Tiger-tastic

["Tony Butler" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just a continuation of the discussion the other day about the mac-mini
experience.
I was sceptical about Tiger - seemed a lot of money (in comparison to the
cost of the machine) for relatively little gain....but having installed
Tiger over the weekend, I have to say I have found spotlight incredibly
useful - and even dashboard is "handy".

I don't do huge amounts of searching normally, and the mini isn't even my
main machine (yet), but I found myself using it more and more because,
well,
it was there, and it is very very quick (even indexing my emails) so saves
time over navigating through folders etc.
Something similar will make it into longhorn when that eventually ships,
but
it is here, now, in Tiger.

The dashboard also, I have found handy - I have installed half a dozen
widgets on it - train timetables, weather, calendar etc and it IS nice just
having all these disparate bits if info popping up instantly.  Again, I
found myself using it because it is there, not because I REALLY needed it.

There is a similarish product for mac AND pc called konfabulator
(http://www.konfabulator.com/info/)
and I tried it thinking "oh goody, I can
have this on windows too", but it's not nearly so polished or usable
so I'm
going to de-install rather than put up with second best.  One of the
biggest
letdowns for it is the poor quality of the widgets.
Eg on the Mac you get a train timetable thing - you can search for the name
of the station and it will display all the details for you.  Konfabulator
has a timetable thingy where you enter a 2 character code for the station
name.  Where is the list of these codes?  Buggered if I know :/

Anyway, I think both spotlight and dashboard help to increase productivity
to counterbalance some of the other things that are not as intuitive as on
the PC....and in a way are a bit TiVo-ish in that you can't really
understand/appreciate them until you've got them.

I still am not used to using Word etc on the mac, and I type this on my PC
remote-desktopped from the mac (if only I could go the other way at a
DECENT
speed!) but I'm getting there....

Finally, to make this somewhat related to this group, wouldn't it be cool
if
there were xAP/xPL widgets?

I have seen the xAP desktop and it looks nice, but can clutter the screen -
these ideas translated into widgets would be great - one click (or move the
mouse into the corner if you set that up) and you can see all your xPL/xAP
controls on the desktop, another click and you're back to your spreadhseet
or whatever - a bit like when you used to surf pr0n at work and had to
Alt-Tab away whenever someone came near :P

I understand the widget technology is web based, so dunno how that would
work with xAP/xPL, but I'm sure you can write more fully featured apps too.

Cheers,

Tony