Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / February 2005

Apple's had a series of pages on their web site for months now
describing what's new in Tiger.  It's hardly a secret.  See
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html>.

Personally, I think that Spotlight and its published APIs so that it is
available to any application that wants to use it is huge. Virtually
instantaneous searching of data and metadata with today's huge disks
will provide lots of benefits.

Dashboard probably falls into the "cute toy" category.

Automator, essentially a lego approach to system-level scripting will
provide a lot of benefit to a large minority, at least, of users.

iChat AV's "conference audio-video chatting" will be of use to a lot of
folks -- small businesses and organizations can now have audio or video
conference calls, eliminating a whole bunch of meetings.

If you're a software developer, the enhancements in Xcode 2 will please
you quite a bit.

All of the above is covered in far greater detail on Apple's Web site.

Whether any of this makes it a "must-have" for you, only you can
decide. There are enough features being touted (and which we've seen
showed off in one or more of Jobs' webcast keynotes), that I'm looking
forward to its release.

As to "when", that's anybody's guess. From past experience, though,
when Apple says "2nd quarter", that pretty much means June. I would
assume the same for "first half." When a release date is actually
"known" by Apple management for a product they're touting, they
typically announce a date somewhere between a month and six weeks out.
They have yet to do so, therefore I would guess Tiger's still a few
months away.

It is scheduled to be released sometime "before" the second half of 2005
and reported on time so far.  The new toys are what makes it a must-have
for some.  Anything else is just hear say.

Expect it to be announced at the WWDC early summer,
with public release a week or two later.  That has
been typical of how Apple has done it in the past.

-john-