Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

It sprang out of the box and leapt into my iBook. Apple's new operating system, Tiger, is so far an impressive upgrade, if solely for the addition of the Spotlight feature. Appearing as a magnifying glass in the upper right corner, Spotlight allows me to find anything on my hard drive instantly. Plug in a keyword, like "friend," and within seconds Spotlight returns 221 possible hits containing the word "friend," displaying the top choices in each category. The hits are organized by 14 types: applications, system preferences, documents, folders, mail messages, contacts, events & to do items, PDF documents, images, bookmarks, music, movies, fonts, and presentations. Spotlight searches not only names but also the content of the files. How it zips through a whole hard drive so fast I've no idea. But it's cool!

The only other feature I've used so far is Dashboard, which springs on top of your work area and displays a calculator, clock, calendar, and real-time weather. The calculator interface is far better than the Windows equivalent. Safari also has an embedded RSS (Real Simple Syndication) reader, which lets you aggregate feeds from sites such as news providers and blogs.

Meanwhile, in the next room over, my Dell Inspiron notebook sputters and coughs from having to run Windows XP with Service Pack 2. Ever since I upgraded to SP2 my PC has been virtually worthless. Funny how I always thought of Macs as toys. As I've learned, it's important to combine work and play, and Mac lets me do both well.