B. Mann Consulting

I completed my upgrade to Tiger today. Well, actually, I still have some application installing and data migration to do to my laptop, but Tiger is running.

First impressions are good -- I'm likely to use purely Smart Folders for my mail, rather than doing any filtering or sorting out of my inbox, especially since all my accounts are actually Gmail accounts (more on that at some point soon).

But, my most hoped-for thing, sync capability with my Nokia 6630, apparently is not to be.

The iSync supported devices page certainly doesn't list it, but I was hoping. Well, I'm a bit stuck now. A quick search shows a mac os x hints thread which suggests that since the 6630 uses Symbian Series 60 version 8.0, there is still work to be done.

On the big desktop machine, 1280x720 is now a supported resolution for my Benq DV2680 (yay!) and the Epson CX4600 drivers, including scanning support, are included and work great (yay!).

iChat now has Jabber support. It doesn't support signing on to gateways (which will let you connect to your MSN, Yahoo, AIM, etc. accounts)...but, if you connect to a gateway with your Jabber account on a client that supports it, you will remain connected in iChat. I'm going to try and run iChat/Jabber + gateways as my backup IM client (after Skype). Yes, Adium, especially the latest 0.80 version, is still great, this is just another step in my experiments with IM.

Check out Julian Missig for all you need to know about iChat/Jabber. He's a long time Jabber developer, and makes some really interesting points about iChat's (non) support of standards. Ouch, doesn't look good for Apple on this one. Where's the Dave Hyatt of Apple's Jabber support?

I've already used Automator a couple of times. It's incredibly easy to build little "apps" that do stuff like scaling/cropping to a particular set of dimensions. Which is good, because as far as I can tell, Preview still doesn't have a resize option.

Dashboard is cool. I re-mapped my screen gesture of the Expose current application windows to bring up the Dash instead. I'm not sure how much I will use it -- it's certainly another place to "put" things. I'm feeling that I actually need more/simpler ways to input things -- e.g. a key combo/service/graphical widget to create a new iCal entry.

There are some interesting little add-ons that you can download already, like a screen capture widget. I think the Address Book widget will also be super useful -- I'm always having to launch AB just to get a phone number/whatever, and now it's that much closer. And of course, a couple of clocks showing different time zones for people I talk to all the time.

Most difficult task in migrating? Well, I was running really close to running out of room because of the huge amount of music that I was carrying around. I really do need to get an iPod of some kind for this, since the desktop machine is our main repository. For now, I'm paring things down, but it looks like I'll still have a few thousand songs.

Oh yeah, and I need some kind of playlist-based syncing between iTunes libraries on separate machines: I seem to remember that Zack Wily of iPhoto to Gallery fame was working on something like this. Last thing I remember was him being pissed off because I had already thought of half a dozen feature requests ;P

Speaking of sync'ing...while I haven't pulled the trigger yet, I'm thinking I will get a .Mac account. Kate and I really do need to be sync'ing our calendars, her phone supports syncing etc. etc. Where all the etc. come down to the fact that calendars and contacts need to "just work". I cannot believe that an Exchange server or a .Mac account are still the only easy solutions.