50 Random Observations on Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”

April 20th, 2005

Looks like Tiger information is slowly making its way onto the net, so I figured I’d post some of my own observations.

  • When copying Google searches to the system-wide search-clipboard-thing, Safari now only copies the first word in the query. Makes it much easier to Google your way to a page, then ⌘G your way to the first instance of whatever it is you were looking for. Before, Safari would copy your whole query, which wasn’t as useful. If you surround the query or first few words with quote marks, it’ll copy the entire quoted string, sans actual quote marks. If you use a special search operator (like site:assortedgeekery.com), it will ignore the operator and only copy the actual query onto the clipboard. EDIT: Also available in Safari 1.3.
  • The Special Characters palette is now a standard item in Edit menus.
  • Finder doesn’t soil itself when trying to preview a 700-MB movie for which it doesn’t have a codec.
  • Every goddamn time I try to empty the Trash, I click “Open” instead.
  • Command-R refreshes Dashboard widgets with a neat effect.
  • I’ve already managed to break Spotlight’s ability to index emails. Bloody hell.
  • Finder utility windows (for long copy operations and such) use a pure white background for no apparent reason.
  • “Save as Plugin” in Automator is pretty sweet. Makes a contextual menu item for the Finder.
  • Safari’s RSS button will dutifully forward the RSS URL to your default newsreader. NetNewsWire automatically makes a new subscription. I don’t think I could possibly be happier about this.
  • Battery menu extra offers once-click access to energy saver presets.
  • Google Maps is broken in Safari 2.0, unless you identify yourself as MSIE 6.0, in which case it works fine. Interesting. (All the other spoofs in the debug menu have version numbers that are too low, so I couldn’t test those.) Google Maps works just fine in Safari 2.0.
  • I can find printer supplies on my own, thanks. The operating system need not provide a link.
  • I have 16,529 files on my computer that contain the word “the.” 16,530 now that I’ve saved this document. Spotlight results are updated instantly.
  • There’s a strange, jittery visual glitch when renaming files in Finder.
  • Browsing dictionaries in Script Editor (now version 2.1) is much improved—you can browse by suites (like before), containment, or inheritance. Uses a column-view interface by default. Makes finding what you’re looking for much, much easier.
  • Preview can save as GIF (not just PNG).
  • Mail uses a custom drop-down menu to choose the account for a new message, for pretty much no reason at all.
  • When you click “Edit Menu” in the new PDF button-menu thing in the print sheet, the header in the table view that pops up has a colon. It’s also difficult to tell that it’s a header at all. Probably would’ve been a better idea to put “Printing Workflows” as just regular text above the table.
  • Image dimensions in the Finder. Thank God. EDIT: Yes, they were available in 10.3 via the Show Item Info option, but Tiger makes them much more accessible. They’re shown in column view and the Get Info window.
  • “Smart Folders” are saved searches, literally. Just a plist with info about the search. They’re not cached, so they really don’t exist until you open them. At least they save the state of the window.
  • iChat 3.0 gets rudimentary support for AIM profiles.
  • Stickies gets a useful Window menu.
  • Grapher pretty-prints math equations as you type.
  • AppleScript dialogs and icons have been updated to be more OS X-ish. icon 1 is now the icon of the calling application.
  • Full screen is still a “pro” feature in QuickTime.
  • There’s now an “automatic” font smoothing style that claims to choose the best settings for your main display.
  • Male, female, and novelty voices are now separate in the “Speech” prefpane. Good call.
  • iChat still doesn’t refresh status messages often enough.
  • Finder instantly becomes aware of changes made at the command-line level. Seems to give the changed files a generic icon based on the extension first, then uses type/creator info to figure out the proper icon. (Save a document with no extension to the desktop, then cp it to see what I mean.)
  • A new “poof” cursor shows when dragging a running application off the dock, but letting go snaps it right back. The application will disappear when quit. Does anyone remember one of the keynotes where Steve dragged a running app off the Dock, and when it snapped back, it bounced a little? I want that. I think I’d probably spend about three hours a day doing that.
  • Contextual menus on images in Safari now have an “Add Image to iPhoto Library” item.
  • The Safari address bar is now a real, live NSToolbar, or at least a good impersonation of one.
  • The printer utility-thing (not “Printer Utility.app,” but whatever appears when you try to print) keeps a history of successful print jobs.
  • BOMArchiveHelper now handles tarred and gzipped files. Fucking sweet.
  • Use /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ ScreenSaverEngine -background (all one line) to add the RSS screensaver to your desktop. Whoa.
  • Use Quartz Composer to make your own RSS screensaver. Whoa, again.
  • Safari 2.0 supports Undo in textareas.
  • You can FUS without signing off iChat.
  • Safari warns before automatically mounting a disk image that contains an application.
  • Drag a Finder window under the Dock, and let go. It’s now completely covered, and you can’t get at it anymore! Neat trick. (Side note: Cocoa windows usually bounce back automatically, and Carbon windows usually don’t allow you to drag them under the Dock in the first place. Where Finder fits into this, I have no idea. Anyone want to try it in Panther and comment?)
  • Highlighting 2+4 in a text box and running the “Get Result of AppleScript” service does nothing. This upsets me. Doing the same with say "hello" still works.
  • Safari now supports inline PDF viewing. This is mentioned on the New Features page, but you’ll have to uninstall the Shubert-It plugin before you can see it in action.
  • Safari now copies tables correctly, sort of. Oddly, it copies them correctly into TextWrangler, but not into Pages or TextEdit in rich text mode. My guess is that it puts the correct data into the plain text components of the clipboard, but reverts to the old ways for the styled text components. (I think my terminology is a little off, but put a table on the clipboard and try get the clipboard as record in Script Editor to see what I mean.) So if an application asks the clipboard for plain text, it gets the correct data, but if it asks for styled text, it gets the crap data. Of course, you can always scrub the clipboard before pasting, and it’ll work properly in a rich text environment.
  • The FUS menu extra allows you to choose between an icon, the user’s full name, and the user’s short name.
  • The “Look Up in Dictionary” contextual menu item is a nifty new feature; choosing “Open Dictionary panel” in Dictionary.app’s preferences makes it even niftier, giving you a little popup right under the word you’ve chosen to look up. Unfortunately, you can’t copy from the Dictionary panel, but you can drag from it. Seems to work in just about every Cocoa text view. (Curiously, TextWrangler didn’t automatically get support for it, but it automatically got support for the “Spotlight” contextual menu item.)
  • Paste and Match Style in iChat pastes, but it doesn’t match the style. My font is Georgia 10, and it pasted some styled text from Pages (which was in Times 12) as Helvetica. WTF?
  • Lots of new goodies in StandardAdditions and System Events, for you AppleScript fans out there. Even the venerable “display dialog” has some new tricks.
  • Dragging a picture file onto the “Tile Game” Dashboard widget makes a new game with that picture. This is stated clearly on Apple’s Tiger preview page, but it’s cool enough to deserve mention here. (Start a drag operation, invoke Dashboard with a hot key or hot corner, and drop it on the widget.)
  • Help Viewer now searches Apple’s online support articles in real time.
  • TextEdit can export to valid HTML or XHTML, with embedded, inline, or no CSS. Really. And what’s even more interesting is that the generator is Cocoa HTML Writer, not TextEdit—is this a “for free” Cocoa feature?

Some Additional Observations

  • On a fresh install, the default short user name is your Apple ID.
  • Default computer name is based on your model—mine was “Christopher Biagini’s PowerBook G4 15"”
  • The Apple image picker now lets you zoom beyond 100%. This is a mixed bag. If you’re using it to select a buddy icon for iChat, then you can’t really be sure how it’ll look on your friends’ Windows machines. (It looks fine at any size on a Mac because OS X resizes images beautifully.)

  • iChat 3.0 now gives you one-click access to being a complete tool:

    iChat showing a link to iTMS

    Thanks to Rosyna for the screenshot.

  • If an application crashes, the Send Report dialog now gives you the option to reopen the application. If the application crashes immediately after opening, the dialog offers a “Try Again” option which temporarily restores the application’s default preferences.

This entry was posted by Chris Biagini on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 9:21 pm and is filed under OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

65 Responses to “50 Random Observations on Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger””

  1. Does iChat have tabs yet?

    —Dominic Damian, 2005.04.25 @ 8:27 pm (#)

  2. Nope :)

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.25 @ 9:12 pm (#)

  3. I am pretty sure the Finder has always shown image dimensions. The option is in the menu View>Show View Options (Cmd+J) : Show Item Info.

    —Josh Bryant, 2005.04.25 @ 9:40 pm (#)

  4. I just checked the “Finder window versus the Dock problem” in Panther and the window is forced to have the titlebar peeking out from around the Dock.

    It is possible to put a Finder window mostly under the dock and then launch a few new applications to force it to grow over the window’s titlebar completely. This applies to both brushed and standard window styles.

    —Martin Jenkins, 2005.04.25 @ 9:46 pm (#)

  5. Drag a Finder window under the Dock, and let go. It’s now completely covered, and you can’t get at it anymore! Neat trick. (Side note: Cocoa windows usually bounce back automatically, and Carbon windows usually don’t allow you to drag them under the Dock in the first place. Where Finder fits into this, I have no idea. Anyone want to try it in Panther and comment?)

    Won’t let you do it in Panther!

    —Lloyd, 2005.04.25 @ 9:53 pm (#)

  6. Great article BTW, makes my mouth water for Friday!

    —Lloyd, 2005.04.25 @ 9:54 pm (#)

  7. Josh, thanks for pointing that out. Someone else had done so earlier, but I managed to completely destroy all the comments on the trip from MT to WordPress. Perhaps what I should have said in the article is that image dimensions are more accessible in Tiger.

    Lloyd and Martin, same deal for you guys. Someone beat you to it, but I baleeted their comment. So thanks :)

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.25 @ 10:00 pm (#)

  8. We pre-ordered Tiger at work from Apple. Does it ship on the 29th or should we have it by the 29th?

    —David, 2005.04.25 @ 10:17 pm (#)

  9. You should have it by the 29th. Some people have even received it already.

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.25 @ 10:24 pm (#)

  10. the RSS screensaver desktop. how do i make it stay there? when i run it from terminal and then quit terminal, the screensaver quits too.

    —Clueless, 2005.04.25 @ 10:29 pm (#)

  11. Other interesting stuff:

    Single user mode now has more user-friendly instructions.

    The startup process no longer names what’s loading.

    Periodic scripts are no longer handled by cron.

    Terminal icons have been redesigned.

    Address Book does envelopes.

    —Lucas Wagner, 2005.04.25 @ 11:25 pm (#)

  12. […] Mac folket er s vilde med deres maskiner. De tager jo det ene designhit efter det andet. 50 forskellige synspunkter til Mac OS 10.4-Tiger Interessant lsning for folket (moi) der p […]

    —Familien Bojko’s weblog » Blog Archive » Weekenden, 2005.04.26 @ 3:06 am (#)

  13. This is a little nitpicky, but…

    IF DOCK MAGNIFICATION IS ENABLED: When right clicking on any item in the dock and then left clicking anywhere else but the dock, the dock freezes in its magnified state. I’ve found this to be somewhat annoying as I am constantly right-clicking my applications folder in the dock, which is something I do quite often.

    Anyone else experiencing this?

    —Scott Moschella, 2005.04.26 @ 4:28 am (#)

  14. Dashboard has a very cool visual effect when you click the ‘+’ icon in the bottom left corner. It moves the entire screen up to make room for the widget collection.

    —Mike Cohen, 2005.04.26 @ 11:47 am (#)

  15. How were you able to break Spotlight in Mail? Saw something similar. Dunno how to reindex.

    —Ben, 2005.04.26 @ 6:17 pm (#)

  16. “Paste and Match Style in iChat pastes, but it doesn’t match the style.”

    My iChat has always kept the style of the source, regardless of the version.

    —Revi, 2005.04.26 @ 8:00 pm (#)

  17. blink

    nm. delete that :)

    —Revi, 2005.04.26 @ 8:00 pm (#)

  18. Scott, I can confirm your Dock bug.

    Ben, no idea how I broke it. Even Mail itself can’t search the contents of messages. As far as Spotlight is concerned, .emlx files don’t exist. If I rename a text file to have that extension, it disappears from the database.

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.26 @ 11:30 pm (#)

  19. Clueless: append a space and an ampersand to the command so it will run in the background. It should keep running after you quit terminal. In other words, the command you enter should be: /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &

    —Micah Buckley-Farlee, 2005.04.27 @ 1:02 am (#)

  20. Micah, I’m afraid that won’t work. Even if you send it to the background, the ScreenSaverEngine process is still created as a child of the bash shell that made it. When you close the window, the bash process and all its children are killed.

    The only way I’ve figured out to avoid this is by executing the command in Script Editor, in a do shell script. Script Editor beachballs, but you can force quit it and the ScreenSaverEngine process survives. It’s reparented to (null), though, which kind of scares me.

    I’m sure that one of the free utilities (like BackLight) that let you do this kind of thing will be updated eventually to let you run the RSS screensaver. (It’s a Quartz Composer screensaver, and BackLight doesn’t seem to recognize that it’s even there.)

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.27 @ 1:31 am (#)

  21. […] nd installed Tiger yesterday and hopefully I will get it off him today. Can’t wait. [Link] 

    Post by Mark | Filed under: Kuwait, Technology, Information

    No C […]

    —2:48AM [The B-Sides] » 50 Random Observations on “Tiger”, 2005.04.27 @ 5:21 am (#)

  22. Christopher, have you found a way reindexing? There’s no menue, right? I restarted at some point, after that, the harddisks reindexed. Didn’t find everything I was looking for in Mail after that anyway, though.

    On a second note, is there a way to do AND in Spotlight? What about things like “search this sentence only”?

    —Ben, 2005.04.27 @ 7:25 am (#)

  23. I have Jaguar and tested what you said about windows popping back. System Preferences, Calculator, and Safari popped back just enough to display the whole titlebar. Appleworks wouldn’t let me drag the titlebar off, even partially.

    And as for the font glitches when copying and pasting, I’ve had similar problems, just within Appleworks in Jaguar. Even in a document with all the text being one font (Courier New), if I try to copy and paste text from one section of that document to another, it still pastes in Helvetica. Truly most annoying and evidently not corrected.

    —Tylerious, 2005.04.27 @ 12:18 pm (#)

  24. Can you paste from Word into iChat 3.0?

    —Todd Plants, 2005.04.27 @ 1:12 pm (#)

  25. How about using the unix disown command to detach the ScreenSaverEngine process from the terminal. Does a this desktop hack still break Expose functionality?

    —Gary, 2005.04.27 @ 1:45 pm (#)

  26. Read Apple’s tech brief on Spotlight here: http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/MacOSX_Spotlight_TB.pdf for details on complex searches. There are also command line tools (mdlfind, mdls) for working with Spotlight.

    —Seth, 2005.04.27 @ 2:02 pm (#)

  27. does grab save as .jpeg yet? or any non-tiff file format. most tedious when you have to open photoshop to save it as something else.

    —spence, 2005.04.27 @ 2:33 pm (#)

  28. Since searching is one of the main features of Tiger, have they finally fixed searching in the address book? I repeatedly get calls where the caller ID doesn’t show the name and I search for the number in the address book but get no results even though it’s actually there.

    —cdub, 2005.04.27 @ 3:24 pm (#)

  29. But image dimensions aren’t any more accessible in Tiger - they work in exactly the same way.

    —Martin, 2005.04.27 @ 5:56 pm (#)

  30. Well in’96 Jobs promised that he would deliver the power of OpenDoc (or the NeXT equivalent) when Apple/he abandonned it - well now I have System 6 DA’s back….. with a fancy new name. I still ain’t got the functionality of the OpenDoc I had in 1996!

    —Martin Owen, 2005.04.27 @ 6:19 pm (#)

  31. • When copying Google searches to the system-wide search-clipboard-thing, Safari now only copies the first word in the query. Makes it much easier to Google your way to a page, then ⌘G your way to the first instance of whatever it is you were looking for. Before, Safari would copy your whole query, which wasn’t as useful. If you surround the query or first few words with quote marks, it’ll copy the entire quoted string, sans actual quote marks. If you use a special search operator (like site:assortedgeekery.com), it will ignore the operator and only copy the actual query onto the clipboard.

    Feature is in Panther

    • The Special Characters palette is now a standard item in Edit menus.

    Feature is in Panther

    • Battery menu extra offers once-click access to energy saver presets.

    Feature is in Panther

    • Stickies gets a useful Window menu.

    Feature exists in Panther

    • Safari 2.0 supports Undo in textareas.

    Feature exists in Panther (Safari 1.3)

    • Highlighting 2+4 in a text box and running the “Get Result of AppleScript” service does nothing. This upsets me. Doing the same with say “hello” still works.

    This is a deal breaker for me - I use applescript arithmetic a dozen times per day!

    • Dragging a picture file onto the “Tile Game” Dashboard widget makes a new game with that picture. This is stated clearly on Apple’s Tiger preview page, but it’s cool enough to deserve mention here. (Start a drag operation, invoke Dashboard with a hot key or hot corner, and drop it on the widget.)

    This was a feature of the Puzzle game in Classic Mac OS

    —Gibbons Burke, 2005.04.27 @ 6:23 pm (#)

  32. Clueless, try puuting a ” &” after the command (space ampersand, no quotes).

    —ben, 2005.04.27 @ 6:36 pm (#)

  33. Chris, you are being linked all over the place! :P

    —Nick, 2005.04.27 @ 7:40 pm (#)

  34. Martin Owen: Just curious here, what kinda OpenDoc features were you wanting to see back again? I didn’t make much use of OpenDoc when it was here, from what I remember I thought OS X services and the smarts behind the standard text views and input fields had pretty replaced most of that.

    —Gary, 2005.04.27 @ 8:33 pm (#)

  35. This is a strange question, but as an OS/X user (the version which came with my iMac, pre-Panther), I’ve noticed that the simple screensaver function where images in a folder are panned across, then faded into another, is actually more visually impressive than trying to achieve this kind of effect in iMovie (for example, via the so-called “Ken Burns” effect). Is it possible in some way, then, to record a screensaver routine, perhaps in Tiger? Thank you for your advice.

    —Carl, 2005.04.27 @ 8:48 pm (#)

  36. Do you still have to hit return between the first and last name entry fields in the Address Book? Seems simple, but it really drives me up the wall. Can’t a program discern between a first and last name?

    —Paul, 2005.04.27 @ 9:47 pm (#)

  37. “• Battery menu extra offers once-click access to energy saver presets.

    Feature is in Panther” I don’t think that;s what he meant. I think he means that one can select the presets (“Automatic, Higher Performance, etc…) from the battery menu extra without going to the Energy Saver pref pane

    —Nick, 2005.04.27 @ 9:48 pm (#)

  38. thanks for the info, can’t wait till friday

    —austin, 2005.04.27 @ 10:16 pm (#)

  39. Preview now supports fillable PDF documents. This includes PDFs that appear in Safari.

    —Shain, 2005.04.28 @ 2:54 am (#)

  40. > the RSS screensaver desktop. how do i make it stay there? when i run it from terminal and then quit terminal, the screensaver quits too.

    Try ‘nohup’. See ‘man nohup’ for more info.

    —stewey, 2005.04.28 @ 2:54 am (#)

  41. Finder Media Preview:

    Its more than just no longer soiling up - you can interrupt it, THATs maybe what you meant, and its what i love : Its still trying for as long a time aas in Panther, but you can anytime stop it.

    The same goes for Open/Save Dialogs, where you tend to wait for QT to show the preview (Open Button seems greyed out until that is done) BUT you can still hit return and it interrupts preview generation and opens the file..

    yeah well its sorta neaty tweaky thing, this Tiger, really cool.

    —Mr. Mike, 2005.04.28 @ 4:12 am (#)

  42. Really cool list! Just what I’ve been looking for…

    —Tijer, 2005.04.28 @ 5:33 am (#)

  43. To keep the desktop screensaver running, add two comments above together: Run /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background & Then you will given the PID of the process. Run disown PID#

    —astr0b0y, 2005.04.28 @ 8:12 am (#)

  44. You can hit control-command-D over a word to get that pop-up dictionary definition panel. ;)

    —lookmark, 2005.04.28 @ 9:23 am (#)

  45. Speaking of Address Book, I’m thrilled to have Card/Look for duplicate entries… as an option. After applying this from the menu you get an option to merge data as well, sweet!

    —Kerry, 2005.04.28 @ 9:47 am (#)

  46. When copying Google searches to the system-wide search-clipboard-thing…

    Um. you don’t need to copy or select or anything. just do a search from the google-bar, and then when it loads, hit Cmd-F, and the search (word, phrase, etc) is in there.!

    —Stephen, 2005.04.28 @ 10:33 am (#)

  47. Nice stuff.

    —Plastic Chicken, 2005.04.28 @ 11:10 am (#)

  48. Yeah, Stephen, that’s kind of the point ;) Read the sentence again. Safari is doing the copying when you use the Google box.

    The whole idea is that you don’t have to bother with ⌘F, because the clipboard already has something useful in it. (Does anyone know what it’s called officially, by the way?)

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.28 @ 11:18 am (#)

  49. This is pretty great. It’s nice to see a good compilation of features that might not make it into a more formal preview (but are really interesting nonetheless). I’m really looking forward to Spotlight just to show my friends but after reading this I’m thinking this might be the release that I take the time to really learn AppleScript.

    —Steven Hepting, 2005.04.28 @ 11:57 am (#)

  50. Re: Finder Windows under the Dock issue in Panther. I have my dock on the right side of my 23” Cinema Display. I can drag a Finder window so just a bit of the left edge of it remains on the screen. When I mouse over to the right edge of the screen the Dock appears as normal and at first it seems that Finder Window is now trapped. However, if I quickly grab an exposed part of the window before the Dock appears, I can drag the window back onto my screen, no problem. I couldn’t find any Expose or hide/minimize tricks to recover it, though one could obviously change the Dock preferences to temporarily move the Dock to a different edge of the screen and get at the trapped window that way.

    —Dana Dawson, 2005.04.28 @ 1:20 pm (#)

  51. Address Book now reconnects to your Bluetooth phone even after a system restart. Before, you had to reconnect by clicking the Bluetooth Icon on the Address Book toolbar each time.

    —Shain, 2005.04.28 @ 1:46 pm (#)

  52. How about adding some of all these pertinent observations to http://www.tigerwiki.com ?

    —Peter J. Pedersen, 2005.04.28 @ 3:02 pm (#)

  53. About the Finder window under the Dock: if you do that you still have the focus on it. If you close the window (Apple-W) and the open a new one (Apple-N) it SHOULD be opened again under the Dock. Instead it is opened with just the titlebar over the Dock, so that you can drag it back on the desktop.

    —Anidel, 2005.04.28 @ 3:38 pm (#)

  54. Thanks for the heads-up, Peter. I think I just might. Should probably mention some of them to bugreport.apple.com, as well.

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.28 @ 3:39 pm (#)

  55. About the RSS screensaver: if you run the command with the & at the end of it and you CLOSE the window, then you are sending a KILL signal to the shell. The shell then quits killing all of its children, regardless of if they were in background (&) or not. But if you QUIT it (via the shell commands exit, logout…) then all the background applications will stay alive.

    —Anidel, 2005.04.28 @ 3:40 pm (#)

  56. More Tiger Tales

    50 Random Observations on Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”

    —ZuDfunck, 2005.04.28 @ 5:00 pm (#)

  57. Here’s a nice Spotlight feature. After typing in your search, hold down the Command key and it will select the “Top Hit”. While still holding the Command Key, hit Return and it will select it. Nice for opening applications that aren’t on the dock. Just hit Command-Space, type the name of the application and then hit Command-Return. Presto!

    —MacJunkie, 2005.04.28 @ 8:09 pm (#)

  58. Has anyone noticed that you can’t open Google search results in a new Safari tab? At first I thought this was a Safari bug, but telling Safari to identify itself as MSIE fixes the problem. Google is using some weird onclick handler on each link, and the version that they give by default to Safari seems to be causing the problem. There was a JS issue with Google Maps, too, but that’s been resolved.

    I’m sure improvements to Safari’s support for XMLHttpRequest and other Microsofty things explain why Safari works with the MSIE versions, but that doesn’t explain why the Safari versions stopped working.

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.04.29 @ 8:28 pm (#)

  59. Great list, great reading, thx!

    I’m still on 10.3.9 (can hardly wait any longer …), Safari 1.3, but I guess the following applies to Tiger as well: Safari displays not only PDF’s, but also RTF’s! No luck with DOC’s, though. Comes handy sometimes.

    Anyone else noticed the “Copy Image”-bug in Safari! In anything but Cocoa-apps to paste a ‘copied’ image just results in pasting the url (as text) — that’s annoying.

    Very nice, on the other hand, is the fact that you can select text quickly and accurately by means of Shift-click on non-contiguous text (well, the resulting selection will be contiguous, though). Wonder, why Command-click seems to have no special function.

    —Risach, 2005.04.30 @ 10:42 am (#)

  60. […] video format so very slinky looking! If you want more then check out this great list of 50 Random Observations from Chris Biagini’s Assortedgeekery blog. Kudos to Apple, […]

    —Tigersprout » Blog Archive » Tiger - first impressions, 2005.04.30 @ 12:59 pm (#)

  61. “Is it possible in some way, then, to record a screensaver routine, perhaps in Tiger?”

    SaverLab can do this; get it from versiontracker or www.dozingcat.com.

    —Brian, 2005.05.01 @ 3:56 am (#)

  62. The reason for mail to use that custom drop-down menu for accounts in new mails is pretty neat for us with a bunch of accounts to send from.

    —Toor, 2005.05.02 @ 11:30 am (#)

  63. Maybe I’m missing something, Toor, but I don’t see how the custom drop-down is any more functional than a standard drop-down.

    —Christopher Biagini, 2005.05.02 @ 1:24 pm (#)

  64. I found the screen saver works if run from an Applescript. The Script Editor froze, however…. but the screen save kept running. Unfortunately, mine is the iTunes Album art and it’s taking quite a bit of the CPU.

    —Lee, 2005.05.02 @ 7:14 pm (#)

  65. that PDF button ion the Print dialog is going to annoy me as long as I use Tiger. What was Apple thinking??

    —Nick, 2005.05.04 @ 2:10 am (#)

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