Installation: I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that the installation is a lot more streamlined, with fewer hidden tasks to get through; particularly, the ever-irritating "Optimizing System Performance" step at the end, just after the main progress bar completes and you think you're done, only to have to wait another ten or twenty minutes, has been greatly trimmed down. There's no "optimizing" step at all after intermediate tasks such as language installations, and the overall prebinding update at the very end (the final "Optimizing System Performance") only takes thirty seconds or so now. Boy, is that ever satisfying to see.

Overall: I love the new responsiveness of the Finder in reaction to external stimuli; this, more so even than actual mouse feedback, is what I think qualifies Tiger to claim it has teh snappy. Great new screensavers, particularly the RSS news ticker with the headlines swooping through cloudy space—it's like watching a TV commercial. Like Siracusa, I'm not too wild about the loss of the customizable button bar in System Preferences, but I'll deal—it does make it cleaner, and besides I've got some friends who despise the interface metaphors involved in these customizable toolbars and the Dock (namely, that you can drag something—moving it off the toolbar—and it disappears, vanishing to parts unknown).

Spotlight: sweet. I've already been using it almost unconsciously; just in writing the book, I've discovered a use for Spotlight that isn't really discussed in the usual boilerplate: I need to find something I put in a previous chapter, and I know exactly where the file is, since I've got the window open right in front of me—I just don't know which file the string I want is in. So why bother even navigating? I just put the search string into Spotlight, and up pops the file I want. Perfect.

Dashboard: Everything I hoped it'd be. At home, I've got it mapped to the big fat F13 key on my G5 keyboard. It's got a few perplexing painting bugs (try resizing a resizable widget until it's really big, then flipping it over), but with the out-of-box configuration it's pretty damn cool. The weather widget is just what I want. (And the "degrees" symbol has a pulsing "activity" light in it when it's acessing the network). Dictionary/thesaurus and calculator widgets: yes indeed. And there are already a bunch of good third-party widgets available at Apple's download site, including a Wikipedia widget and a package tracker. They still have that stupid iTunes controller with the rotary volume control, though, much to my dismay. But with the default loadout and the new widgets coming online, I'd say the coffin of Sherlock is finally getting nailed shut. The only thing left is a movie showtimes tracker, and I can get Sherlock out of my Dock for good. (I doubt this will come as much of a consolation to the Watson people, though.)

QuickTime 7: ground-up rewrite. I weep like Troi: Great joy... and gratitude. Great joy...... and gratitude.

Mail: Mixed feelings. Positives include a crisper interface, all the obvious Spotlight integration features (which means instant searching that will make my life so much easier), and a redesigned Signatures system that Apple implemented apparently down to the last "if" clause the way Chris suggested to them (cascading global and per-account signatures).

iChat: The new "current iTunes track" setting has started a number of conversations for me already.

Initial slowness: There's about an hour of really grotesquely slow performance during the first hour or so of the first uptime in Tiger. This is because of the Spotlight indexing process, as well as a bunch of other caches that have to get set up during post-install. Also, Mail has to migrate all your mailboxes to the new one-file-per-message format, which takes a long time. It gets better, but it's still not a great way to make a first impression.

SSH Agent has broken for some reason. Hopefully that'll get fixed soon; I hate having to type passwords to open up SSH sessions.

Mail: lots to gripe about here. I've filed sooo many bugs. Let's see here:

• It's sloooooow. I used to be able to clear out a mailbox with several thousand messages in it with a single delete keystroke; the delete process would be over within half a minute. Now it takes an hour or more, and while it's doing that, it blocks other operations, like message deletions and moves within your Inbox. I was waiting for a bulk mailbox cleanout process to complete; while I waited, I read and deleted a few messages out of my Inbox. Then I switched to another mailbox, then back to the Inbox. The messages I'd deleted were still there, and wouldn't go away until the bulk deletion completed, hours later. (I eventually had to force-quit Mail and go in and delete messages a dozen at a time. This took a while on a mailbox with over 11,000 messages in it. I don't look forward to cleaning out my Junk folder in the future.)
• The little activity spinner icon that indicated when Mail is busy is gone now; now I can't tell when Mail is still working on updating its caches or transferring stuff to and from the IMAP server, or if it's gotten confused and lost track of which messages are read and where they go. The little "clock" icons next to each mailbox don't cover the same set of information that needs to be conveyed.
• The Tab key is now mapped automatically to "four spaces"... and you can't turn this off. Aaargh! What possible reason, aside from sadism, could inspire this decision? I put a Tab at the beginning of every paragraph I've ever written in e-mail; if I make a mistake or change my mind, now I have to got Tab-BACKSPACEBACKSPACEBACKSPACEBACKSPACE, bangin' on the keyboard like a chimpanzee, to correct it. Whose brilliant idea was this? I can see the utility of rendering tabs into spaces during delivery—it fixes many layout problems—but why not perform that rendering at delivery time, rather than while I'm still composing the thing? Gaahh!
• Did I mention that it's slow? When my Inbox finally started deleting those messages that I'd deleted many minutes ago, I could watch them go away one by one: delete..... delete.... delete.... about once every two seconds. This is ridiculous. I know they've gone to a new one-file-per-message caching scheme, to support Spotlight, but this is not a usability improvement.
• The buttons in the toolbar are stupid. The shapes are non-unique, the dull little arrow icons are non-evocative, and the default layout is dangerous (c'mon—"Reply" right next to "Junk" and "Delete")? Blaugh.
• Smart Mailboxes are great, but why can't I organize them into folders? I want to create dozens of them, but I don't want them all sitting in the topmost level of my folder tree, guys.
• Oh yeah—it's slow. Just replying to a message takes several seconds to pop up a reply composition window. What's up with that? (Well, on closer inspection, it appears that this can be blamed on the fact that Mail has to cache all the attachments in all your folders during its initial run, including your spam folders and all your old archives. Without the activity indicator like the old Mail had, there's no way to know this is occurring.)

Hmm. Looks like Mail is a big thumbs-down, for the first time since Cheetah Mail (10.0). Maybe they can address some of these problems. Lord knows they've got the bug reports to work from.

iChat AV: I only got to try this once over the weekend, with a couple of guys in England who were sharing a constricted-upload DSL pipe, but I'm sure I was supposed to see more than 20 total pixels for each person's image. I'm seriously, here: big fuzzy pixels—five across, four down. I should have gotten a screen grab. Oh well—at least multi-way audio chats work, which I guess is what we were doing—it was just an multi-way audio chat with a very dumb-looking visualizer.