infobong.com

Dang, Apple moves fast! I submitted a battery exchange request on Friday, and a new (hopefully non-exploding) battery for my iBook just arrived. I thought it might have been shipped from a depot in Austin, but, no, the battery was shipped overnight from California. I see a lot of complaints about Apple's service and support on various blogs, but I wonder if Apple users just expect a higher level of quality. In comparison, my last laptop caught fire, and, when I called their customer service, the seemed completely unconcerned.

In other news, I installed OS X "Tiger" over the weekend. I thought I would wait for the reviews to come back before taking the risk of losing files or gunking up my computer. Actually, I wasn't going to bother with it at all until my students told me a "bare" version is available at the campus computer store for $15, which is a substantial savings over even the $75 student license.

Installation was completely straightforward for me. I think I was thinking of all of the hassles involved in upgrading different versions of Windows, but this is more like a Service Pack, albeit a $129 Service Pack, than a new version of the OS. Unlike upgrading Windows, there aren't any funky new interfaces I have to learn right away, and all of my files are in the right places.

Tiger has given me a modest performance improvement, and that alone is probably worth $15. The two major new features, as everyone has said, are Dashboard and Spotlight.

Dashboard is pretty gimmicky; I installed Konfabulator when I first got my iBook to keep track of memory use, but the application itself is a memory hog. I've got a system monitor running in Dashboard, but pushing "F8" when I want to check memory isn't the most convenient or accurate way to monitor performance. The best thing I've found, is the "Movie Locater" plugin, which will be nice when I want to quickly look up a picture in class. I tried to make a similar widget for searching the UT Library Catalog, but my attention span ran out before I figured out how to get it to work. I'm sure Prentiss or whomever could figure out the code in 10 minutes. I'll make a logo if you do the code...

I can see why people are excited about Spotlight, but I don't usually have a hard time keeping track of my files, except for images, and, unless there's some kind of metadata system for images, I don't see how it will help. But this leads me to the features I wish were included. First, I wish that Apple would include thumbnail views of images in the OS, a la Windows XP, so I don't need to open iPhoto to see thumbnails. In addition, I had read rumors that Tiger would include NTFS support, but I am still unable to write and delete on my old NTFS volumes I've put in external chassis.

Finally, the Safari browser has some nice additions, including the ability to view .pdf documents in the browser. I thought it was a hassle when Safari would download .pdfs to the desktop, and then open them in Preview. This is certainly an improvement. On the other hand, I don't like the fact that when I right-click on the "back" button, it brings up a context menu for customizing the browser bar. I want to see the last ten pages. I know I can left-click-and-hold to get that context menu, but I wish I could switch it back to the old context menu. Finally, Safari's history is still that stupid scrolling menu - I want a tree interface like the one used in Firefox or even IE.

Yikes, that was quite the geek-out, but those of you who haven't seen me in a while, you now know I'm really turning into an Apple guy. I guess I've owned five computers in my life, and three of them have been Apples, so maybe I was just flirting with PC-ness for the last five years.