30 April 2005

I intended to go to sleep early, and in the middle of the night stumbled onto the Ars Technica review of OS X Tiger: twenty long pages of thoughts and criticisms written by the geekiest Mac user you can find — an absolute must-read.

I had begun taking quotes out, but there were too many, so you’ll just have to read it for yourselves^*. In short: makes me want it. And it also makes me want to buy a Mac with a top of the line video card: if I buy a Mac mini, I guess I’ll end up being more frustrated at the graphics performance than the CPU’s.

^* a digest: the Aqua updates are as inconsistent as with every other update; the filesystem gets BeOS-style custom metadata, but doesn’t do much with it yet; Apple’s software, including Spotlight, doesn’t know about parentheses when it comes to boolean logic (even though the Spotlight command-line tool can process them perfectly); the Address Book and iCal store each entry, each event, in a separate file so Spotlight can index it, which is an odd way to manage the issue; Apple finally found an innovative solution to the file extensions / MIME types / creator codes conundrum; Quartz is even more optimized for modern video cards, but the optimization is turned off in version 10.4.0; Core Image and Core Video and Quicktime 7 are the bomb, except for the full screen display that’s only available with Quicktime Pro, cue rant (a copy and paste of what I wrote yesterday about .Mac); and lots of other things — like I said, you’ve got to read it. (If you’re a geek.)