Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright... on My Laptop! Quiz

Answer: a comprehensive search engine

Spotlight was a system-wide desktop search engine, capable of searching full-text and metadata. It created a virtual index of all times and could search documents, images, applications, bookmarks, mail messages, and even System Preferences. It was easily accessed in a number of ways, including by clicking the blue-and-white magnifying-glass icon in the top-right corner of the menu bar. The index was constantly updated, and results appeared from the moment the user typed a word. Searches could be saved into Smart Folders.

Spotlight also had command-line utilities and could perform Boolean searches. Spotlight continued to be released through Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

Answer: widgets

Dashboard is a layer that appears when its icon is clicked in the Dock, when the cursor is moved into a hot corner, or when a hot key is pressed. (Hot keys and corners are set by the user). Some examples of widgets are stopwatches, timers, FTP interfaces, stickies, and reminders.

Historical note: "Desk accessories" is a term from the early days of Macintosh (the 1980s), when the System (as it was called) had little to no multi-tasking capability. The Desk Accessories, or DAs, were very small, helper-type programs (e.g. Alarm Clock) that were actually a special class of driver that could run while other applications, such as MS Word or MacPaint, were running. They were directly installed into System's DRVR resources. In 1991, System 7 introduced co-operative multitasking, which eliminated the need for DAs, but they continued to be supported through Mac OS 9.

Answer: both of these

The great new feature of QuickTime 7 was the new H.264 codec that supported the HD content of the new HD TVs of the mid-2000s.

Some of these features weren't easily available to customers in the very begining, however. Although Tiger could run on slower machines, to properly watch HD one really needed a PowerMac G5 (later Intel Core Duo) to get 1080p video (1920x1080). Also to use iChat's videoconferencing features, 1 or 2 GHz processing speed was needed along with 1000Kbps upstream bandwidth.
In 2005, this was three times the upload speed that cable or ASDL Internet providers typically offered residents. MacInTouch also reported speeds as low as one frame per second when they tested this feature!

Programming note: New classes were added to the Cocoa application programming interface (API), and the QuickTime Player was completely rebuilt with Cocoa, to let developers better take advantage of the new capabilities.

Answer: VoiceOver

VoiceOver treated the user interface as a series of elements with which it interacts. By clicking in a textbox, for example, it would read what the user typed. VoiceOver was later added to the operating systems of the iPods and the iPhones.

VoiceOver used the same voices of Fred, Junior, Kath, Ralph, and Victoria, and Zarvox, introduced in the MacInTalk Pro speech synthesizing technology of the 1990s. Unlike the earlier technology, however, VoiceOver could not only read the text on a monitor, it could also read refreshable Braille displays, which are electro-mechanical devices with round-tipped pins that emerge through holes to form braille characters.

Historical notes: Universal Access was introduced with Jaguar (10.3) and provided capabilities to the blind, deaf, dyslexic, and other disabled persons in one preference pane of System Preferences. Features included sticky keys, inverse colors, flashes for alert sounds, larger cursor size, etc.

Answer: Automator

No need to learn a programming language or how to write shell-scripting! AppleScript, which was available in Mac OS 9 or earlier, was difficult for the average user to master. Automator gave the user an easy drag-and-drop interface. The user could drag Actions from a master list to create Workflows, which could be saved as stand-alone applications, but they would only run on Tiger, not Panther or earlier, as they required Tiger's libraries. Automator never really took off, however, as a way to customize Tiger for the typical user.

Answer: JavaScript support

JavaScript support had been standard on Safari (and most other web browsers at the time) for years by the mid-2000s, although Safari 2.0 offered improved speed.

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, which is a website technology that allows publishers to syndicate data into web feeds or channels that regularly change their content. For example, RSS is particularly useful for news feeds. The user simply had to press the button on the address bar. This was a new, cutting-edge feature for the Safari 2.0 web browser packaged with Tiger in 2005.


Future note: By the way, Safari 2.0.4, available on the Mac OS X Update 10.4.4 (the last Tiger update), was the last version of Safari released exclusively for Mac OS until version 6, when it was integrated into Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8).

Answer: Tiger eventually ran exclusively on Intel processors

When Tiger was released, it ran on PowerPC G3, G4, and G5 processors at a minimum of 300mHz. Apple began to transition to Intel x86 processors shortly thereafter, and released Intel-based Macs such as the MacBook Pro running Tiger in 2006. Tiger was the first Mac OS to run on the Intel processor. Tiger would not run natively on the original iBooks and iMacs, but users could install Tiger by using third-party software, or by swapping out the hard drive from a supported Mac.

Historical/technical note: This was the third major CPU migration that Apple underwent. Previously, Apple switched from the Motorola 68K to the Motorola-IBM PowerPC. Before that was a switch from the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 of the Apple II to Motorola 68K, and it was the only PC company to make the successful transition; Commodore and Atari went under after making such a switch in the 1980s.

Answer: access control lists (ACLs)

Darwin already had traditional Unix permissions, but added ACLs in a more sophisticated way - they tell the operating system which rights each user has to each object (directory, file, etc.). For the average user, this was neither here nor there, but for server operators and technicians this was a boon.

Protocols like ssh were already supported by Darwin before Tiger.

More technical info: Mac OS X prior to 10.4 supported traditional POSIX-compliant permissions. From 10.4 and beyond, Mac OS X added support for NFSv4 ACLS as well as traditional permissions. It also supported the classic Mac OS (9.2 and earlier) "Protected" file attribute (a non-Unix feature).

Answer: changing from the old filesystem (HFS+) to the new (NTFS)

Apple's Safari 2.0 browser protected against Trojan horses by examining the file contents as they are downloaded and offering an option to cancel before completion. This was an improvement over Safari's behavior in Panther (10.3), which would only prevent the launching of applications after download was complete.

Apple added a number of new configuration options to the firewall program ('ipfw'), including UDP-blocking and stealth mode. This latter would hide the Mac from any ICMP (ping) requests, which essentially ask, "Is your computer there?" ("Is your IP address accessible?"). Blocking pings makes hacking even harder (though not impossible).

The new startup program, a daemon (background process) called 'launchd', essentially combined several other programs into one to streamline the bootup process, very noticeably on the lower-end Macs running Tiger.

A filesystem is how files are logically named, stored, and retrieved, usually in some hierarchical fashion. Tiger continued to use the same Mac OS Extended filesystem that had been used on Macs since the late 1990s.

Historical/technical note: The Mac OS Extended filesystem is also called HFS+ for Hierarchical File System Plus. It was in place in since 1998 and supports 32-bit block addresses, a 32-bit allocation table and Unicode (rather than Mac OS Roman in the old HFS).

Answer: It would run Macs with Intel processors

Usage note: Classic Environment is often shortened to Classic (uppercase) while the legacy Mac operating systems (Mac OS 9 and earlier) and/or their applications are referred to as "classic" (lowercase). The lowercase "classic" also refers to the application user interface (API) for programming "classic" applications.

Classic Environment is a hardware/software abstraction layer that permits the running the Mac OS 9 applications. While earlier G3 and G4 Macs were dual-boot machines that would boot in the user's choice of Mac OS X (up to 10.2 [Jaguar] or possibly 10.3 [Panther]) or Mac OS 9.2, Classic was crucial for running Mac OS 9 on G5 and G4 computers purchased after 2002 as they would not boot in the "classic" operating system. Mac OS 9 would boot into a sandbox environment, a sort of virtual machine in which low-level system calls would be made to OS X instead of to the kernel. Most users found that the improved OS X device drivers and in general the greater processing power of newer Macs meant that their Mac OS 9 apps ran much faster than on their OS 9-bootable Macs. Intel-based Macs did NOT support Classic.