Apple has announced the ship date for its next generation operating system, Mac OS X Tiger. The operating system, which the company says includes hundreds of enhancements, will be available to customers beginning at 6:00 pm on Friday, April 29, 2005, at special events held at the company's retail locations and authorized retailers. Pre-orders for Tiger are being taken today at the online Apple Store -- Tiger will cost US$129.
"This is a must have upgrade -- it really can transform your Mac," Ken Bereskin, Apple's senior director of Mac OS X Product Marketing, told MacCentral. "Ultimately Tiger will change the way you use your computer."
In addition to the single license available for $129, Apple is also offering a Mac OS X Tiger Family Pack, a single-residence, five-user license that will be available for $199. The Mac OS Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchase a qualifying new Mac system on or after April 12 for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95. Tiger requires a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire.
"We are shipping ahead of what we promised, so we are feeling good about our ability to get out a major release earlier than when we said we would," said Brian Croll, Apple's senior director of Software Product Marketing. "We think that with this release we have established Mac OS X as the most innovative operating system ever created. It's going to be really hard for our competition to keep up with this one."
Spotlight
The most talked about new feature of Mac OS X Tiger is, without a doubt, Apple's desktop search technology, Spotlight. The new search allows the user to search files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications and any other file on the hard drive. Search results are displayed as you type and change dynamically as new documents are added to the hard drive.
Spotlight doesn't just search the file names, it also searches the meta-data including the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size and other details. Most documents, images and emails, already contain rich meta-data. Spotlight also indexes the content of a document, displaying results based on what appears inside a file or document, not just its title.
Using a separate Spotlight window, it is possible to sort results by by date or category. Searching for a particular person in Spotlight will not only bring up their contact information, but also authored or edited documents, images they have emailed, messages they wrote and messages you sent to them.
Dashboard
Billed as "Exposé for Widgets," Dashboard contains mini-applications that provide dedicated features and functions. Widgets also take advantage of OpenGL-based graphics and effects, giving smooth transitions when adding a Widget or changing options.
For example, widgets that have been demostrated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs include currency conversion, yellow pages, eBay auction tracking and weather reports. Other Widgets include flight information, tile game, stickies, a world clock, a translation tool, calculator, address book, iTunes controller, dictionary, stocks and iCal.
Safari RSS, private browsing, parental controls and PDF
Apple is making it easy for users of its homegrown Safari Web browser to track Web sites through RSS feeds. When you navigate to site that contains an RSS feed, Safari will show a button in the address bar, that when clicked will show a summary of new items on that Web sites page. The RSS feed can be bookmarked and configured to automatically check for updates at a specified interval.
Compatible with RSS 0.9, RSS 1, RSS 2 and Atom, Safari RSS allows you to sort feed results by Date, Title or Source. A built-in search box also allows you to enter keywords to read just the news you are interested in.
Sharing too much personal information on a public or home computer is becoming more of a concern everyday, but with Safari's new private browsing feature Internet surfers have a new way to cover their tracks from prying eyes. Using the private browsing feature no information about where you visit on the web, personal information you enter or pages you visit are saved or cached.
Safari's built-in parental controls allow parents to specify exactly which web sites children access by bookmarking only those sites on the Safari Bookmarks Bar. With Safari controls enabled, kids can browse only the sites in the Bookmarks Bar. New web addresses typed into the address field or non-approved sites linked from approved sites will not load on Safari.
Using the PDF engine built into Mac OS X Tiger, Safari can now display PDF documents inside a browser window. So, clicking on a linked PDF on the Web will no longer download it to your desktop, instead displaying it in a Safari window. You still have the option to save the PDF by clicking "Save" from the File menu.
Apple's included Mail application features many enhancements including the use of Spotlight's search technology to make Smart Mailboxes. These mailboxes dynamically fill themselves with email based on the criteria you enter.
Mail also includes a new twist on viewing images within emails. While Mail has been able to display inline images, Apple has added a slideshow capability, so inline images are shown in full-screen mode, complete with effects.
iSync and Mail now work closely together as settings can now be synced to your .Mac account. New accounts, changing or new rules and accounts will all be synced and made available to other Macs listed in your account.
.Mac and sync
Synchronizing information from your computers to .Mac has become much more centralized in Tiger. Sync and .Mac information is now built-in to the Mac OS System preferences, making the sync process integrated with many of Apple's applications.
Apple applications that will sync include Safari, iCal, Address Book, Keychain and Mail -- including multiple Mail accounts, Mail rules, signatures and Smart Mailboxes. Developers can also incorporate syncing into their applications as Apple makes sync-services available system wide.
