Last week was a mix of all-out working and some rare relaxation, which is why I’m a week late in posting this: Glenn Fleishman and I reviewed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for The Seattle Times, which includes a goofy picture of me (and, again, has only Glenn’s name on the byline for the online version, even though we both wrote it): This Tiger purrs more than growls.
Although good common wisdom dictates that only fools install a new operating system the first few days it’s out, I went ahead and took the plunge. I made a full backup of my drive (of course!), then turned off most of the items in my Startup Items list (found in the Accounts pane of System Preferences), and used the Archive and Install method of installing Tiger. (Joe Kissell recommends using the Erase and Install method in his $5 ebook Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger, but I didn’t have a copy handy when I upgraded.)
I’m happy to report that Tiger is, so far, the most solid Mac OS upgrade I’ve run in a long time. Things that I expected to fail – QuicKeys X2, FileMaker 6 (both older versions) – are behaving well. A friend from Portland visited this weekend with Tiger installations that I helped apply to his PowerBook and his wife’s iBook, and both also went smoothly.
In TidBITS, we covered Tiger in a super-sized issue, and will be writing more about it this week. Although Tiger isn’t for everybody, it’s a good solid upgrade.
As for iMovie under Tiger, I haven’t noticed anything amiss, which is nice. A contact at Apple said that video performance within iMovie should be a little improved, thanks to QuickTime 7, but I haven’t had an opportunity to test it out. Let me know if you’ve upgraded to Tiger and see a difference.
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 