Apple Fix Tiger: Waiting for 10.4.2

by C.K. Sample III May 31, 2005

This is pathetic. It’s time for me to write an Apple Matters article and there’s nothing new and great to write about. Just more complaints about how rough around the edges Tiger remains, a little over a month after its release and a full update later. We have 10.4.1 now, but things are still somewhat askew. 

Apple seems to be “pulling a Windows.” Rather than addressing the problems in Tiger, they are ignoring them publicly and talking about all the new features to distract us from the truth. They recently announced a new version of iTunes with support for podcasts. That’s great, but where is it and in the meantime why can I no longer transfer pictures and files via iChat since I upgraded to Tiger? Why does Spotlight decide to bring the Finder to a screeching halt every once-in-a-while? Why does iPhoto crash every third time I launch it?

Safari RSS would be a neat feature if it worked consistently. At least once a week it seems to either forget that it is supposed to be checking for new posts in the feeds, or it becomes fully unable to load the 1375 new stories that are queued. As a result, I have to close Safari / restart Safari, disable / reenable RSS, reboot Tiger, or trash my prefs. These are the four separate solutions I’ve had come to the four different times this has happened.

After doing all the installation bits the wrong way, I went back and did them again the right way and I am still having problems. And I’m a guru! I can’t imagine what kind of problems Tiger may be causing for some of the new to Mac people who ran with hope-filled eyes towards Apple and a good riddance to their virus and spyware plagued Windows world. I mean, sure, it is still better, but if it’s frustrating me, I cannot imagine what it is doing to them.

Things I want to change about Tiger:

  • I want to be able to turn the Dashboard off. It’s a memory hog.
  • I want to have an option to prevent Spotlight from indexing external drives. The other day, when I hooked my digital camera into my Powerbook, for some inexplicable reason, Spotlight decided to try to index the compact flash card inside the camera and my Powerbook came to a screeching halt.
  • I want Safari RSS to work consistently.
  • I want file and image transfer in iChat back.

I do like the new Mail.app though. When it works, I like Spotlight. I like that screenshots default to PNG now.  There are good things about Tiger. I just wish there weren’t as many bugs. I want Apple to get a move on and make everything in Tiger as stable as OS X was for me in the later versions of Panther. 

Do that before you add new features to iTunes, Apple. Please.

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Comments

  • Here is a fix no one has mentioned. How about being able to copy and paste the info from the translator onto an email?

    If I want to use the Japanese translation I would have to get a Japanese keyboard.

    Smitty had this to say on Jun 02, 2005 Posts: 1

  • Don’t use animated dashboard widgets, such as radar maps. These suck down your memory. Other widgets don’t take much memory at all, I’ve found.

    linuxuser had this to say on Jun 06, 2005 Posts: 3

  • The photo is an accurate representation of how I feel at the moment.  Even to call Tiger “buggy” is too kind to Apple.  The final versions of Panther were very stable, but in Tiger, not only do various apps crash frequently, but the OS crashes completely (kernel “panic,” requiring a restart) at least twice a day. 

    That’s much worse than Windows XP, or even Windows 98SE. There.  I’ve said it. 

    So why don’t I feel better?  Because I’m running a very nice iMac, only eight months old, that was wonderful under Panther but is now a source of constant annoyance.  And there’s no acknowledgement of the problem from Apple, or any help on their website, including .mac.

    arffl had this to say on Jun 21, 2005 Posts: 1
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