Gear

Reviews

Most reviews of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger focus on the marketing-compliant features such as Spotlight, Automator, and Dashboard. Those features are certainly useful, but what’s of particular interest for mini owners?

Improved Meta-Keymapping

Our Mac Keyboard Guide tackled how to remap your meta keys using utilities such as DoubleCommand. Apple apparently agrees that this functionality is necessary for new switchers—10.4 lets you remap your meta keys directly. The settings are in System Preferences’ Keyboard and Mouse, behind the Modifier Keys button; you can remap the caps lock, control, option, and command keys. More impressively, an awkwardly worded dialogue box guides you through setting up an unrecognized keyboard.

Left-Handers Rejoice!

Windows has let you swap the left and right mouse button assignments since version 3.1, but when Apple added support for two-button mice in Mac OS X 10.0, they overlooked the fact that there are left-handed people in the world. 10.4’s Mouse pane in Keyboard and Mouse lets us assign the primary mouse button; just click the Left or Right radio button.

Overscan Improvements

If your mini is driving your TV, 10.4 improves the overscan geometry considerably. Just click the Overscan button in the Displays panel; in 10.4 raggedness of the sides is reduced, and some of the artifacts at the bottom of the screen are cleaned up. While not perfect, it’s a noticeable improvement.

Core Image

According to System Profiler, Core Image is not supported on on the Radeon 9200 in the Mac mini. The 9200 offers some, but not all of the needed hardware support to do all of Core Image (in particular, support for arb_fragment_program). Does the 9200 support Core Image at all? Generally, no—but it should be able to support some basic features of Core Image and fall back to AltiVec to do the more advanced pixel pushing. So it appears we’ll have to go without the Dashboard ripple effect. Future versions of 10.4 may be able to take better advantage of the 9200, but don’t expect too much.

QuickTime 7

While not specifically a Tiger feature, we’ve tossed QuickTime 7 in the pile of new 10.4 stuff due to the timing. This version offers two rather notable features for mini owners. The first is smoother playback when the computer is dealing with multiple tasks—good news for the modestly powered mini. The second is support for new codecs such as h.264 (also known as AVC). What this means for the home theatre crowd is the opportunity for far better video quality at the same file size, relative to other MPEG-4 codecs such as XviD and 3ivx. Additionally, with the $30 upgrade to QuickTime Pro, QuickTime Player becomes a solid video presentation and conversion application, including AppleScript and Automator support.

Performance

If you’ve been an OS X user for the last few versions, you know that this operating systems actually gets faster in successive versions. 10.4 once again delivers the speed, offering easily as much of a speedup over 10.3 as 10.3 did over 10.2. While it doesn’t offer gains in raw CPU performance gains—such as encoding audio or video faster—the applications that seemed to have a sluggish interface (Finder, Safari, Mail, iPhoto) all feel much faster. This improvement is purely subjective, yet undeniably real; we call it snappier. All told, if you want a faster mini, 10.4 yields real results.