Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

From Applepedia

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is the fourth major release of OS X since its introduction. It contains the most enhancements of any major point release to date. It was released on April 29, 2005.

1 Updates
2 Features
3 How to Spot
4 See also

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Updates

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Features

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Spotlight

Spotlight is Apple's advanced file-search tool. It indexes the contents of the user's hard drive (and relevant metadata for many file types) in order to significantly reduce search time and increase relevance.

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Dashboard

Dashboard is Tiger's implementation of desktop "widgets" -- small objects that sit on their own desktop layer (toggled by pressing F12) and perform simple functions. Widgets that come standard with Tiger include a calculator, a current-weather widget, and a clock widget.

At their most basic, widgets consist of a PNG background image and HTML for the user interface. CSS and JavaScript can be included to increase the complexity of a widget's appearance and behavior.

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Automator

Automator is like a GUI for AppleScript. It lets you create linked chains of actions to automate actions, such as downloading all the mp3s on a web page and synchronizing them to your iPod.

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Core Image

Core Image is an advanced framework for graphics effects, all rendered directly on modern video cards. Since Macs can't play games, Apple decided to harness all that GPU power in the GUI.

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Quartz 2D Extreme

Quartz 2D Extreme is a replacement for Quartz 2D, that renders graphics primitives on your graphics card, and caches font glyphs in VRAM for super-fast rendering. It's disabled by default.

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VoiceOver

VoiceOver is a screen reader/keyboard navigation system integrated into the OS, allowing low-sighted users to interact easily, if slowly, with the operating system.

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Secure virtual memory

Secure virtual memory encrypts your swapfiles, preventing anyone who can access your disk from seeing the contents of your memory. Is not enabled by default, and so there are some gotchas when you decide to enable it, see the article.

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Access Control Lists

ACLs are a much more advanced system for file permissions than the old UNIX read/write/execute system.

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Updated apps

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Safari RSS

Safari RSS (Safari 2.0) is the newest version of Safari. Its most significant new feature is the integration of a feed reader. In spite of the name, it supports both RSS and Atom Feeds.

As an extension of this, there is a new screensaver called RSS Visualizer where you can have your Safari RSS Feeds beautifully displayed in your screensaver. To add new feeds, click the RSS button in the URL bar in Safari, then click Add bookmark... at the bottom of the right hand pane in the Safari RSS reader. Once bookmarked, you can use this feed in the screensaver settings, accessable in Desktop & Screensaver pane in System Preferences

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