Three days after installing Tiger, I’m starting to feel quite comfortable in the new environment. I’m glad I made the decision to upgrade, and I think on the whole things are slightly better and faster than they were in Panther. Here are some random notes and thoughts.

• Tiger runs pretty well on my 600MHz G3 iBook, with 640MB RAM. I’m surprised, but very pleased, that hardware this old can cope so well with a brand new OS. Anyone got Tiger running on any lower-spec machines?
• I took a long look around what Dashboard has to offer, and decided that most of the time, I simply won’t need it. There’s only a few widgets that I imagine I might use often, such as the world clock and the converter. But the information they provide is easier and faster to find with my web browser, which is always open and doesn’t require me to switch to a virtual desktop environment. It bothers me that widgets have to be viewed separately from everything else. And the security concerns have yet to be addressed.
• Spotlight has not ousted Quicksilver as my main file and application launcher. That said, I’ve been using both for different purposes, and think they work just fine together. I’ve found myself using Spotlight to find stuff I’ve created in the last few hours, things that Quicksilver hasn’t had a chance to index yet. Spotlight’s instant update is very nice.
• Automator is by far my favorite new feature. I’ve spent hours fiddling around, trying out ideas for new workflows. I’m really excited by the possibilities, especially once more third-party developers get round to releases their own Automator Actions.
• Camino seems to have slowed to a crawl, even though I’ve downloaded the latest stable release, 0.8.4. I’m back with Firefox again for the time being, it seems to be behaving itself.
• The Finder is working faster than in Panther, and Get Info panels are nice and swift (about time too!). As with Automator, I think Smart Folders are going to be really useful for me; so far, I’ve not spent enough time exploring them. I created one to find about a hundred photos scattered across my drive that had the wrong date (the camera had come back in time from the year 2016, just to take photos of that party!). That made it really easy to hunt down all the offending files and deal with them swiftly.
• I’ve not seen any system crashes, although a few apps have frozen unexpectedly. Nothing terribly troublesome, though.
• The Spinning Pizza of Doom is appearing more often than of late; I suspect this is something that will be dealt with in coming Tiger updates. Again, this has been occasional and not too annoying.

I consider my installation a ‘no frills’ one; I can’t get rid of Dashboard, so I just choose to ignore it for the time being. On this G3 machine, the eyecandy isn’t even very eye-catching, so I don’t need to bother with it. I’m happy with Tiger and look forward to watching it develop and grow over the coming year.

Happy with Tiger?