Tiger? More like Kitten!

I was in London today giving back my Gizmondo (looked great on paper, not so great in plastic) and dropped into the Apple store on Regent street to play with Tiger. The refund from the Gizmondo fresh on my card, I actually had half a mind to grab a 12" Powerbook as a backup notebook for email, etc.

Having seen the Tiger demos, I was really impressed by Spotlight and Automator. On my PC, I shelled out 70 bucks for X1 search and all it does is make my system hang (actually just removed the damn thing) so the promise of built-in real-time indexed search combined with the Photoshop Actions-type Automator feature was enough to make me give the Mac another shot. Yet another disappointment!

Spotlight doesn't even support boolean search. You can't specify words to exclude or phrases, etc. For mail, you can't specify that only the subject should be searched, the body, specific date ranges, etc.

Automator? Only supported by the current system apps that come with the OS. It'll be a year at least before the major applications integrate it into the latest versions of their software.

Final verdict: One to watch but not terribly useful today. I'll take a look again in a year. Kitten definitely has promise but it has to grow up first.

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