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Ten Questions with Mac OS X Help Line, Tiger Edition Author Ted Landau
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Date: May 12, 2005
By Ted Landau
Article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press.
Q: What's your favorite new feature in Tiger?
Dashboard. I expect to be using it a lot. And I especially look forward to all the great widgets that will come from third-party developers.
Q: What's Tiger missing?
Not much. I was already pretty happy with Panther. Tiger is even better.
Q: Are you a cat person or a dog person?
Definitely a dog person-although I have both a dog and a cat and think they are both great.
Q: How does Tiger compare to my favorite animal, the Liger?
For starters, the first letter is different.
Q: Should Mac users rush to upgrade? Why or why not?
I advise not to rush. Tiger is not nearly as big a leap forward beyond Panther, as Panther was over Jaguar. You can easily afford to wait at least a few weeks-until most third-party apps have released Tiger updates and Apple has probably released its first bug-fix update to Tiger.
Q: What does your Tiger book do that the rest don't?
It covers troubleshooting at a depth that no other book does. Also, compared to other "big" books that delve into the inner-workings of Mac OS X, my book attempts to do so in a way that is geared more for mainstream users.
Q: Apple claims Tiger will change the way you use a computer. Has it? If so, how?
Not in my case. I suspect they are mainly referring to how Spotlight will change the way you can search for information. Perhaps I will come to appreciate this more as time goes on. For now, I like what Spotlight does, but it is not as big a deal for me as Apple suggests.
Q: What's your favorite widget?
Weather. It's great to be able to see a current six-day forecast whenever you want. No need for a newspaper or even a Web browser.
Q: Explain what's cool about Automator.
You can easily maintain settings across multiple Macs. Want your Safari bookmarks or your Address Book data to be the same on both your Desktop and laptop? .Mac Sync makes it easy to do. As a bonus, all your info is also stored on your .Mac account disk space; so if you should somehow lose all other access to the data, you can still recover it. In Tiger, you can no longer do this with iSync. You need to use the Sync settings in the .Mac System Preferences pane.
Q: What's your top tip for taming this Tiger?
I haven't had enough time with it yet to have a true "top tip." But here is one candidate: In the Info window (Command-I) for every file is a section called Spotlight Comments. Like the Comments field from previous versions of the Mac OS, you can enter your own text here. The cool part is that whatever text you enter is searched by Spotlight. So, for example, suppose you have a group of otherwise unrelated files that you want to all come up in a search on the phrase "tax stuff." Just enter the phrase into the Spotlight Comments field and do a search on the phrase. The files will all turn up.
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Ted Landau is the author of Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters (now in its 4th edition) as well as Mac OS X Disaster Relief.
He is the founder and original editor of the MacFixIt website
and a contributing editor for Macworld magazine. His books and MacFixIt have received numerous awards and nearly universal critical acclaim from
sources as varied as U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, Yahoo! Internet Life and the
Computer Shopper -- as well as virtually all Mac media. Ted has been twice listed on the annual
"MDJ Power 25" as one of the 25 most influential people in the Mac community.
See the complete list of available articles.
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