UnTiger

Tim Bray remains down on Apple's OS X 10.4 aka Tiger. In a recent post on his blog, he finds fault with both Spotlight and Dashboard, the two new killer features of Tiger. He notes that email search with Spotlight "is egregiously stupid; it starts searching as you start typing, retaining all the settings from your last search which (in my case at least) are almost certainly wrong, forcing you to stab frantically at the control buttons (which dont appear until youve started) to point it in the right direction. But the worst thing is, it just cant find emails that I know are there when I search for words that I know are in them. (There is a solution: Open a Terminal, drill down to the directory where the messages live, then use grep). Then he goes on to note that Dashboard is largely a bit of unnecessary bloat-code (my words, not his), but concludes positively, noting: "Fortunately, the OS X value proposition—a decent Unix with a decent UI—remains solid. Im assuming that the next big cat will actually include something interesting."

I have to say that for the most part, I agree with him. I've learned to like Spotlight, but the email searching capabilities aren't by any means the bees knees. I can, and do, do without Dashboard.