Do I like it? Well, I pre-ordered the family 5-pack from Amazon (we have a lot of Macs around gulker.com). Spotlight is probably worth the price, and I really like that Mail has finally fixed the HTML forwarding bug, as well as added search, smart folders and a more intuitive account interface et al. Mail.app, with its Bayesian filters and Spotlight search is like a better, more capable, local Gmail - indeed it is a really useful piece of business software, IMHO, especially when wed with Apple's iCal calendar and Address Book apps.

Safari 2.0 is faster - Firefox fast - and supports direct rendering of RSS feeds, which is useful, and cool. It also renders PDF directly, which, unfortunately, because of its semi-support for forms, and the fact that it and Preview treat PDF forms differently, is probably going to confuse (and disappoint) users. Don't try to fill out a long PDF form in either ... it's probably not going to work the way you'd expect. It is handy to view flat PDFs that don't have any intelligence, but I (admittedly biased) will stick with Acrobat or Adobe Reader.

The Mercury News mentioned that Tiger blurs the line between the Net and local services and files, and that's a not unreasonable view. Tiger users don't usually need to care where the stuff of interest is... you can just get it, and deal with it, wherever. There are some .Mac improvements, but I think Apple really needs to do some serious innovation here. .Mac is only barely compelling in its current state, only attracting 500,000 of the 25 million or so Mac users. I subscribe, I like the easy iPhoto slide show sharing, I use the iSync feature, but it could do a lot more. More about Tiger anon...
Comments 10:13:10 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures