Reviewing Apple's Tiger Release

Early Friday evening, a friend who lives within sight of the Apple Store in Arlington, Va., sent me this brief text message:

"There are almost 200 people in line at the Apple store waiting for Tiger at 6PM."

It's a rare software release that draws that kind of anticipation, even among hardcore geeks. But Apple's Mac OS X updates still get that kind of attention. I gave Tiger -- aka Mac OS X 10.4 -- my own evaluation over last week, and you can read my assessment here.

I'll be online at 2 p.m. ET today to take your questions about Tiger, and if this chat goes anything like earlier Apple-centric discussions, I'll be online for a while past 3 p.m. If you can't be online this afternoon, submit a question or comment early.

In the rest of Sunday's personal-tech section, we had a look at what Microsoft's been up to with its own next-generation operating system, nicknamed Longhorn.

Leslie Walker assessed RealNetworks ' newest music service in her Web Watch column, and we had reviews of the alien-shooting game Area 51, a fantasy adventure called I of the Dragon and a photo-magnet-making kit from Pixifun. In Help File, I discuss what to do when somebody sends a file that your word processor can't read -- and how you can avoid being that somebody.

Tiger Testing

I gave Tiger a more intensive review than I usually can; since I had neglected to send the Mac mini I'd reviewed this winter back to Apple, I could plug it into my standard PC monitor, keyboard and mouse, then do all my work in Tiger for this week. (Our recent move to a new story-editing program that's run entirely off a central server through a Web interface allowed me to do this.)

As a result, I had way more notes than I could possibly fit into the column. Fortunately, I have this newsletter to soak up the excess -- the tidbits that couldn't quite earn a spot among the 950 or so words that make up my column, but which I still think are interesting.

Installation: Because Tiger ships on a single DVD, instead of multiple CDs, it's a pretty much brainless install -- pop in the disc, click a Restart button to boot off that, click Enter a few times, then come back in maybe 45 minutes. (If your computer only has a CD-capable drive, you can order a copy of Tiger on CD-ROMs for $10 shipping and handling.)

You can, however, greatly trim the amount of time and disk space a Tiger install will consume. Click the "Customize" button in the installer screen, and you can decline the customary installation of 13 foreign-language packs (449 MB total), a lineup of foreign-language fonts (129 MB) and a set of printer drivers (1.2 GB). (A Tiger update should take about 2.7 GB in all.)

User interface: After extensive tweaking in earlier OS X releases, the basic elements of OS X -- the Finder program that manages files and folders and the Dock that provides access to active and regularly-used programs -- don't change much in Tiger. But Dock icons, when right-clicked, now offer a few more options: You can have this program run automatically every time you log in or just have its icon kept in the Dock full-time for easier access. Since the first action is done so rarely (in my experience), while the second was already easy to do, I'm not sure this contextual menu needed the added clutter.