End-user features Apple advertised that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger had over 150 new and improved features, including: •
Spotlight — Spotlight is a full-text and
metadata search engine that can search everything on one's Mac, including
Microsoft Word documents,
iCal calendars and
Address Book contact cards. The feature is also used to build the concept of '
smart folders' into the
Finder. Spotlight will index files as they are saved, so they can be quickly and easily found through a search-as-you-type box in the menu bar. As a side-effect, it adds hidden folders and indexing files to removable media like USB flash drives. •
iChat AV — The new iChat AV 3.0 in Tiger supports up to four participants in a video conference and ten participants in an audio conference. It also now supports communication using the
XMPP protocol. An XMPP server called
iChat Server is included on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server. •
Safari RSS — The new Safari 2.0
web browser in Tiger featured a built-in reader for
RSS and
Atom web syndication that can be accessed easily from an RSS button in the address bar of the web browser window. An updated version of Safari, included as part of the free 10.4.3 update, can also pass the
Acid2 web standards test. •
Mail 2 — The new version of Mail.app
email client included in Tiger featured an updated interface, "Smart Mailboxes", which utilizes the Spotlight search system, parental controls, as well as several other features. •
Automator — A scripting tool to link applications together to form complex automated workflows (written in
AppleScript,
Cocoa, or both). Automator came with a complete library of actions for several applications that can be used together to make a Workflow. •
VoiceOver — screen reader interface similar to Jaws for Windows and other Windows screen readers that offers the blind and visually impaired user keyboard control and spoken
English descriptions of what is happening on screen. VoiceOver enables users with visual impairment to use applications via keyboard commands. VoiceOver is capable of reading aloud the contents of files including web pages, mail messages and word processing files. Complete keyboard navigation lets the user control the computer with the keyboard rather than the mouse, a menu is displayed in a window showing all the available keyboard commands that can be used. •
A complete built-in Dictionary/Thesaurus based on the
New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, accessible through an application, Dictionary, a Dashboard widget, and as a system-wide command (see below). •
.Mac syncing — Though this was not a new feature, .Mac syncing in Tiger is much improved over Panther. Syncing tasks in Tiger are now accomplished through the .Mac system preferences pane rather than the
iSync application. •
QuickTime 7 — A new version of Apple's multimedia software has support for the new
H.264/AVC codec, which offers better quality and scalability than other
video codecs. This new codec is used by iChat AV for clearer video conferencing. New classes within Cocoa provide full access to QuickTime for Cocoa application developers. The new QuickTime 7 player application bundled with Tiger now includes more advanced audio and video controls as well as a more detailed Information dialog, and the new player has been rebuilt using Apple's
Cocoa API to take advantage of the new technologies more easily. •
New Unix features — New versions of
cp,
mv, and
rsync that support files with
resource forks. Command-line support for features such as the above-mentioned Spotlight is also included. •
Xcode 2.0 — Xcode 2.0, Apple's Cocoa development tool now includes visual modelling, an integrated Apple Reference Library and graphical remote
debugging.
New applications in Tiger •
Dashboard — The Dashboard is a new mini-applications layer based on
HTML,
CSS, and
JavaScript, which returns the
desk accessories concept to Mac OS. These accessories are known as
widgets. It comes with several widgets such as Weather, World Clock, Unit Converter, Dictionary/
Thesaurus, and others (
full list). More are available to download for free online. Its similarity to the
Konfabulator application caused some criticism. •
Automator — Automator uses workflows to process repetitive tasks automatically. •
Grapher — Grapher is a new application capable of creating 2D and 3D graphs similar to those of
Graphing Calculator. •
Dictionary — A dictionary and thesaurus program that uses the
New Oxford American Dictionary. It has a fast GUI for displaying the Dictionary, and allows the user to search the dictionary with Spotlight, to print definitions, and to copy and paste text into documents. Dictionary also provides a Dictionary service in the Application menu, and Cocoa and
WebKit provide a global keyboard shortcut (ctrl-⌘-D by default) for all applications that display text with them. Its use was furthered in Mac OS X Leopard by providing definitions from
Wikipedia. The Dictionary application is a more feature-filled version of the Dictionary widget. •
Quartz Composer — Quartz Composer is a development tool for processing and rendering graphical data. •
AU Lab — AU Lab is a developer application for testing and mixing
Audio Units. ==Improvements==