Mac OS X 10.4.1 on track for May release

I´m just glad there´s a Party in Austria as well....
I hope they fix my problems with the iDisk synching before 10.4.1....

My CompUSA is having a party but I am going out of town and have to miss it. SUCKS! But I can't pass up my nitro fix (NHRA).

Looking forward to 10.4.1. The initial release of 10.4 has quite a few bugs.

- Slideshows (the ones you can trigger from the Finder, Spotlight, or Mail) sometimes display a screen full of garbage. Sometimes it works. It's sporatic. There's garbage appearing in several other full screen situations as well, but in most other cases, it only appears for a second and then goes away (such as when you switch to full screen mode in QuickTime, or start a screensaver).

- The Finder has actually managed to get worse. Resizing windows in icon often didn't work correctly in 10.3...this hasn't been fixed. Now there's a problem with resizing list windows too. If you make your columns narrower, the window won't shrink to fit the correct size. You have to drag it to a new size, then click resize again, and then it works...almost. The window is always several pixels wider and taller than it should be. The resize cursor doesn't appear when you hover over the edge of a list header, until you start dragging, so there is no indication whether you're pointing in the right spot.

- Speaking of mouse cursors, there's a problem with the wrong cursor occasionally "sticking" in many applications. There seems to be a big problem in general in determining the correct mouse cursor.

- Drag and drop operations no longer work in several apps -- even ones that have been updated for Tiger compatibility (e.g. DragThing...you can no longer drag and drop an application into the include/exclude list for a dock). In Azureus, you can no longer drop a .torrent file into the window; you must now select them manually with an "open" dialog.

But I don't want to come off too negative. These are just a few flaws in an otherwise great update. There's a lot more to like about it than grit your teeth about:

- As usual the UI has been refined even further; everything looks really nice.

- The iTunes Album Artwork screensaver is really cool, as long as you've added artwork to most of your music. I've got over 7000 songs, and at least 80% of them have artwork, and I like the iTunes screensaver a lot.

- The RSS screensaver is pretty neat too.

- Dashboard is really handy. Chews up a lot of memory though. My one beef about it is that the widgets don't load until the first time you try to use Dashboard, so you'll be sitting there waiting for quite awhile the first time you try to use it. The widgets are very slow to start up (especially when you have a lot of them open), and some of them don't respond for several minutes.

- Spotlight is great. It's going to become a big part of how people use their Mac, especially as more and more apps add plugins to support the metadata in their file formats. It's no replacement for LaunchBar though. It can't find discontiguous letters (so "TX" won't find Text Edit, and "PS" won't find Photoshop). The developers of LaunchBar and QuickSilver have absolutely nothing to worry about. Spotlight is really not the same thing at all (although it does steal their default shortcut, but you can change it back easily). Fortunately, LaunchBar/QuickSilver and Spotlight co-exist very nicely.

- Resizing video in QuickTime is really smooth and impressive, and I've only got a Radeon AGP (32 MB). Some people scoffed that this was one of the "200 new features", saying that Apple was padding the list, but they'll eat their words when they see it for themselves. QuickTime 7 is great all around, actually. The full screen controls are very handy.

Quite a lot of other minor things I liked as well. It's now possible to remove the US input method entirely when you have Kotoeri enabled (for Japanese input). The Romaji mode of Kotoeri is the same layout as the US, with one key difference: there are keyboard shortcuts to switch to hiragana/katakana. In 10.3 you could turn off the US input method, but it would still be in the menu, and if an app mistakenly switched to it (happened sometimes), the Kotoeri shortcuts stopped working.

Tiger has quite a bit more flexibility in date/time formats. It takes longer to set it up the way you want, but you have a lot more control over it. I recommend choosing the US region and customizing it, because some other regions mysteriously don't work in all apps. If you choose Canada, and make the same exact customizations, a bunch of apps will ignore them. So choose US (or another one that doesn't give the warning), and simply set it up however you want. One neat new feature is the ability to select from a bunch of different calendar types. Most of us use Gregorian, but you can now select Buddhist, Japanese, and other calendars. (The Japanese calendar, for example, substitutes the year with a different number based on how long the current emperor has reigned.)

Anyway, that's more than enough out of me for the moment.

Woo!

Party at MacUpgrades!

They should have waited until May.