Tiger Notes

I've been running the final developer seed of Tiger for several weeks and now that it's released I can talk about it without invoking Apple's wrath. Here are some of my favorite features and a few tips.

• Smart Mailboxes are my favorite feature. It's now very easy to have a single mailbox listing all of your unread messages or messages received today.
  
• Safari RSS presents news feeds in an attractive format, but still lets you use your favorite news reader such as NetNewsWire.

  

• Automator brings AppleScript power to non-programmers. Workflows can be created by dragging and connecting actions. Workflows can even be saved as finder plugins, which will appear in the contextual menu. Here's a simple one you can use to create a thumbnail for the selected image file.

  

• For developers, XCode now shows the number of errors or warnings in the dock icon and bounces the icon when a build is finished. PackageMaker has been completely overhauled. Most significantly, it no longer stores absolute paths to directories, which made it difficult to move documents between systems.
• Screen captures are now PNG rather than PDF format.
• iChat now has an option to show the currently playing track in iTunes. Other Tiger users will see an arrow that will go directly to that track in iTunes Music Store.
• Spotlight is no substitute for utilities like QuickSilver. It doesn't learn your shortcuts for commonly used files or applications.
• Safari always gives a warning for downloaded files which contain an application or otherwise may present a security risk.
• You can now change Energy Saver settings directly from the menu extra.
• I find that CPU usage is way down, according to Activity Monitor. Safari is no longer a resource hog.
• Some third party startup items may present a security warning at startup, but the system will fix it and they will work normally after that. What it really means is the ownership is wrong. Startup Items must be owned by root with a group ID of 0 (wheel) to avoid the message.