Mac OS X Tiger

System requirements

• Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G3, G4 or G5 processor
• Built-in FireWire
• DVD drive for installation
• 256MB of RAM
• 3GB of available hard disk space

History

New and changed features

End-user features

• Spotlight — Spotlight is a full-text and metadata search engine, which can search everything on one's Mac including Microsoft Word documents, iCal calendars and Address Book contact cards. The feature is also used to build the concept of ‘smart folders’ into the Finder. Spotlight will index files as they are saved, so they can be quickly and easily found through a search-as-you-type box in the menu bar. As a side-effect, it adds hidden folders and indexing files to removable media like USB flash drives.
• iChat AV — The new iChat AV 3.0 in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger supports up to four participants in a video conference and ten participants in an audio conference. It also now supports communication using the XMPP protocol. A XMPP server called iChat Server is included on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server.
• Safari RSS — The new Safari 2.0 web browser in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger features a built-in reader for RSS and Atom web syndication that can be accessed easily from an RSS button in the address bar of the web browser window. An updated version of Safari, included as part of the free Mac OS X. Automator comes with a complete library of actions for several applications that can be used together to make a Workflow.
• VoiceOver — screen reader interface similar to Jaws for Windows and other Windows screen readers that offers the blind and visually impaired user keyboard control and spoken English descriptions of what is happening on screen. VoiceOver enables users with visual impairment to use applications via keyboard commands. VoiceOver is capable of reading aloud the contents of files including web pages, mail messages and word processing files. Complete keyboard navigation lets the user control the computer with the keyboard rather than the mouse, a menu is displayed in a window showing all the available keyboard commands that can be used.
• A complete built-in Dictionary/Thesaurus based on the New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, accessible through an application, Dictionary, a Dashboard widget, and as a system-wide command.
• .Mac syncing — Though this is not a new feature,.Mac syncing in Tiger is much improved over Panther. Syncing tasks in Tiger are now accomplished through the.Mac system preferences pane rather than the iSync application.
• QuickTime 7 — A new version of Apple's multimedia software has support for the new H.264/AVC codec, which offers better quality and scalability than other video codecs. This new codec is used by iChat AV for clearer video conferencing. New classes within Cocoa provide full access to QuickTime for Cocoa application developers. The new QuickTime 7 player application bundled with Tiger now includes more advanced audio and video controls as well as a more detailed Information dialog, and the new player has been rebuilt using Apple's Cocoa API to take advantage of the new technologies more easily.
• New Unix features — New versions of cp, mv, and rsync that support files with resource forks. Command-line support for features like the above-mentioned Spotlight are also included.
• Xcode 2.0 — Xcode 2.0, Apple's Cocoa development tool now includes visual modelling, an integrated Apple Reference Library and graphical remote debugging.

  New applications in Tiger

• Automator — Automator uses workflows to process repetitive tasks automatically
• Grapher — Grapher is a new application capable of creating 2D and 3D graphs similar to those of Graphing Calculator.
• Dictionary — A dictionary and thesaurus program that uses the New Oxford American Dictionary. It has a fast GUI for displaying the Dictionary, and allows the user to search the dictionary with Spotlight, to print definitions, and to copy and paste text into documents. Dictionary also provides a Dictionary service in the Application menu, and Cocoa and WebKit provides a global keyboard shortcut for all applications that display text with them. Its use was furthered in the next version of OS X by providing definitions from Wikipedia. The Dictionary application is a more feature-filled version of the Dictionary widget.
• Quartz Composer — Quartz Composer is a development tool for processing and rendering graphical data.
• AU Lab — AU Lab is a developer application for testing and mixing Audio Units.
• Dashboard — Dashboard is a widget application. Tiger widgets include: a calculator, dictionary, a world clock, a calendar, and more. Users can also download and install more widgets.

  Improvements

• An upgraded kernel with optimized kernel resource locking and access control lists, and with support for 64-bit userland address spaces on machines with 64-bit processors.
• An updated libSystem with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions; combined with the aforementioned kernel change, this allows individual applications to address more than 4 GB of memory when run on 64-bit processors, although an application using Apple libraries or frameworks other than libSystem would need to have two processes, one running the 64-bit code and one running the code that requires other libraries and frameworks.
• A new startup daemon called launchd that allows for faster booting.
• The printing dialog in Tiger now features a drop down menu for creating PDFs, sending PDFs to Mail, and other PDF related actions. However, the user interface was criticized for creating a hybrid widget that looks like a plain button but acts like a pop-up menu. This is one of only three places in the entire Mac OS X interface where such an element appears.
• Dock menus now have menu items to open an application at login, or to remove the icon from the dock.
• The Window menu in the Finder now features a "Cycle Through Windows" menu item.
• The Get Info window for items in the Finder now includes a "More Info" section that includes Spotlight information tags such as Image Height & Width, when the file was last opened, and where the file originated.
• Early development of resolution independence. Apple notes that this will be a user-level feature in a future version of Mac OS X. Among the changes, the maximum size of icons was increased to 256x256. However, the Finder does not yet support this size.

  Technologies

• A new graphics processing API, Core Image, leveraging the power of the available accelerated graphics cards.
• A new data persistence API, Core Data, that makes it easier for developers to handle structured data in their applications.
• A new video graphics API, Core Video, which leverages Core Image to provide real-time video processing.
• Core Audio integrates a range of audio functionality directly into the operating system.

  Interface differences

Accessibility

Tiger trademark lawsuit

Support for Intel processors

Release history