TextEdit
As a Windows user, I always hated Wordpad, but early on, Notepad was too simplified for a lot of tasks - forcing me to use Word when I didn't exactly want to. The Windows 2000/XP version of Notepad fixed a lot of my complaints, and then Notepad became much more of a useful tool to me. I've seen a similar transition with OS X's TextEdit in Tiger, not to say that TextEdit wasn't already infinitely more capable than Notepad, but with Tiger, it has gone from a pretty impressive text editor to a more full-featured editor, while still maintaining the simplicity of TextEdit.To me, the biggest feature of TextEdit is the ability to now save to HTML. Not only will TextEdit save in HTML formats now, but the HTML saving options in TextEdit are options that I wish all applications which produce HTML had. You can select from strict or transitional HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0, and you can choose whether or not you want to use CSS. The HTML produced by TextEdit is just as simple and as clean as you'd expect from a text editor that still appears hardly intimidating. The only requirement for saving as HTML is that you need to be in TextEdit's rich text editing mode.
There's a new checkbox in the Save dialog box - "If no extension is provided, use .txt". That change is pretty self-explanatory.
Hitting the zoom button in TextEdit now seems to expand the window to the full width of the screen, instead of just zooming to a larger, better proportioned window. The button now acts as "maximize", which I don't like so much (surprisingly enough, because my first reaction to the zoom vs. maximize debate the first time I used OS X was that I missed the ability to maximize windows). You can get the same functionality as Panther's TextEdit by enabling Word Wrap, but when doing so, you get a fairly useless layout border around your text as seen below:
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
elrolio - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
yayayayayaay, as a dual user myself (my baby the power pc is at home whilst im a gfx designer workin on a powerbook - mine and G5s - company) and im currently installing tiger all over the frikken office. cuz for mac, i AM an early adopter hahahaanyways yay for tiger goddamn its cool
/end fanboystuff
ailleur2 - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
I should mention that the quartz debug utility will only be accessible if you installed xcode2.And i forgot to mention that the xcode that comes with panther uninstalled itself w/o telling me (or i didnt see it anyway) and i was actually trying to understand why i couldnt compile anything in tiger.
Xcode 2 is free and available on the tiger install dvd.
randomman - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Ars Technica managed to enable quartz 2d extreme, its just not on by default (probably for a reason like left over bugs).ailleur2 - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Good reviewI find automator to be the potentialy greatest thing since sliced bread.
Heres a site that i would like to see grow so i post it where i can.
http://www.automatorworld.com/
It holds (or will hold, hopefuly) a bank of workload algorithms that you can download and execute.
Spotlight is nice, i actually find myself using it. At first i thought "what, this is the big thing tiger brings?" but its actually quite powerful and useful.
I find safari to be quicker in tiger and the rss support is great althout i have yet to find how to use it as an expandable bookmark like in firefox.
All this was done doing an "archive and upgrade" install of os 10.3.9 on an ibook 800mhz (g3) with only 384mb of ram.
Anand: you can enable quartz 2d extreme (i think) if your graphic card supports it. Do a spotlight search for quartz and run the quartz debug utility and check the menu to enable quartz 2d extreme. Cant test it myself as my ibook only has a mobility 7500.
Shortass - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Good article, even though I mostly just scanned through it before I head off to work. I definately wish I had the funds to invest in a nice G5 or a really nice Mac laptop, as I've used them since I was 5 (17 now). If only the hardware pricing was less steep...