Status-Q

The following is an account of my experiences upgrading my Powerbook to the new “Tiger” version of Mac OS X – a long spiel which is probably of very little interest to anybody not likely to be doing the same thing… and probably not of much interest to them!

This turned out to be a very long post and only suitable for those with great stamina, so I’ve moved it into the Comments. Summary for the rest of you: Buy an external firewire drive if you don’t have one, do a complete bootable backup onto it before starting. Then reboot with a system CD and use Disk Utility to verify/repair your disk. Then do the install. Then reboot with the Tiger DVD and ‘Repair permissions’. That’s my recommendation, anyway, and you can read the rest if you want to know the reasoning.

Now that Tiger, Apple new version of Mac OS, has been released, those of us with developer licences can talk about the cool new stuff, and there are more new articles and websites to read this weekend than ever before.

Anyone with an interest in the underlying techie details as well as the visible might enjoy John Siracusa’s 21-page review at Ars Technica.

A very significant new feature for me is not much talked about – the ability, at last, to rotate external displays and use them in portrait mode. This is a godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time reading or writing pages of text. I’m not sure whether it’s supported on all Macs or just those with certain graphics chips, but it works on my PowerBook.

The very latest (2005) PowerBooks have a motion sensor built in to them. It will park your hard disk heads if you drop or bump the machine. But that’s not all it can be used for….

I’m often worried these days that something I see and find interesting on the web won’t be available if I ever go and look for it again, or it’ll be in some premium-rate archive and I’ve never yet stumped up the money for any of those. (Publishers, are you listening?)

Mac users, of course, can capture anything as a PDF using the built-in facilities of the Print dialog. But if you want to start doing some really nice things with your PDF files, you want to play with PDF Services, a little-known but rather handy feature of Mac OS X. This MacWorld article will get you started, and there’s more information on Apple’s site here.

The potential of this is starting to come home to me as I play more with a preview of Tiger, which will instantly index the text in any document you save to your disk. Including PDFs. It may not be long before I automatically capture the image of every web page I read.