Well, the frustration of waiting two extra days for Tiger has been compounded by my being distinctly under the weather for most of the last 5 days. Tiger finally arrived yesterday afternoon and I set to installing it. I chose to erase and install and it all went very smoothly.
The OS install itself took about 30 minutes and while I watched it working away I thought back to the bad old days of OS 8 and 9 and the many human interventions such installs required. At that time you had to keep stopping, choosing things, restarting. Tiger allowed me to make a couple of choices early on in the piece and then it just ran itself very smoothly, culminating in a restart and the intro video.
The first real challenge was that I had hoped to use the Migration Assistant to pull my data from my backup drive. It didn’t work as my data wouldn’t show up. I suspect it was because I have my backup inside a folder on the drive, rather than at root level. I restored my data by simply dragging it across. The copying seemed quicker than under Panther.
Since then I’ve been reinstalling and updating a few items and exploring, hampered by a very fuzzy head and general unwell tiredness. I’m very pleased to say that Virtual PC 6 (crucial for work I do for one client) is working fine, once I’d tinkered with the Virtual Switch settings. I seem to have temporarily mislaid my Sticky Brain database, but it’s just a matter of identifying it on my backup drive. I needed to download an updated version of Saft, which adds good stuff to Safari. Everything else has just worked, as far as I can recall, but then I make a habit of updating software immediately if the update’s free and a lot of software came out with free updates for Tiger.
It’s been interesting exploring all the new stuff — far too much to come to grips with on one day and with a head full of cotton wool. One major item sticks in my mind though: the new way to set a custom time and date in the International System Preference. I found it very hard to come to grips with and I’m still not sure I actually have it set how I like it. I can say that Moneyworks is complaining about the date format and displaying dates incorrectly.
The other major problem I’ve experienced is around Digital Rights Management. I recently bought a trilogy of Adobe format ebooks. I had to download Adobe Reader 7 and do some kind of authorisation process. Now I can’t open the books at all, in spite of all attempts at authorisation. The Adobe web page seems to be telling me I have to go back to the “other computer” and do some process. Since I’ve now reformatted the Powerbook that’s impossible. Sometime soon I’ll follow up on that.
And in general: Tiger, I like it!