Mac OS X Tiger
Apple have released Macintosh OS X 10.4 – codenamed Tiger. The new OS X upgrade promises a host of new features including Spotlight, a new search technology that can search every document and application - including e-mails, digital images and calendars - on your hard disk and display detailed information about them including the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size ad so on. Very handy for us more disorganised designers.
Other features of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger are Dashboard, which hosts a serious of utilities for viewing information such as sticks and shares, the weather and currency conversions. Probably of limited use specifically for designers. Also included is a new RSS enabled version of the Safari browser; iChat Av, which lets you video conference, audio chat and send instant messages; and Apple also claim that Tiger has better compatibility with Windows and other operating systems.
Most importantly for designers, is possibly the new Mac OS X Quartz Extreme, which Apple boast is a much faster method of displaying digital graphics on-screen. Apple's web site claims that Quartz Extreme allows modern graphics cards, combined with Quartz 2D and OpenGL technology, to deliver unequalled responsiveness for graphics display under OS X Tiger.
The lag in resizing Windows under Panther and earlier versions of OS X was of the biggest issues up until now. If this has indeed improved, it will be well received by designers and Mac users alike.
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