Review by B.L.

On the whole, OS X Tiger is a fantastic improvement on what was quite possibly already the most usable and elegant operating system on the market today.

The Dashboard feature – which allows you to run small applications in such a way that they’re only visible when you tap the f12 key (making them very easy to get to when you want them and not at all a source of clutter when you don’t) – is rapidly gaining a library of extremely valuable options that can allow you to look up information on the internet quickly, track useful information (weather, flights, packages, tv schedules), and other small utility functions that might otherwise clutter your desktop. I truly hadn’t thought that I would get much use out of this, but tapping f12 to check in on the weather report or look up the exact definition of a word has become something I do regularly.

Spotlight works wonderfully to find practically any information that you could want on your computer, and it finds it amazingly fast. It brings back results that are both faster and more useful than any other hard drive searching method I’ve come across.

Automator is something that mostly power users are going to love, but it’s a relatively simple way to make a series of actions you might do frequently into a process that you initiate and the computer takes care of the rest.

For those who like to develop applications or just try out writing a little bit of code, Tiger also includes a copy of the latest version of xCode, which is rapidly gaining popularity for developing OS X software (and it can easily be used to write and modify code in languages like Java that will run on other systems as well).

There’s a long list of other improvements, though many of them are deep enough in the system that a casual user won’t immediately notice them. What you will notice is that the applications you use are running faster than ever, because while Apple has released CoreAudio and CoreVideo so that developers can make better use of your video and soundcards and get some of the audiovisual load off of your processor.

OS X Tiger is now up to version 10.4.1, with 10.4.2 rumored to be in the pipeline on its way to release. So when you run Tiger, remember to click on the apple at the top left of your monitor and run System Update to be sure that you have all of the latest updates.

I simply cannot say enough about how well the Mac OS X operating system works. If you’re switching from something else the first few weeks of a new operating system are always a little awkward – even if you’re very comfortable with computers in general – but that rapidly passes and you start to notice some of the little but incredibly helpful ways that this operating system does its best to make your life easy and let you devote your energy to getting your work done rather than forcing you to fight battles with uncooperative software.