Favorite features in Mac OS X Tiger

April 12, 2005

Now that the release date is known (April 29th), and after having browsed the 200+ new features of Tiger, these are the ones I'm looking forward to:

Spotlight -- I'm using Quicksilver for some of the Spotlight features but Spotlight integration in Apple applications (especially Mail) seems quite powerful
Dashboard -- Widgets are cool (but are they useful?). What is interesting with Dashboard is that it's based on Web standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). If it is possible to use an XmlHttpRequest object from Dashboard widgets, there is a lot of potential (a new wave of Web Services straight to my desktop)
Preview -- View and create annotations to a PDF document
DVD Player -- Bookmark favorite moments of a DVD
iChat AV -- Jabber support
Mail -- Add photos from Mail directly to iPhoto
Mobility -- More battery usage for my PowerBook
Access Spotlight from a UNIX command line using mdls or mdfind (will it be more powerful than find/grep/locate combination?)
Java 1.5 -- it seems it's not part of Tiger but available as a separate download

There is no killer feature for me (like Expose was for Panther) but a lot of minor enhancements which should improve the great user experience I have on my Mac so far.