Paradise Pete's Journal: OS X 10.4 Early Impressions

I've had 10.4 installed for only about a day now, so no doubt many of the gripes will be easily solved as I discover more.

Mail

• Improved searching is great.
• Why is there so little control over the sounds?
• The interface seems to be "de-proved." But maybe I just need to get used to it. It sure seems harder to see at a glance the state of the folders. I did go get Cage Fighter, which helps a bit.
• Why did they remove the "Quote Level" from the contextual menu? I can use the keyboard, sure, but chances are I've just selected some text and my hand is on the mouse, not the keyboard. And I'd rather have it right there than have to go to the menu bar.

System Preferences

• What? No more toolbar? I can't drag the frequently used ones to the top anymore? Am I missing something, or did they make it less usable? And here's an aside: I notice that System Preferences is one of the few apps that doesn't have Preferences.

Safari

• Impressively fast. Seriously fast.
• I just noticed in typing this that it supports multiple undo. I don't know if that's new or not.
• It's able to deal with some sites it couldn't before. I don't who was at fault, but either way they work now.
• Overall, simply a first rate browser.

Widgets

• So far, pretty much a toy to me. Seems like a big layer of stuff just to bring back desk accessories, but then I'm pretty sure I just don't get it yet, and the light will come on.
• Does World Clock actually work? When I flip it over to set the city I can't flip it back. There's no "Done" button or anything, so it just sits there, taunting me with its back turned. It looks like maybe it's missing some resources.
• Many of them seem pointless, as if someone said "Well we've got iTunes, and we've got widgets, so I guess we'd better make an iTunes widget." How is that any more convenient than going to the actual app?
• The translator, which I was very pleased to see and thought I would use in place of going to babelfish or google, is pretty clunky. It's slow, with no indication that it's doing anything, and the interface sucks. How do i actually invoke a translation? Do I tab, click on the squiggles, what? If it weren't so pokey I could use the feedback to figure it out, but for right now I don't really know what makes it "go." It's also very easy to make it appear to be wrong.
• I really like the weather widget. It looks great and does what I want.

Finder

• Why do all the apps now say .app? It gives it such a "Windows-y" feel. Is that to protect me from accidentally running a program or something? If that can be turned off I'd sure like to know how.
• Can I get some control over the interface sounds? It seems like such an obvious desire that I wouldn't be surprised if there's already a third-party utility to do so.

X 11

• I generally use this for only one thing, running gnuBackgammon. For whatever reason, it (gnubg) takes much longer to start up now.
• I now have to click twice on the dock icon to get it to come to the front.

Spotlight

• I guess it's great. I find myself making "interface" blunders, though. I'll get used to it, but it somehow seems unfinished. Maybe it's just me, because I can't be more specific. I think part of it is that my expectations were so high.

That's all that comes to mind right now. I really haven't yet done all that much with it. More to come. Comments are encouraged, especially where I'm wrong about things.

tiger

[venicebeach]

Does World Clock actually work? When I flip it over to set the city I can't flip it back. There's no "Done" button or anything, so it just sits there, taunting me with its back turned. It looks like maybe it's missing some resources.

That's odd. It works for me, has a little "Done" button on the back.

I really like the weather widget. It looks great and does what I want.

Me too. The shining sun looks awesome.

Why do all the apps now say .app? It gives it such a "Windows-y" feel. Is that to protect me

Re:tiger

[Paradise Pete]

That's odd. It works for me, has a little "Done" button on the back.

Yeah, other people too. It bothers me that maybe the install didn't go quite right.

You can turn it off in the Finder Preferences under Advanced.

Thanks. I don't know why I didn't think to look there. I tried View Options and the System Preferences.

So far this release has been a bit flakier than I would like. I'm getting lots and lots of disk activity (May be Spotlight indexing? If so, it'd be nice to be able to schedule it. My under

Re:tiger

[venicebeach]

Yeah, I've read that spotlight is not really done indexing when it says it is done indexing. It indexes filenames etc. for the first few hours, but after that it spends a loooong time (perhaps weeks) sifting through the insides of documents. So if that's the case, hopefully things will speed up over time.

I have the same issue with Safari, sometimes it hangs for a very long time. I have my activity monitor open constantly to try and track down what is giving me all the excessive disk activity and such