Back in my fourth year of college, I use to work two jobs and go to school full time. On the weekends I worked at Best Buy in the audio department and during the week I had a computer lab job. At the lab, I mostly browsed the Internet and helped nursing students with their word processing or internet searches. I hardly ever went to my morning class cause I was so tired all the time, and so the only classes I was really awake for were my afternoon classes. Luckily I had read a lot of novels the year before and done all the work for my afternoon classes, that I was able to pass my finals for that 7:30 am class! This final year of school I had absolutely no social life and spent what little time at home on the Internet too. My girlfriend refers to this semester as the computer geek time. But I hardly even noticed it until I quit all my jobs and graduated, I literally had missed out on everything my last year at school and what did I have to show for it? My best grades since my freshman semester, that’s what!

Back in college computers were still interesting and new. The internet was cool and it was changing every day. It’s now ten years later almost to the day Netscape became a public-traded company and it almost feels like the Internet has now finally started to change again after a long period of stagnation. You have new technologies like AJAX, and open-source projects like PHP and Apache that are keeping things exciting and affordable for everyone.

Now that I’m an old guy to this Internet stuff though, I’m starting to see a lot of younger kids look at computers and they are not excited about it as much as I was. They see computers as tools. They have used them all their life and they are use to them. It’s hard to appreciate a car if you’ve always had one. The technology has also changed, Microsoft finally made a version of Windows that kinda works, Apple moved pass the old MacOS System to the shiny iPod, suddenly computers are not that new.

The other thing that I do get is that working with computers really does suck. You often end up spending hours on little problems, because something is not set up right or worse there is a glitch somewhere. After so many frustrations you realize you are babysitting a freaking widget! And who wants to do that for a living?

Well it turns out that the digital divide has a couple of generations. The older generation wish things were simple like MSDOS and old P90’s. While the newer generation has no appreciation for the design or the history of technology. So if you find yourself collecting old MacSE computers in your garage, guess which generation you are from? Most likely you will have more than one old Mac and PC lying around, and so you’ll think yeah computers do suck, but not mine, mine’s a classic.

I broke down last week and ordered MacOS X Tiger after reading John Siracusa’s Tiger review on Arstechnica.com.  The review is very much an depth technical review, so I would not recommend it for everyone.  AnandTech.com’s review  is probably a better start, since Anand covers such features as The Dashboard in more depth, and is more of a user centric review than John’s.

Of interest to me, were that Tiger has the following changes and features:

Faster GUI: MacOS X is inherently slow.  It has been since its creation.  The technology for GUI does a lot more than the old QuickDraw on the original MacOS Classic.  With Tiger, Apple has embraced OpenGL even more and given the GUI a much needed speedup, supposedly even the rendering by the CPU is faster too.

New Kernel & Extensions: Drivers are what make the OS unstable.  Microsoft spent years getting this under control with NT, and with Linux you have to recompile the kernel to add extensions.  Apple went with an architecture that allows for easy extensions, but obviously it took them four years to deliver on what they exactly wanted to do with drivers and extensions.  Tiger has a very defined architecture now, and hopefully this will mean less broken drivers and more stability.

Spotlight Searching: This is one feature which is suppose to be the reason why you should update to Tiger.  The problem with Spotlight is that once you use it, you’ll never think about it again.  In other worlds, the most modern OS should have had this a long time ago!

QuickTime 7: Apple has overhauled their multimedia system and has made it even more powerful.  It is not that they added a new codec to it, but they have made it faster and more of an integral part of the technologies in OS X.  QT 7 is one upgrade that will definitely impress.  Unfortunately Apple still wants to charge users $30 for a fully enabled QuickTime Player application.

Overall Utilities & Application Improvements: Safari, TextEdit, Mail, Dashboard, etc… with Apple it is the little things that they do that makes a difference, and with Tiger, they have tweaked and added much in the way of applications and utility changes.  Not one specific change will make you go out there and buy Tiger, but added all together, you do get quite a lot.

The Bugs Are There!

Undeniably Apple has delivered some very bad OS releases, (System 7, MacOS X 1.0, and even the last one OS X  Panther).  From reports on the Internet, it seems that Tiger may have a few bugs crawling around and it may have been rushed a bit, but I’m sure the .1 update will be coming out very soon.  As always a 2 month delay in upgrading is a pretty good strategy to have.