The Brad Hole

Unless you've been living in a cave (or more likely, not using a Mac), you know that today marks the official release of MacOS X 10.4 - "Tiger".

I was lucky enough to get my hands on the GM version yesterday through work and installed it to prepare. So far, so good. I really like Spotlight - it's shockingly good at finding what I want, and some bonus things that I didn't even know I had. I also really like Dashboard. Unlike Expose, I suspect I'll be using Dashboard all the time. Right now, I'm searching for a hex calculator for it - that would r0xxor my b0xxors.

CodeWarrior 9.4 isn't so happy about 10.4, and I hear a CW 9.5 update is pending to address that. Notably, it won't build against the 10.4 BSD headers - you have to force it to use the 10.3.9 SDK for now. Interestingly, the 10.3.9 SDK contains some finally-revised OpenGL headers, including the long-missing VBO stuff. Interestingly, the glext.h headers for 10.4 include defines that hint at possible future extensions, like GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two.

One change I appreciate is for Nav Services dialogs. In 10.3, Cocoa apps had the ability to adjust the width of the column view in Nav Services (i.e. file picker) dialogs, but Carbon apps inexplicably did not. This is rectified for 10.4 - all apps now share the same file picker dialog and features.

I use Apple's Mail program, and it got a big facelift in Tiger. Thankfully, the drawer is gone, replaced by a splitter view a la Outlook and Entourage. Not so nice is the new color scheme for the splitter: light blue background with not-quite-light-blue circles containing white text that tells you how many messages are unread. On my 23" display, I can't read the number of unread messages for each folder - it's just a blue blob to my poor eyes.

There are a few other changes that will take some getting used to. I like to command-click on the title bar of windows in the Finder to move up folders in the hierarchy. More specifically, if I option-command-click to do this, the old window closes and the new window opens, which avoids window clutter. In 10.4, this has become a bit more cumbersome. I must command-click, then press option after the menu appears to achieve the same effect. I can't hold down option while command-clicking like I could in 10.3 and earlier.

The other annoyance is actually a bug left over from 10.3 that has become worse in 10.4. I use a USB switchbox to move between my 2 desktop Macs and my PC. Under 10.3, if I switched to another Mac and attempted to immediately use my keyboard or mouse, odds were great that I'd lose all USB devices and would have to force-restart my Mac. I could work around that for the most part by waiting 5 or so seconds after switching. When I forgot or got impatient, I had a second mouse connected directly that I used to attempt a clean restart.

Now under Tiger, the problem seems much worse. I've lost USB control twice today even after waiting the requisite 5 seconds from before. Worse, the mouse I have directly connected becomes inactive too. I may have to either get a better switchbox or find a better workaround, because I move back and forth between Macs constantly. I'd use a software solution like VNC, but it doesn't work with OpenGL windows, and believe it or not, they play a pretty large part of my day. :-)

Anyway, on the whole I'm very impressed with Tiger. I can't wait to see all the new Dashboard widgets and Spotlight plugins that other people develop. I've even had daydreams about writing a MacMAME spotlight plugin!