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Ten Questions with The Little Mac Book, Tiger Edition Author Robin Williams
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Date: May 12, 2005
By Robin Williams
Article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press.
Q: What's your favorite new feature in Tiger?
Smart Folders, Smart Groups, Smart Mailboxes. Makes me very smart. And I love this feature: Whenever you buy something online or pay your bills, you get that page that tells you to print it, but then you know you'll also get an email shortly and so you'll have to print that too, but you're afraid not to print the Web page just in case you don't get the email and you end up with too much duplicated paper. BUT with Tiger, when I get one of those Web page receipts, I go to Print and choose the button to "Save PDF to Web Receipts folder." Tiger makes a new folder for me inside the Documents folder and puts the PDF in that folder. Well, it only makes the folder once and then keeps storing PDFs of my Web page receipts. When I get the email receipt for the item, I can throw away the PDF and never have to print it.
Q: What's Tiger missing?
Well, it doesn't make my coffee in the morning or fold the laundry. Dang, the things I have to do myself.
Q: Are you a cat person or a dog person?
Dog dog dog dog dog. Although I have had some wonderful cats. But they don't like to hike across the desert at dawn and they don't keep the bogeyman away.
Q: How does Tiger compare to my favorite animal, the Liger?
Nobody wrote an operating system about ligers. Maybe Napoleon Dynamite should do that.
Q: Should Mac users rush to upgrade? Why or why not?
Of course.
Q: What does your Tiger book do that the rest don't?
Well, as I write this, I don't know anything about the other Tiger books. But I'm sure each one is perfect for somebody. There's a lid for every pot.
Q: Apple claims Tiger will change the way you use a computer. Has it? If so, how?
Actually, it has. Once you figure out how Spotlight really works-there are four different ways of working with it and each one has an advantage over the other.
Q: What's your favorite widget?
I keep weather panels in my Dashboard for each city where I have a child living. It's silly, but I like to be able to click a button and see what their days are like.
Q: Explain what's cool about Automator.
Instant in, instant out. What time is it in London? Click click. What does "prole" mean? Click type click. Has my mother's plane landed yet? Click click. Change the song. Click click. How do you say, "working girl" in Greek? Click type click. What is 75 degrees F in Celsius? Click 75 click click.
Q: What's your top tip for taming this Tiger?
Read the directions. It always amazes me the things that "power users" don't know. For instance, what's the key command to paste text into your email message (or TextEdit) so it picks up the formatting of the text you already have on the page? Ha! That's not even a Tiger feature-it's been there for years.
And get a two-button mouse.
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Robin Williams is the author of dozens of best-selling and award-winning books about the Macintosh, including the groundbreaking The Little Mac Book and Robin Williams Mac OS X Book. She is an icon in the Mac community. Through her writing, teaching, and seminars, Robin has educated and influenced an entire generation of computer users in the areas of design, typography, desktop publishing, the Mac and the Web.
Best-selling author Robin Williams is also the author of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Peachpit Learning Series and co-author of The Robin Williams Mac OS X Book, Tiger Edition.
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