*DAMN R6 Forum

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000777041145/

Apparently quite a few folk are starting to recieve shipping notices from Apple!! Wish i would  :(

BFG or any others, please pm me with your impressions once yours arrives and gets rolling.
Im nervous and scared, and need your reassuring words.

thx

Want someone to hold your hand? ;)  Yeah, should be here soon, cant wait- its going on the Lappy (sorry laptop) first as a failsafe, then on this monster!

I got my shipping notice late last night!! The baby is in the post :D

I'll go pick up my copy at 6pm on friday at my local reseller. They aren't allowed to open the shipping crate until then apparently. (preordered though...)

Its a bit mad - quite a few people accidently recieved their copies from several US retailers (apparently MacMall and a few others) over a week early! and i know several people in the UK who have just recieved their copies... There must be hundreds of thousands of copies flying around the post right now.. but your resellers can't open the shipping create yet?!

Well all being well i should get it tommorow morning.. tried to track the package but TNT came up with a order from 2004 signed by "Gertrude" (bad name love really bad name) in Worksop... no thats not me!

hehe i love mac madness

i got my Tiger package yesterday after i got the shipping confirmation from the Apple Store per email on tuesday noon. i love german mail, so fast! ;D

Damn you Civic, according to the TNT Tracker my Tiger package was either shipped last year to Gertrude in Worksop or its still sitting waiting to be delivered. Stupid bloody un-express lack of delivery

so  come on then, have you got it installed or are you still dribbling with anticipation? What is it like damn it, i need to get my hands on that bloody H.264 codec so i can encode this bloody project!

everything is much faster than before, i have a startup time of about 15 seconds now! :o all around pretty much only positive experiences so far.

well, except a few bugs that i discovered...:

- stuffit expander doesnt want to work right. 99% of the .sit's it expands are empty folders... and the funny thing about that is that as soon as i move a file into the folder the expanded files appear all of a sudden, as if they were invisible. just weird... i hope they fix that, apple or the stuffit guys.

- quicktime seems to freeze my system sometimes when it starts a movie eitehr in the browser or in the app itself. not always... but sometimes totally unexpected and forcing me to force restart (holding the start button of the G5). very annoying and i hope that gets fixed with 10.4.1. :::-/::

- when a game starts, or quits, it always changes the display resolution... this is where my system freezes and forces me to force quit almost every time also. ::wall::
my guess is that the cause of this problem are my two monitors. people with Tiger and only one monitor don't seem to have this "bug" and i don't know anybody with two monitors to test if it's only an individual problem on my system. again, i hope 10.4.1 fixes it. i didn't get to try it with only one connected monitor yet... i'm too dependent on the 2nd one in my usual work. i'll try that later. :::-/::

thx for the heads up...

99% of my Client files come stuffed, and i just knew there was going to be fuckups...major ones..
And im sure apple is just jumping on with the support for these problems..

Ill suspend judgement for now, till i hear more, but they can kiss my ass..Im keeping my money. It aint broke, so I aint breakin it some more...ust for a few seconds faster startup...No fuckin way.
It'll probably break my email, pdf, and printer prefs too...

All three of those complaints are pretty stock areas & standard apps, and if they can't get that right, god knows what else wont work. ok..now im pissed all over again.
somebody give me some good news on this.

Go APPLE...

Good luck Civic, keep us posted... u2 bfg.

OK so now im pretty scared... I wouldn't be upgrading (no ok yes i would im a freaking mac geek) this quick but im in desperate need of the use of Quicktime 7 and H.264 for my final year project... that and i guess im hoping its going to inject some much needed life and organisation into this babby ;)


Well that just about scares the freaking shit out of me... why can't it be widgets or whateveryou call em that fuck up.. why dose it have to be the one thing i really really need in the next 2 weeks?

They kinda sound like rather nasty bugs that you would have thought had been spotted in testing...

i'll need it, oh god!

See, told you guys it was a good idea to wait for version 10.4.1.  ;)

Most can be fixed with a QT updater. As for 10.4.1:

Well folks my package of loveliness arrived this-morning, and the laptop is sat on my bed crunching its way through the Install DVD - i'll post up what ramblings and first thoughts i get, came in a bloody stupid big box considering its just a few cds and a freaking little brochure!! (PS for anyone that didn't realise - its not a install cd... its an install DVD)

It surely can't take 3 hours?

what to post ramblings? well im in uni now, had to leg it in so not much. First impressions of tiger though ...

Civic ive not hit the problems you listed yesterday which is reassuring! Stuffit is expanding and stuffing files without any problem ... but i wont hold my breath! ;) and quicktime is working wonderfully - just exported the first of my vids in H.264 and well its lovely - oh and the ability to scale the video window in real time is just awesome - how the hell they do that i don't know but i was just blown away.

Spotlight - it took about 15 minutes for it to index my HD on the laptop (which for the record had nothing much on) so i can imagine for those of us with lots of very big and full hard-drives the process could take quite a while - however once again it is most definatly worth the wait - the speed and accuracy is incredible!

Dash-bored... im not quite sure what all the crazy fuss about it is right now. i mean its pretty slick - some nice aqua effects and its handy to have everything in one place ... i grabbed the transmit ftp  widget - drag and drop feature apparently but i cant seem to let dashboard let me drag anything from the desktop etc anywhere near a widget... more fiddling when i get home ;)
- however that said - if developers really get their teeth into these things (and i spend some time familiarizing myself with it) i think the possibilities with these widgets is stupefying - the ease and comparability with retrieving and displaying realtime information is impressive!

Back to work... lots more soon :)

Super-tastic.  Keep the impressions comin', BFG  :)

I might be heading out to a nearby Apple store to pick up a copy today...we'll see if it works out.

Ack bugger i have go go to work in an hour but a bit more from me after my first day with my tiger.

Firstly for reference im currently running it on an original 12" 1Ghz Powerbook with 768MB DDR Ram.

And now on to the proper fun and games... my new pussy cat ;) The biggest "wow" factors that have gob smacked me today have to go to Spotlight (its everything they touted it to be) Quicktime 7 (the H.264 codec and the real time resizing of videos), and, a late entrance from Dashboard. Now a lot of people were very excited about dashboard but i must say i didn't exactly jump of my seat when i saw it - lots of us were saying "well its just a rip off from Konfabulator" ... well while eating a piece of toast and loudly slurping a mug of Tea (typical brit i know) It finally hit my square in the face. if developers get their teeth into this thing the possibilities are immense the effectivness of displaying information pulled off the web in such a slick form is stunning. I hope the big boys from Adobe to Aladin (not to mention all the fantastic little guys) really produce the works for this.
And dashboard for gamers? A gameranger widget - showing if your buddies are off or online, server status widgets, even ingame widgets so you can see who is winning or loosing in a MP game

So for Dashboard i can't wait to see what gets released. I have however one great big bug with this gadget... Now why can't i work and see my widgets at the same time? Say im working in Photoshop and i want to do some measurement conversion - great, i just kick up the converter and smack my numbers in; hey presto job done.. but i can't just slip back to PS, ive got to hide dashboard, go back to PS and then bring the dashboard back upagain to do my next sums... Ok its a petty thing - but my main computer is fine tuned to work exactly just how i want it (the way it should be) and when somthing like this dosn't work with the way i work... well it just bugs me a bit! ;)


Which brings me smartly on to my ears... or rather "bloop" "pingong" and "ziptash" No im not listing off cities in Vietnam, im talking about the crazy new sounds courtasy of the apple audio department... Call me a old man and i'll go get my pipe and slippers but some of them (like whenever you move any file!) get just a touch annoying!

mail.. or rather mail2! this wasn't just a face lift, this feels like a whole new application! Its slick its smooth, its sexy. ok maybe not sexy, but its a hell of an inprovment. The implementation of spotlight is great and the interface feels more inteligent and sophisticated - a lot less cluttered and a lot easier to navigate. My only complaint there... well it feels like a lot of stuff has been hidden away - a bit like when the kids clean their room by sweeping everything under the bed... so its into the customise tool bar option if you want to get your hands back on those nifty little features and tools.
- and lastly with mail, the intelligent mailboxs are, well fantastic - a perfect example of tightly integrated spotlight! :D

Oh before i forget, the upgrade (i was running latest version of 10.3) went very smoothly - all my preferences were saved, shiex dont' take this as certain but don't worry about email, pdf, and printer prefs, i have had no such problems, credit where credit is due! ;)

Last little notes:
• No crashes, no errors, no hangs, no nothing that isn't doing what it should or anything doing what it shouldn't!
•Ive yet to test ichat video conferencing what with a rushed day (sorry brutha) but if anyone wants to hook up for a big one tommorow PM gimme a shout! 
• Stuffit (id have a look civic i think its at your end) is working perfectly, as is quicktime.
• The finder, the apple apps and most housework feels faster and more responsive. it takes the laptop a few seconds to kick start the GUI - but once it does kick in Tiger loads like a flash.
• Safari: does exactly what it says on the tin. It still feels very much like safari - although a bit quicker and slicker, and of course excellent css support in the reader. i like!
• Automater looks slick, but also like you need a big mug of coffee and a free evening if you want to really take advantage of it!

Last but not least, the old mac hands in the audience don't tend to dip into the OSX help menu very often, the last time i did was as i tested the water and speedinprovments of the help section in 10.3 - but if you do you will very very relieved to hear tht the performance of the help app/reader/section has been put on speed - it runs tens of times faster than before. i believe the expression is "excellent smithers"

Right, run out of time, i must depart to sheppard drunken teenagers for the night. cheers guys :)

yeah, i made such a dashboard widget for z][t yesterday which shows the online/offline status of every member. i was surprised how simple it is to develop a dashboard widget (it is/was a pain in the butt for  konfabulator). :)


according to StuffIt it's a known bug now and it seems to only happen on certain computers respectively configurations. they're already working on a Tiger-optimized version with the bugfix.

Hey Guys,

Thanks a lot for your info.

(you need to get checks from apple imo)

I may just get this thing after all.
I have read tons of reprts to day, and I'll say that the positive to negative ratio is about 5 to one.
And for the problems that many are having....most if not all are addressed in the 'atlanta' build 10.4.1 due next month.  They accepted some known and identified bugs to meet the ship deadline..whcih iguess i can go along with.

If you have quicktime pro, and you need it, get ready to buy it again with QT 7 tho..which is normal...a pain, and fucked, but normal..and I also found similar cases to Civics where config played a part..

Keep the info coming, and for Civic...

Did configuring widgets require applescript  or unix knowledge or is it fairly straightforward?

Thanks again.


guys..its fuckin friday...commence the boozin'.

exactly. much more positive stuff than negative and this mainly because of the ship deadline which will be then fixed with 10.4.1. :)


my QT problems seem to be gone now for some reason, at least in the last 5 or so movies i watched in Safari, no freeze. i only turned off the auto-start movie option in the QT prefs... maybe that was the cause, dunno.


it's pretty straightforward but it also depends on what you're trying to make, what you want to show in your widget or want it to do. have a look at this site: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/dashboard.html, helps a lot in understanding how they work and how you can develop one yourself. :)[/color]

Id go for it Shiex - but wait till your key apps for work are known to be happy running with 10.4 - im holding back til i know for certain that everything from AfterEffects to MM Director,  i want to be certian everything i need will run!

ps.. would have loved to have got pissed..it is however 3:30am and i just got home from work...

A shame BFG (if Macromedia Apps don't work under tiger). I can't quite imagine how Adobe plans to maintain macromedia as a company whilst continuing to develop their own Creative Suite. If there are Macromedia Problems under tiger, let's just hope Adobe has completely put their production of updates and patches on hold.

P.S. I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11 again. (if BFG can side note so can myst!... well maybe i don't have 4000 posts...)

hehe i think you can get away with a little sidenote myst ;)

Yeah i must confess im rather scared about what will happen with Adobe and Macromedia - and wether Adobe is really just buying macromedia and letting it get on with its busines or wether adobe is going to start sticking its fingers in the pie and screwing around... it will be interesting to see.


Im starting to love one of the biggest new features of Tiger - and probably the most under-publised of them.. its the amazing intergration between apps - from finder, mail or iphoto (not to mention what you can do with autamator - which is awsome) they have finally done what should have been done in Panther - really embed the applications and system together into a seamless process where the movment of anything anywhere is... well seamless :)

(fahrenheit 9/11 ... i got so angry about that film - both at the way Moore delbt with it, and in doing so distracted from the real issues - first few minutes of the film imo were the very best)

Frankly, thus far I'm a little let down. For the $137.00 (including tax) bones I had to scam to buy this OS, I was expecting something more than an app like Dashboard or Spotlight, when my Konfabulator app pretty much did the same damn thing, and I had no qualms with the original search feature (Although the water ripples when you start up a widget on Dashboard is pretty fucking cool, but hardly worth $129.00).

I guess there are some performance boosts, but hardly anything revolutionary. And Safari RSS, well it has a RSS reader built in and thats the extent of it.

My overall point is that Apple once again has successfully created an OS that fixed a bunch of shit that wasn't broken, hyped it up has the most advanced OS in existence, then marketed it for $129.00 retail. Apple's capitalist greed has run amok, and their sure as shit turning profit from a minimal effort.

Also another qualm I have with Apple is their privacy policy. If you read the fine print it says they don't give your info to other companies, unless there is a strategic interest that Apple and another company share. So basically, they do give your info to other companies. Then you read a little more and find that they also will give your private information to the government for law enforcement and or homeland security purposes. Ok whatever, I thought, and attempted to bypass the registration form by not filling out my name and personal info, but of course this is mandatory, so you get dicked any way you look at it. Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, but it's the principle of the fucking matter, i don't want some greedy capitalist fucks whoring my info out, more than they already do, and especially to the god forsaken government.

I'll give the Tiger more time to impress me but thus far I want my $129.00 bones back, so i can go buy some drugs and or alcohol that better serve my purposes.

 

You have the very framework of the OS changed. Perhaps that means nothing this month, but in the coming months you will see pro tool speed ups and game speed ups. Core Image and Core Data have been overlooked. Perhaps you should take a look at the list of the 200 new features. Not too hard. In fact, here you go:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html

So they count each Dashboard widget as a new feature? Whatever, I still feel $129.00 is highway robbery.
And now my printer doesn't work.

You are obviously choosing to ignore the actual OS difference by  grasping on to the fact that widget was mentioned 20 times. 200-20=180. Read them.

I'll have that info by 3:30 today when i walk over to the reseller and pick up my copy. I'll try some benchmarks. Anyone else with a core image compatible card test the core stuff yet?

1  -  I havn't sent apple any form of registratoin information whatsoever - (btw if you don't want it to send of info just pull the bloody ethernet cable out!  ::lol:: ) but i agree that small print sucks ass

2. Spotlight is good - no actually spotlight is fucking great. Ok for those of you that have 10 files on your HD and you keep them spotlessly organised its maybe its not quite so great... but for a dyslexic unorganised computer freak with a lorra lorra files well im hooked lined and sinkered!

3. GS - at the moment im finding great speed inprovments. The whole system feels a lot more responsive - i've done no gaming or seriouse application work on the laptop (other than a few hours playing Rise of Nations which incidentally seemed to run great) so i can't give you much info outside of the box - but applications like mail are fast, boot times are very fast, file copying, moving, editing everything in the finder and the OS feels... well fast.

Ok, so the retailer feels the need to take a day off after staying open a hour later yesterday... Tiger on monday...

i got mine from microcenter today...they have a $50 dollar rebate going on until tomorrow(sunday May 1).Anyways I installed it, looked the same except for more apps, I haven't really dived into yet, looks "ok".  Then I try playing games, like Battlefield 1942 and it crashes and crashes and crashes :-(.  Then I try opening Mail, Freeze freeze crash :-(, then I fix permissions, mail is ok for now, BF1942 keeps crashing :-(. 

try trashing the .plist file of BF1942 which can be found in ~/Library/Preferences and is called com.aspyr.battlefield1942.plist.

damn thats lorra lorra crashes... Did some work and some image scanning on the laptop this morning... no problemo's - its been running since friday now without a single crash or glitch! :D

Is that your new favorite word? ;)

Hah.  What does lorra mean (looks like "lotta")?

Yeah BFG, what gives?

Is it because youre 9 feet, 7 inches tall, and you have ginormous meatfingers, and they made the T and the R too close, and you cant help help but smushing the wrong key, or is a lorra lorra a juicy foreigner word??

The thought of B)ig-F)reekin-G)iant pecking furiously at teeny-tiny laptop keys at 4am with his massive slabs of ham made me laugh.

please clarify.
 ::lol::

notice any problems at all with your install? or is it all gravy on your end?  Youve been freakishly positive (you ARE an apple mole, arent you??)...and Hey what about Macromedia? Does that stuff supposedly not work or what???

oh crikey i hardly even noticed myself doing it! sorry guys!

First prize goes to Cobra. Let me clarify... Anyone heard of Cilla black? Used to be singer turned TV presenter - probably only in the UK. anyway she was from blackpool up north and had a crazy accent.. to cut a long story short rather than saying "a lot" she didn't pronounce the "T" and it came out as "lorra" as in "a lot of"  - but anway she had a catch frase which was "we're going to have a lot of lotof laughs  - but it sounded like "we're going to have a lorra lorra laughs" and i have no idea why its stuck in my head sorry!

Excellent, ive just read my explanation and ive even confused myself now!

made you laugh? Not half as much as your post has just made me laugh! Massive slabs of ham indeed  ;)

I must confess however i do look a little stupid with a 12" laptop - i look like ive got a slightly oversized Palm personal organiser in my hand apparently!! ::lol::

No the macromedia apps seem to be working fine  - infact i haven't found ive tried to boot any apps that havn't worked :D I have yet to hit any problems at all! - no crashes no unexpected quits... everything is hunky dorey :)  but im still to scared to upgrade this comp - going to wait till im all finished then do a sping clean of the comp and put tiger on.

Sheix stop making me laugh damn it, my meat-fingers can't type straight if i'm chuckling to myself!

Installing in 5.... Ill test doom when done...4...3...2...1

barefeats did some gaming tests (http://www.barefeats.com/tiger.html) which many people should find very pleasing - Tiger seems to be responsible for a 19% speed increase of Doom3 running High settings @ 1920x1200  - a almost 20% speed increase is not bad at all! However we know apple has been doing a lot of work to help optimize things for Doom.

anyone to lazy to click the link, well heres the brief:

                                               Panther   Tiger           Gain
Maya 6 Software Render                50 sec         47 sec       6.4%
Photoshop CS2 MP Actions              28.2 sec      25.8 sec     9.3%
AltiVec Fractal Carbon 64K              18.1 mf   18.7 mf    3.3%
Halo "High" 800x600 4X FSAA       80.7 fps   83.8 fps    3.8%
Doom3 "High" 800x600 4X FSAA    46.0 fps   50.4 fps   9.6%
Doom 3 High 1920x1200              29.7 fps       35.4 fps   19.2%

Overall not mind boggling but also nothing to complain about. On the subject of games though they did get some nasty results with Unreal2004:

But to end on a high note, and probably the most inportant thing for most of us:

Now that is inpressive!

I do, and it's a good upgrade. The new mail app is almost enough on its own, but Spotlight and Widgets are nice additional features. Sadly, I still feel ripped off by the absurd price.

Moved in here from the GG.  -Lone

Doom time demo did 15FPS on 800x600 (High Quality, 4X FSAA) on my Dual 2 G5 with a 9600 pro (64MB), so that's a improvement.
However, tiger brought back the G5 CHIRP. Poor Rev A owners such as mysty.

Honest? the chirp is back?

Damn it though 15fps for that spec machine is still by no means anywhere near PC levels - mind you myst i be you get massive fps inprovments if you turn off FSAA and hit medium quality?   btw what were you getting before on Panther with the same settings?

Six - im kinda amazed there wasn't a bit more talk about the completely overhauled mail app - its so much better in so many ways! spotlight still takes top dog for me though - closely followed by the massivly beefed up "system integration"

The annoying beep won't silent itself.

I was doing that more for the fun of testing. 4XFSAA wasn't available under panther, only 2X. On that timedemo I got 10. Timedemos are not like actual game play, they are slower due to the fact they spend the time to render every frame fully. Normal game play i turn off FSAA and down to medium, it sits around 35-45 FPS on the test then

Sounds good! :) and what kinda of inprovment is that from running on Panther?

Let me run a time demo. 1 second, btw I love remote desktop. Its a increase of 10FPS.

BFG & SixHits,

Can you please elaborate more on the improvements of Mail.  I have not upgraded to Tiger but there is something I been waiting for Apple to improve on.  That is, many times I use Mail, when quitting the app or when click the receive mail icon on tool bar, I get a dialog box opening asking me to enter in my email password for that particular email account, I have 3 in total; even though, when I consult the Mail preferences in th accounts section, it is clear that my password is there and saved, yet many times, I still get that annoying dialog box. 

And, if I don't enter the password and simply ignore it (b/c of frustration), next time I launch Mail, it shows that little triangle or squiggly mark next to the inbox folder (right of it) and when clicking on those symbols, it indicates that either I have to bring that account back online, or something else ( I can't remember now).

So, I would like to know if anyone who has Tiger has noticed if this still happens??, assuming that you have experienced this with Panther.  thanks fellas...

Heya Nomad, Sure let me see.

First up im unfortunatly only to aware of that bug your describing - i remember doing some research about it a while back, but i can't remember what they said the problem was. - anyway i currently have 3 mailbox's running and i have yet to have the bug you are decribing (and which i suffered from repeatedly in Panther) come up, which is great! And to be honest mate, i would upgrade just for that, i had exactly the same problem as you and it drove me nuts.

As for other inprovments etc, Second up is the searching and speed of Mail - for me i have found Mail2 to be faster, a lot more stable, and with the help of spotlight finding particular emails (or the content of emails) is fantasticly easy.

Thirdly are the smart mailbox's - you'll know from mail that you could make 'rules' to help automatically organsie your emails - say if you get the apple e-mail weekly updates you could set rules to automatcally move them to a seperate folder. Smart mailbox's basically work the same way as the smart playlists of itunes - so there is a endless list of ways you can organsie and sort your email - from having a folder for all 'work' related emails, to folders containing all emails from a certain group of friends, or say a certain group of friends in the last week.... you get my drift ;)

hope thats helpful :)

So clarify: Mail will now actually work with multi accounts with out FUBARing?

the current lack of any FUBARing regarding mail has been impressive in my experience

I might just have to give it another chance then. Web based gmail is so boring.

With all my accounts set up, it works. I also love the threaded mail option. I thought I would loose that without gmail, but mail does it better. I now love mail, way to go apple. Now make a spreadsheet app.

Hey Myst,

Can you just describe more about this threaded option you mention? I think I know what yer talking about, but if you can humor me, that would be great.

BFG, thanks for the input...

some more news about the coming first update for Tiger - 10.4.1 - by AppleInsider.com:

http://appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1058

If you reply to a email it will start a "thread" (Drop down arrow ---> expand) so you loose some clutter.

Yep - basically say me and Brutha have been in Corresponance over a topic and five or six emails have nipped back and forth between Norway and England over a couple of days.... Mail basically goes "oh look" and groups the emails together in a thread for you - if you click on the thread it will then open up and show you the emails it contains inside... its very slick and very cool, a hidden gem! :)

BTW, computers that don't support core image you don't know what you're missing! Dashboards water effect is a sad loss without dashboard. Either way Tiger is a great OS! I don't know why people think dashboard is over rated. It's free, you can design widgets better/easier than similar applications on Mac and PC. Also notice the lack of any CPU usage. I'm amazed with the OS user switching in tiger. The multiple user sign in no longer take any performance away.

Automator is a very useful "hidden jem". Oh look at that Apple Spell check doesn't like the spelling yet. Remote desktop under Tiger is also a huge improvement over 10.3 ARD. The new iChat icon makes me happy, I killed AOL for a reason. iTunes's widget is a very nice looking one. I also like the volume spin wheel.

Of the Apple Widgets, the ones I use most are:
1. Weather
2. Converter (mainly currency)
3. iCal's
4. Calculator
5. Thesaurus
6. Stickies

Some third party widget reviews:
1. Stopwatch - Does what it says it does. Compact and useful.
2. Versiontracker - Terrible design, limited usefulness.
3. Daisytracker - Word/Joke/Quote of the day. Weird choices but it's entertaining.
4. TypeCast - Helpful with finding fonts when you want previews or to match what to see in the browser without switching applications.
5. Transmit - Great widget, I'm gonna keep using it to see how it goes.

Myst,

thanks for the clarification.....one question, in your last post you talk about 3rd party widgets, do those come with the OS or do you have DL buy/DL them, extra?

you have to download them. go into your Dashboard screen where you drag/drop them from... above it on the right is a button that says "More Widgets...". click it. ;)

Some are free, others are not. Depends on the widget. Package tracker is free, however Encyclopedia Britannica isn't.

can't wait for more widgets to turn up! But more sexy (i think) is the RSS Screensaver that ships with Tiger - you have got to see it to believe it! It is a stunning Screensaver that is Rendering the lastest Apple news pulled in from a RSS feed - and displaying it in a Helix style something or other - i can't wait to see what other people can do with this - hell its RSS - you can probably look at blog entries like this! - i dug up this movie (http://media.weblogsinc.com/common/videos/engadget/TigerRSS.mov)

Found a nice summery of Tiger for you "should i upgrade" people:

"Tiger is the best version of Mac OS X yet. It offers substantial improvements over Panther in all important areas. The performance improvements are immediately noticeable. Every major bundled application has been improved. There's an unprecedented number of substantial, totally new features and technologies: Spotlight, Core Image and Video, Quartz 2D Extreme, Dashboard, and Automator, just to name a few.

This is all on top of the most significant revision to the core operating system in the history of Mac OS X. Fine-grained locking in the kernel prepares Tiger for future Macs with multi-core CPUs. A stable, abstracted, forward-compatible system for kernel extensions frees Apple to make more kernel changes in the future without worrying about breaking existing kernel extensions. And as usual, nearly every bundled Unix program has been updated.

For the first time in the history of Mac OS X, Apple has made progress in the realm of file metadata. While Spotlight plays it safe with external index files tracking information gleaned from existing file system metadata and file contents, Tiger's extended attribute APIs lay the groundwork for a much more interesting future. Uniform Type Identifiers add another missing piece to the metadata puzzle. If Apple can fully realize the potential of these budding, and still disparate systems, Mac OS X may finally catch and surpass the previous file metadata technology leader: the venerable BeOS. My fingers are crossed.

If you're still running Jaguar or earlier, you really owe it to yourself to upgrade to Tiger. It'll be the best $129 you've ever spent on an operating system. If you're happy with Panther, I strongly recommend going to an Apple store and checking out Tiger in person. Chances are good that there'll be at least one or two features that you'll decide you need, if not right way, then soon. As with any new release, it won't hurt to wait for version 10.4.1 or later.

Overall, Tiger is impressive. If this is what Apple can do with 18 months of development time instead of 12, I tremble to think what they could do with a full two years—let alone the length of time it took for Mac OS X 10.0 to first ship. The productivity of Apple's Mac OS X development team has increased tremendously since 10.0; they're now firing on all cylinders. While I dearly wish someone would steer them in the direction of the eternally neglected Finder, I can't help but be proud of the little OS team that could.

Mac OS X started its life as the most ambitious consumer operating system ever produced. Apple abandoned its existing, 16-year-old code base for something entirely new. Out of the gate, Mac OS X was a technical curiosity with few applications, and a performance dog. A scant four years later, Tiger is a powerhouse that combines the best Unix has to offer with a feature-rich, user-friendly interface. The increasingly capable bundled applications are just icing on the cake. We've come a long way, baby."

Is that from John Siracusa's Tiger review?

Yeah thats the one - i first fell on it from looking at the core image stuff - but the whole review is massive! over 15 pages of goodness :)

Ah.  I knew I'd read that before, just wasn't sure where  ;)  Yeah, I enjoyed his review — it was well-written, informed, and even-handed.  Didn't get through it all in one sitting, though (it's OMG XOBX HUEG!!1!).