I intentionally left out Spotlight, Dashboard, QuickTime 7, core audio, etc., as I don't really consider these applications -- they're more like core technologies (though clearly, QuickTime Player is an application, but I left it lumped in with QuickTime7).

A future poll will separately cover these new and improved technologies...

-rob.

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Dictionary is so handy.
In Safari just highlight the word you want looked up, right click, then Look Up in Dictionary. But i don't use Safari often. Perhaps this feature will show up in Firefox.


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Even better: try control-apple-D and hovering the cursor over a word...

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There is an even faster way to get to your dictionary.

Point your mouse to the word you want to look up. No need to click or highlight or select, just point there. Then press Command-Control-D and wait a second. This works in every Cocoa Application and quite some Carbon based apps as well. you can even switch between dictionary and thesaurus in the results-floating-info-thingie.

A drawback is that you can only select text from within that thingie, but not copy it, just like from the dictionary dashboard widget. I personally think this is ridiculous. Maybe its fixed in a future update.

Regards Pepi

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Textedit? Got some nice changes

Quartz Composer? Pretty fun and spiffy


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TextEdit I missed -- it's now been added; thanks for the catch.

Quartz Composer I left out as it's part of the Developer Tools (Xcode), which already have an entry. I didn't want to have to go into each of the programs in the dev tools, since there are a number of nifty ones. Perhaps a good subject for a future poll!

-rob.

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I love the Cocoa dictionary.

I got this hint from MacWorld: hold the cursor over any word in a Cocoa App (like Safari), and press Control+Command+D.

For those who iChat (or Adium) with large-vocab people, this is excellent. It's also great if you think you know what you're saying, but want to make certain.

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Here is something that I think is pretty darn handy... I use the Logitech Corless Mouse (Cordless Mouseman Optical) and have the logitech control panel loaded. I have programmed (Assigned) the Wheelbutton to Command Control D. Now when I Wheel click on any word on a safari web page or in my email I get a pop up definition of that word without the awkward keystoke.

~e

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For the RSS integration alone. RSS makes reading daily news sites so much easier, and Apple's implementation is so much better than any other browser's, on OS X, Windows, or Linux.

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Heh. Aside from the RSS bit, Safari 2.x is the biggest pile of crap that comes with Tiger, especially compared to 1.2.x

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And the point of that post is to inform us of ... what?


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Between Panther and Tiger, Keychain Access went from being almost unusable to pretty decent. I can't think of any other app that made that kind of improvement.

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The search field in Keychain Access is a must-have, and I'm pretty sure that's new to Tiger.

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There's a search in keychain?? Oh wow, that'll help out next time I have to go digging around for x509 certs for 802.1x authentication servers. Looking through that list line by line severly sucked, and the sort by date didn't work the way I expected it to!

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The one thing for which I'm grateful with the most regularity is the new dock menu for Stickies, which is no longer a mile high and dog slow when you have more than half a dozen notes. Second to that is Keychain Access, which is suddenly useful. And as ugly as Mail continues to be, it doesn't bug me nearly as much as the previous version with bogus error messages.

But my favorite is still Stickies.

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Automator is my hands down favorite application in Tiger! This program has saved my so much time and saved my from doing the tedious stupid jobs I used to hate. One of the first Automator actions I wrote was to save a graphic file as JPEG. I did this so much before automator I started using ImageMajick in the terminal to save time.

Automator just keeps getting better all time as more applications add support for it. Transmit and StuffIt are two that just added support and now I can right-click to send a file to my website via FTP or encrypt a StuffIt file without having to change the preferences in magic menu and then changing them back after I am done. I would also have to add dashboard to my list as well. It replaces Konfabulator and is much easier to program in. I use it all the time but not for eye candy.

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<-- Other

I really like the improved AD plug-in.

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