Okay, there’s a new Tiger in town, in addition to these two.
My copy of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) arrived yesterday, and I installed it starting about 6pm. Bad mistake, as it took about two hours to upgrade my installation of Panther on my 12″ G4 Powerbook.
Anyway, I did get it installed, and for the last day I’ve been playing with it. Here are some comments.
New Features
Spotlight: The most hyped feature of the new O/S is Spotlight, a program that pretty much indexes everything on your machine so you can find it quickly. The problem? If you have a lot of things on your machine, this can take a very, very, very long time. I really haven’t used it much, but I do know that when I took the laptop home and hooked it up to my two external 200GB drives it was very busy. I hooked up a large Samba share at the office and then ejected it – it made the system unusable. I’ll index it when I have more free time. I’ve notice that in all the search panes that use Spotlight, the option to search on, say, Name or Subject (in mail) is gone. It’s just “spotlight”. Current mood: undecided – once everything is indexed maybe I’ll like it more.
Dashboard: The Dashboard adds “desk accessory” like “widgets” to your desktop. By pressing F12 it brings up a bunch of small apps, like a calendar, calculator and a clock. Some of the widgets look pretty cool, like a FedEx/UPS tracker. But I already have a clock in the menu bar and a world clock app that takes up a lot less space than the clock widget in Dashboard. The calculator isn’t RPN, so while useful I’m waiting for a contributed one. The stickies widget is much less useful than the existing stickies app (you are limited to the exact size of the “note”). Current mood: nifty, but I’m not sure how useful.
Problems
Mail: I am a mail power user, and getting used to the new mail has been, to say the least, a real PITA.
The first problem was that the new mail kept crashing. I traced this down to a handy little app called “Mail Enhancer” that I used to match my signatures with my e-mail address (i.e. mail sent to opennms.org would have a different signature than mail sent to sortofa.com, and it would happen automagically). Since the app hadn’t been update in two years, I just removed the bundle file, and now I have to manually choose my signature.
Once mail stopped crashing, I noticed that my SSL certificates, which although self-signed worked fine under Panther, were generating alerts. I found this reference on the Apple site that seems to help some, although the certificate I use for outbound mail seems to still have issues.
Also, GPGMail failed to work. At least that was an easy fix with an available upgrade.
I’ve seen a lot of weird behavior and speed issues with Mail 2.0, so I can’t say that I’m happy with it. I do like the fact that the folders “drawer” is gone and replaced with a pane. But with little issues like the default sort on all of my windows being reset to new messages on the bottom while I like new messages on the top, well, it’s hard to get excited about it. In addition, the “mdimport” process (the indexing process behind Spotlight) seems to be constantly pegged when I am using mail.
_Fire:_I use the Instant Messaging client Fire. It allows me to connect to a ton of services, like Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, etc., from a single app. It’s broken in Tiger, but an update is available. However, that update doesn’t work with Jabber, which is the only instant messaging service I really care about.
Arrrrgh.
So I decided to switch to the more popular Adium. The latest version supports encryption, which was one of the main reasons I liked Fire. So far, I’m pretty happy with it.
SSH Agent: Outside of mail, my other killer app is SSH Agent. This is an application that manages public keys so that I can log on to remote machines without typing a password. I log into and copy files from a large number of systems, and having to remember a password on each one would be a real bother.
Of course, SSH Agent didn’t seem to want to work with Tiger. While this was frustrating, it inevitably led me to a better client, SSH Keychain. I installed it and things went swimmingly.
So, one point to take away from upgrading is that it helps to located those software projects that are still active.
Ooooh, one important benefit from Tiger with respect to SSH has to deal with my SSH connections through the company’s Linksys router. Ever since the router was installed, my session would time out after a few minutes of inactivity. This was extremely frustrating, especially when I was in the middle of something on the remote machine. The new ssh client in Tiger has a parameter called ServerAliveInterval. By editing /etc/ssh_config and setting “ServerAliveInterval 30“, my connections seem to stay up. w00t!
Cisco VPN: The final issue deals with the Cisco VPN client. It doesn’t work with Tiger, and I sometimes need it to connect to customer sites. The workaround I found was to use Microsoft’s Virtual PC, install the Windows client on a virtual windows instance, and use it.
Surprisingly, while Virtual PC throws a bunch of error messages and seems abnormally slow, it does work, at least well enough for me to use until the new client comes out.
I still haven’t really gotten to use Tiger yet, especially things like gcc 4.0 and Java 5, and I believe if my past experiences with Apple are any indication, I’ll grow to love it. I’ll update this saga in a couple of weeks.