By Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 2, 2005 12:00 AM

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.

Mail: Beyond the new interface, Smart Mailboxes and Spotlight searching I wrote about, Mail in Tiger is also much smarter about attached photos. You click a button to launch a full-screen slideshow of them, then click once more to import those shots into your iPhoto library.

Safari: This version of Apple's Web browser adds three overdue features: It can import and export bookmarks files; it can save a Web page, graphics and all, as a single archive file; it can display PDFs inline without needing a separate plug-in.

iSync: I've had a love-hate relationship with Apple's synchronization utility over the years. With Tiger, it finally feels like it's growing up. ISync is much faster at copying contacts lists and calendars to a Palm handheld and a cell phone. Apple also says that iSync's device support can be expanded by other developers, not just Apple's own. That's especially good to hear, considering how weak iSync's Palm support still is.

VoiceOver: Tiger adds this new "accessibility" option for users with impaired vision. VoiceOver will speak aloud, in a synthesized voice, whatever's on the screen: The label on a button, the title of a menu, the text of a Web page. I'm not exactly qualified to say if this really works for a blind person, but, having read complaints about Apple's accessibility support before, I can at least applaud the company for doing something about this.

Other bundled software: In every Mac OS X review I've done, I've found myself unexpectedly pleased by the little additions at the margins -- small but valuable changes to the many small programs bundled with this operating system. Here's a short list:

* The Preview program now also takes screen grabs and can handle pretty much every PDF task imaginable; I can't think of any reason to keep Adobe's much bigger, slower Adobe Reader program on hand.

* The iCal datebook program can now automatically add birthdays, as noted in the Address Book, to your appointments as their own calendar category (complete with a little birthday-cake icon).

* If a program crashes, Tiger, like Panther, pops up a box inviting you to send a bug report to Apple -- but its default choice is now simply to reopen the program in question.

* The System Profiler utility provides much more info about what hardware and software makes up your system and groups this data in a cleaner fashion.

* Both the Print & Fax system-preferences pane and every print dialog box now includes a link to order more ink for your printer from Apple's online store. (However, Apple apparently has yet to learn of my own HP model's existence.)

* With an external monitor connected, the Displays control panel includes an option to rotate the monitor image by 90, 180 and 270 degrees. This must be for the specialized monitors that can pivot from portrait to landscape modes (many graphic designers employ them), but I can also see this being used to play pranks on co-workers.

Finally, I've been reading some distinctly enthused commentary from programmers on various blogs about two foundation-level technologies incorporated into Tiger. One, Core Image, speeds up the display and processing of graphics. The other, Core Data, makes it easier to add powerful data-handling functions to programs. These are the sort of things that may have zero effect on a person's use of a computer today, but in a year or two could wind up making a notable difference.

If my column and this newsletter aren't enough Tiger talk for you, I'll point you to a pair of reviews so comprehensive that I haven't even had time to read them yet (as of Friday evening). One is by Ars Technica's John Siracusa. The other comes from MacInTouch's Robert Mohns.