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Ten Questions with Take Control of Tiger Author Adam Engst
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Date: May 12, 2005
By Adam Engst
Article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press.
Q: What's your favorite new feature in Tiger?
I have to admit, I'm wildly impressed with the multi-person audio and video chat. I don't know just how often I'll use it, but it's astonishingly good, and being able to go beyond a single other person makes possible things that were difficult, expensive or entirely impossible before Tiger.
It's entirely likely that another feature will take over as my favorite once I start using Tiger every day. With both Jaguar and Panther, the little features (like the Apply to All checkbox when dealing with duplicates in the copy dialog) make as much or more difference than the marquee features.
I also have high hopes for SyncServices making it possible to sync a lot more data between applications and devices in the future.
Q: What's Tiger missing?
I'm still pining for some behind-the-scenes, peer-to-peer backup technologies. Wouldn't it be cool if your Mac would automatically back up your data to other Macs on your network (in compressed and encrypted form, of course) in the background, making it available to you if you needed it? It might be a bit slow to recover data, but as anyone who has lost data knows, any ability to recover is better than none.
Q: Are you a cat person or a dog person?
Cat. I grew up with both (and cows and chickens and pigs and turkeys...) but I find most dogs too loud and demanding. Right now we have a 12-year-old cat who is extremely handsome and dumb as a log. Luckily, he's too dumb to get into any trouble at all. And a neighbor dog spends many days at our house (apparently he was friends with a dog that lived here many years ago) and he's great -doesn't bark, doesn't jump on you and he goes home at night.
Q: How does Tiger compare to my favorite animal, the Liger?
I'm sorry, but my NDA with Apple prevents me from talking about Mac OS X 10.6 Liger yet.
Q: Should Mac users rush to upgrade? Why or why not?
Those who absolutely must have the latest and greatest should rush to upgrade because otherwise they'll miss all the enjoyment of finding and complaining about all the little things Apple missed in the release and will be fixing in the 10.4.x updates. I admit, I'm in that camp, though I don't complain much, since it's not all that constructive.
For most people, I think waiting until at least 10.4.1 would be best, and even then I'd recommend checking out the online forums and reading the notes from the complainers.
Q: What does your Tiger book do that the rest don't?
It tells you, in no uncertain terms and with the real-world experience of 40-some installations, the best way to upgrade and what to do if the upgrade doesn't work properly. Apple makes a big deal about how easy it is to upgrade, and that's certainly true in theory, but they're ignoring the real world, where people have installed weird software and where there may be disk or directory corruption. The real world is not a perfect place, and Joe Kissell's "Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger" section in our Take Control of Tiger book is the best advice on how to upgrade safely and securely, bar none.
Q: Apple claims Tiger will change the way you use a computer. Has it? If so, how?
Well, as with most marketing hype, it's a bit overblown. Multi-person audio and video chat will change the ways I use the Mac as a communications device, but realistically, most of the rest of the changes in Tiger won't be changing anything for me. At the end of the day, I still spend my days primarily reading and writing.
Q: What's your favorite widget?
One that's not written yet, but that will give me a near-real-time scrolling view of logs on my remote server and let me perform searches in them. The standard ones are clever, but none really rock my world.
Q: Explain what's cool about Automator.
I haven't done much with Automator, but the aspect of it that I like is the building of automation for repetitive actions in an obvious, graphical way. I'll be curious just how well it works with any given application, since an automation utility must support nearly any application to be of much use.
Q: What's your top tip for taming this Tiger?
You mean aside from committing all of Take Control of Tiger to memory before installing? It would have to be this advice from Matt Neuburg's "Take Control of Customizing Tiger" section in Take Control of Tiger. New in Tiger is the capability of turning off the Caps Lock key, which almost no one ever uses and which causes annoyance every time it's accidentally pressed. In the Keyboard pane of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, click the Modifier Keys button. Then, from the Caps Lock pop-up menu, choose No Action.
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Adam C. Engst is the editor and publisher for TidBITS, one of the oldest and largest Internet-based newsletters. TidBITS is distributed to hundreds of thousands of readers via email, the Web and other methods. Adam has written and co-authored numerous Internet books and magazine articles, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit.
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