Mac OS X 10.4: Preliminary report

Windows integration Some readers report that Mac OS X 10.4 will include support for NTLM, an authentication protocol used in many Microsoft networks. This would feasibly make products like Thursby's ADmitMac v1.1 less essential .

Experiences with Spotlight It seems that Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight feature performs an initial build of a search database during the install process, though we are not sure how often the process updates this database. Is it dependent on file modification, or time sequenced?

In any event initial experiences show that the function is fast, and begins working quickly after the first Tiger boot.

Apple Discussions poster Piko writes: "Spotlight is amazing, really. I installed Tiger on a FireWire drive which took about 20 minutes on a PowerBook 12". Then, I restarted to that fireWire drive. Within the first 10 minutes or so of booting up, I remembered to try out the Spotlight feature.

"I kid you not, I typed in every word I could think of, and it found EVERY occurrence on my computer. Yes, every occurrence. I didn't do any indexing of any sort during those 10 minutes prior. But, within a couple of seconds it literally listed out every email, pdf, txt, doc, java, html and what have you. It found them all."

Getting the ripple effect Note that since the ripple effect -- as seen in Dashboard -- is part of Mac OS X's Core Image component it will only work with certain more recent graphics cards. This excludes the original 700 Mhz and 800 MHz flat-panel iMacs among other models.

What systems will Tiger run on? Though no official word from Apple has been released on what Macs will be supported in the final release of Tiger, some users report problems installing the current developer release on systems that lack a built-in FireWire port, and that built-in FireWire connectivity is listed as a requirement during installation.

RSS support in Panther Some readers report success running the new developer release of Safari (with RSS support) under Mac OS X 10.3.x.

What about Sherlock? Some users have noticed that Sherlock was lacking from any announced feature upgrade documentation, and was not featured at any point during Steve Jobs. Some testers of the current Mac OS X 10.4 developer preview report that Sherlock still exists after applying a normal Tiger install, but we've yet to hear about detailed new features.

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