I was prompted to restart the machine. After numerous clicks and a wait of 40-50 minutes... behold... OS X Tiger.

The feeling inside me for excruitiating. It was a blend of excitement and an anxiety, exciting to see the brand new OS X installed into my beloved Mac Mini but anxiety due to concerns if the new OS will meet my expectations.

The experience
After the restart, the only noticeable thing which I saw, vastly different from the startup screen of the old OS (Panther) was that the fluid blue background behind the login screen had a bit more lines - more refined in fact.

I clicked on my face, keyed in the password and hit "enter".

The OS took a number of minutes to load. First, it was my personalized wallpaper which I crafted with my Adobe Photoshop skills to give me words of encouragement, then it was the revealing of the dock, the desktop icons and finally, the loading was over.

Perhaps it was because I chose the option of "upgrade" instead of a "clean install", as such, the impact wasn't that great. Most if not all of my personalization in my account was retained, so was my personalized Hard Drive icon, compliments of iconfactory.com.

One of the more noticeable changes to the operating system is the menu bar - to be more precise the right most section of the menu bar where the clock resides. There is now a little magnifying class icon symbolizing the "spotlight" technology Steve Jobs have been ranting about since the public preview of Tiger.

Upon clicking it, a dropped down menu revealed - stating - "spotlight is indexing the drive". My first response was WHAT? Does this mean that I will always have to wait for Spotlight to index my drive prior to searching for newly added files? That would be very similar to Microsoft's Desktop Search! Then why bother? - Before I give you - the reader negative perceptions on Spotlight... please keep those negative thoughts away and keep reading.

Minutes later, Spotlight completely indexed all my assignments, PDF documents, manuals, e-mails, music, videos - literally everything meaningful to me in my drive. This is when the test begins. I keyed in the letters "Monash" and out comes a list, arranged by file type showing me the various e-mails I have sent and received, assignments which I have written, contact information of Monash coursemates and loads loads more. To ensure that Spotlight has a seemless integration with the Operating System with every file indexed the moment it enters the drive with ZERO waiting time - as promised by Steve Jobs, I took the liberty in creating a Word Document containing the word "baby". After saving the file, I went to Spotlight, keyed in "baby" and Whoala! Out comes the file I saved seconds ago! So there... the upgrade was worth it after all!

Smart folders
One feature I really really really love about the new cat is it's smart folders! Imagine a world where you save your files anywhere, in any drive and in any folder and just FORGET about where you left them. After all that, you create "smart folders", these are basically folders that reveals documents, images... and everything else that is related to a particular keyword. For example, if I have got pictures of my dog "girl girl" and essays about her life history lying all over the place, smart folders provide a one stop solution in consolidating everything and anything that has to do with the keyword "girl girl". The next time I write another bibliography on my dog, no matter where I have the document placed, Spotlight will detect it and have it listed in the smart folder which I created for "girl girl". Smart!

Widgets...
Ooh.. the name sounds so similar to gadgets that I feel like I'm already drooling all over it! :) Widgets, or should I say mini applications which are installed and used in a sub-environment called "Dashboard". "Dashboard" is a place where you'll find all these mini applications such as mini-calculators, miniature version of iTunes, a miniature calendar, package trackers, flight trackers, language converters, dictionaries... and the list goes on and on and on. The whole idea is that these mini-applications run in the background and whenever you need to say, check the time and weather in Nebraska or get up-to-date information on specific flights such as current speed and altitude, all these are accessible by as click of a button. Since Tiger's launch, many developers such as Amazon with it's Amazon.com have jumped on the Widgets band wagon.

Spotlight integration is seen EVERYWHERE!
Just imagine, you open up your favourite application such as Word or Adobe Photoshop and the thought of just saving the file into that particular folder you created, requiring you to dig deep within the countless levels of directories to to save that masterpiece you created with Adobe Photoshop is giving you a headache - then you thought to yourself, wouldn't it be easier to just search for the directory, click on it, type in your Masterpiece's file name and click save? The solution is available today. Spotlight is intergrated into the "open" and "save" dialogue boxes of literally every application there is made available for the Mac platform...

So there, it took me almost 3 days to get this out. It's been saved as draft many times due to the inherrent workload which has been placed upon me. Now that I'm 75% done with my assignments, I can finally complete this post.

Should I discover more about Apple's new Cat, I'll have it posted.

In the mean time... if you have the opportunity, go experiment with this brand new Cat... :)