Tiger, the new release of the Mac OS X operating system will be available tomorrow. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good review of some of the new features being introduced in Tiger. The review concludes by saying that Mac OS X Tiger (as its formally called) is a beautiful and powerful product, and a big gain for Mac users. Of the many new features being introduced, the best is one called Spotlight .. at least according to the reviewer. Spotlight is a kind of super-search function that indexes both content and metadata in a seemingly seamless manner. Another worthy feature is Widgets (as shown in the preceding screenshot), which offers pop-up utilities for things like a flight tracker, those yellow stickies, share price monitor, calendar, language translation and a weather display. The article in the WSJ makes note of the many other nice features in Tiger, and includes the memorable phrase : “It leaves Windows XP in the dust”. I guess that makes Tiger the best OS that most of us will never use. Mac OS X Tiger - Apple announcement Tiger Leaps Out in Front - Wall Street Journal A companion WSJ article, appropriately entitled “But Will Apple See a Boost?”, bemoans the sorry state of Apple’s share of the personal computer market. It continues to decline year-over-year, reaching a low of just 2% of global PC sales last year, but inching up to 2.3% in the first quarter of this year .. according to International Data Corp. The article invites readers to opine on the reasons for such a small share of the market, by voting at www.wsj.com/question. The results from the aforementioned poll indicate that most respondents (46%) believe that ‘Buyers are reluctant to change systems’ is the answer to the question of why Apple’s market share is so small. There’s another, this one somewhat humorous, poll over at Spymac, posing the question “What comes after Tiger?” … with most people (1/3) saying that the next Mac OS will be called “Lion”, with some wags opting for “Garfield”. But, a dissenting voice can be heard over at Macworld, where an article with the isomorphic title “What comes after Tiger? ” suggests that the next OS X will be called Leopard. History of Mac OS X monikers: Cheetah → Puma → Jaguar → Panther → Tiger → Lion(?) Leopard(?).

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