Ten things we still love about Tiger

Whether you're disappointed or pleased at the four-month delay for Leopard, there's no question that the progress, or lack thereof, on Apple's next OS release has been big news. With all the focus on 10.5, it seems to me that we've lost sight of all the wonderful things about our current main squeeze... so here goes: the top ten things we still love about Tiger.

#10: Still runs on the vintage hardware. Officially, Tiger installs on any Mac with built-in FireWire; unofficially, any machine with a G3 processor and adequate RAM will rock the casbah. I've seen happy campers on original Bondi iMacs and USB-only iBooks with Tiger, although most folks on low-end gear will need to disable Spotlight to get adequate performance.

#9: iChat AV multiparty video. Sure, it requires hefty hardware, and the connection troubleshooting is more finicky than Morris the Cat. It's all worth it for that moment when the entire family (or the far-flung workgroup) pop up on the same screen in glorious H.264 -- and for a lot cheaper than previous videoconferencing options.

#8: Safari RSS. Although the Konqueror-based browser made its debut in Panther Jaguar (displacing the unlamented IE 5.1), it really started kicking ass and taking names in Tiger. The addition of built-in RSS feedreader capability made Safari the browser to beat. Since 10.4 shipped, it may not have kept pace with the wider compatibility of Firefox or the wealth of options in Opera or Omniweb, but it's still the standard for Mac browsing and the future platform for Dashboard widgets and iPhone apps.

#7: Secure everything. Got to really, really delete that sensitive file? Secure empty trash. Need your home directory obscured from prying eyes with AES-128 encryption? FileVault (introduced in Panther, made better in Tiger). Want your VM pagefile scrambled in case your machine is purloined? Secure virtual memory. Working on a project for Uncle Sam that calls for Common Criteria certification, smart card two-factor auth and the rest of the alphabet soup? No worries, mate: with the possible exception of the nigh-legendary Mac OS 8.6, Tiger is the most secureable version of Mac OS yet.

#6: Exposé. [OK, mea culpa -- Exposé was introduced in Panther! Oops.] Some users might as well have the magical keys to hide and reveal the desktop, all windows or just one application tattooed on the insides of their eyelids, that's how often they use Exposé every day. Others (myself included) find the hot corner activation feature just the thing for the occasional practical joke. Either way, the 'aha!' moment when you first see it in action is universal.

#6, mean it: Dashboard. Yes, we know, everything's all widgets all the time nowadays, from Google to Yahoo! to Vista. Tiger's version (possibly inspired by Konfabulator, which continues life as Yahoo! Widgets) of these tiny, shiny applets set a graceful standard for the implementations now running rampant. Expect more shiny and extra oomph from Leopard's version.

#5: 64-bit BSD layer. OK, this ain't on the side of the cereal box, I grant you -- but for developers of scientific or imaging applications, the first step towards a fully 64-bit-enabled version of Mac OS X is a big deal; access to an exabyte-scale memory space lets databases and other large sets can use as much physical memory as can be crammed into the box. Tiger's implementation of 64-bit computing is limited to non-GUI applications for now, yet it lays the groundwork for Leopard's fully-64-bit system to come.

#4: Automator. Scripting is cool, sure, but having your own personal robot assistant? SO much cooler. By adding the modular, drag-and-drop ease of Automator to the power of AppleScript, Tiger gave the rest of us access to the macro tools long enjoyed by the script elite.

#3: Spotlight. Love it or hate it, the big cat's slickest trick is undoubtedly desktop search. With the ubiquity of filesystem-level indexing taking over from Sherlock and Finder Find in earlier versions, Spotlight's metadata controls have paved the way for search apps like Google Desktop for Mac (not to mention another popular desktop OS and its search feature).

#2/#1: Marklar and Boot Camp. Granted, these weren't in 10.4.0, but you have to give credit where due. Getting a skunkworks version of Mac OS X running (again, post-NeXT) on Intel hardware, in case IBM's PowerPC roadmap disappointed Apple engineers and designers? Genius. Ramping up developer tools and preview hardware to get the application base moved over to Universal binaries? Heroic. Pulling a dual-boot rabbit out of a hat and offering Mac owners the choice of running Windows XP on the same shiny new Mac hardware? Awesome.

See all 200+ features introduced in Tiger here.