Comments on: The Lazy or the Tiger? http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/ Things that Eric A. Meyer, CSS expert, writes about on his personal Web site; it's largely Web standards and Web technology, but also various bits of culture, politics, personal observations, and other miscellaneous stuff Fri, 10 May 2013 11:50:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Paul http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-16340 Paul Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:13:45 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-16340 Google Earth (despite it telling you frequently that it doesn’t) will run on Panther…
Does fall over quite a bit (although cleanly) but as it’s essentially a toy, I’m not sure
this is such a big issue.

]]> By: nerkles http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-14118 nerkles Thu, 02 Feb 2006 23:00:40 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-14118 If you’re worried about ruining your working system, use SuperDuper to make a bootable clone of your whole system on an external drive (or other partition). Then if anything goes wrong, you can clone the old system back. SuperDuper is *awesome* for this kind of thing (and for everyday backups).

Anyway, I’ve upgraded (as opposed to clean install) about 25 machines from Panther to Tiger, and only ran into a few minor problems. I rarely had to reinstall anything.

I doubt you’ll have much if any trouble, and it’s *well* worth it. Just be sure to run disk repair, repair permissions, and preferably DiskWarrior first to make sure your Panther system is all clean (do all that before cloning too).

Clearing out caches first will save you time on the repair & backups.

So to sum up:
1) run every disk repair thingy you have
2) make bootable clone
3) upgrade

]]> By: Alex http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-14006 Alex Thu, 02 Feb 2006 04:29:33 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-14006 Do it. On my AlBook 15″ 1.5, the performance difference was quite noticeable, especially after a clean install (updated immediately to 10.4.4). Probably thanks to Quartz Extreme and Core Video improvements, I dunno. I’ve had no stability issues (except for Virtual PC, but that’s another story) and don’t think any apps needed an upgrade per se, based on a quick check beforehand (although I took the opportunity to get the latest versions of them anyway). I actually find the Dashboard quite helpful for a few reasons – calculator in one keystroke being one of them – and Spotlight has come in handy numerous times; even if I know where a file is, I can get there faster by just hitting Command-Space and typing its name. I’d agree with the 1GB RAM comment though, but that could be from trying to run a few big Java apps (Zend Studio and Test Track) at once along with Carbon/Cocoa apps (especially as Firefox, Adium, Terminal and OmniOutliner are always open at least). Mail does feel like a step (or maybe just a “Shuffle”?) backwards, more of a “kiddie” interface than Panther. But overall the whole environment is an improvement and a joy to work with. A final thought: I have an original (Bondi!) iMac still on Panther, and next to it Tiger just seems somehow more… refined. Maybe less lickable, but more usable on a long day (imho).

]]> By: Sol http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-13046 Sol Fri, 27 Jan 2006 03:28:35 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-13046 Ha ha, I’m in an identical situation. I have DP G5, but it’s my main production machine and I know that any upgrade means a fair amount of work and downtime. Upgrading is further complicated by all the Unix software I’ve compiled and got set up the way I like, which means more manual changeover is needed. I’m still waiting a little bit longer, because I want to complete my current project, but I agree with you that at this point new software is beginning to shift to require 10.4. Tiger added so many interesting aids from a developer standpoint (such as Core Data) that I can see a lot of dev companies (especially small ones) would rather save the time required to re-implement comparable features in Panther at this point and just go Tiger only. So shift time I guess. On the bright side, last I heard from Apple a lot of the core OS X APIs have finally been frozen, so in the future we may see more long term support.

]]> By: Poncho http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12964 Poncho Tue, 24 Jan 2006 20:05:44 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12964 Tiger is a great upgrade and I can’t imagine not using some of it’s less fancy features, but for the likes of Dashboard, spotlight etc. I could live without.

A friend of mine installed Tiger on his 1.2Ghz 15″ Powerbook and lost use of his bottom RAM slot as a result of a “Known” problem. Apparently Tiger upgrades the firmware effectively irreversibly damaging the logic board.

Just do a quick search on the Apple support forums if you have a 15″ Powerbook, I wouldn’t recommend upgrading until you have.

Cheers;
Poncho

]]> By: Brad Rice http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12912 Brad Rice Mon, 23 Jan 2006 16:46:34 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12912 I can understand the hesitation. I’m the type of guy that is always upgrading on the razor’s edge. If you use your mac on a windows network, I would be especially cautious. It seems like Panther works better in a windows environment. Spotlight doesn’t work too well for Windows formatted volumes unless you use the mdfind hack to turn on indexing of those volumes, and the recent places menu crashes my mac all the time when I fhave windows volumes mounted (Adobe Apps mostly). That used to work fine in Panther. but if those aren’t concerns, I would say go for it. I like how quick it boots. Spotlight, Automator and Dashboard are cool. Safari is nice and quick in Tiger. Xcode 2.1 on Tiger rocks.

]]> By: Paul Wild http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12861 Paul Wild Sun, 22 Jan 2006 14:19:29 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12861 2 words – “Google Earth”. You mentioned that you’re really, really busy….? You can easily waste hours using G.E. I’d say the switch is worth it for Spotlight alone. I use it all the time, it’s incredible.

]]> By: Keith Burgin http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12625 Keith Burgin Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:58:46 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12625 I can’t say whether Tiger is better than Panther, because I never used Panther. My Mac came with 10.4 installed. However, I like it very much. The widgets are a bit of “much ado about nothing” in my opinion, but the OS seems very stable, the updates work for the most part, and they’ve kept up with security and such pretty well.

Just my opinion.

]]> By: Brian Sooy http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12529 Brian Sooy Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:03:26 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12529 I just upgraded our entire design firm’s Macs to Tiger, and I think we had one System prefpane to update, a couple of minor applications, and that’s about it. It went smoothly for everyone and have had no downtime other than the approximate 1 hour to install. Automator has some potential (when I can script entourage with it). My saddest realization is that Ibeezz (a most excellent tool or launch apps, etc) no longer works and won’t be updated for Tiger. Stil looking for a replacement.

]]> By: Ted http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12509 Ted Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:51:53 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12509 Yes, it is high time you upgraded. Tiger has a lot of goodness that you will quickly come to love. Panther was a great release, and Tiger definitely ups the ante.

]]> By: Lori http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12382 Lori Sun, 15 Jan 2006 04:45:33 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12382 Yes! It is worth the upgrade. Spotlight is amazingly fast. Widgets, which I hated at first, are also excellent once you find some you really like to be able to see at any moment. The panda cam widget alone is a good reason! Mail 2 is way better than Mail. Smart folders are incredibly useful. 10.4.4 has been good to me so far. Good luck :)

]]> By: jr http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12370 jr Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:20:00 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12370 I actually bought a new computer to move to Tiger, my iBook doesn’t read DVD’s.

]]> By: Ed http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12356 Ed Sat, 14 Jan 2006 17:51:05 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12356 I’ve been mulling over the same thing… For what it’s worth, the feature in Tiger that’s calling me most isn’t Dashboard or Spotlight, it’s the WebKit. I like Safari, but v.1.3 still has some memory leak problems that force me to quit and restart it occasionally. I want to be able to run the latest build of Safari, and multiple builds for testing.

From what I’ve seen from others who have taken the leap, upgrading to Tiger may also come with the need to boost your RAM — those widgets add up. While Panther was sprightly with 512MB, Tiger only seems faster once it’s been increased 1GB.

]]> By: Darren Cornwell http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12352 Darren Cornwell Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:15:07 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12352 Spotlight and the dashboard, two things you didn’t think you needed until you tried them. My desktop is always a mess, it’s my dumping ground for all my files, spotlight has given me the freedom to not worry to much about file locations and concentrate on work instead. The dash has also sped up my life, from a simple drag and drop ftp interface ‘transmit’ to all of my system monitoring widgets, I don’t know how I managed before. Get tiger, it’s much faster than previoud iterations of OS X (install it on a G3 iMac and you’ll see what I mean! DC

]]> By: Bob Monsour http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12255 Bob Monsour Sat, 14 Jan 2006 01:56:07 +0000 http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/01/12/the-lazy-or-the-tiger/#comment-12255 One more thing…that I forgot to mention in a previous comment…

While Blair thinks “Automator is a joke”, for those of us that are indeed not even passingly familiar with Applescript, I think it’s quite useful. One recent example of its use for me was the following: (1) using a web camera that ftps photos to a web directory (every 10 minutes, 6 days a week), each image has a base name plus date/time appended as digits to the filename, (2) used Quicktime to make a time-lapse of the sequence, (3) turns out that Quicktime doesn’t handle enough digits in the sequence number of the filename to make sense (see my time lapse “wrapping” over the 1/1/06 cusp, (4) spend about 10 minutes with automator to change the filenames to QT-usable sequence numbers. ‘nuf said (at least for someone that might not have a simple way to go about it otherwise.

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