Hold that tiger

[austin_dern]

As I walked past the MRT station an attractive young woman in short, shiny dress gave me a plastic bottle of purple gelatinous goo and a brochure. This is unusual for me. Assuming the brochure describes the contents, it's styling gel. I don't do much with my hair besides keep it with me. I wash it daily, and every few months have a (specific) person from New Jersey cut it, but impose no other demands, which is why my hairstyle so resembles a guinea pig's. The brochure calls it ``Xtreme Gel'' and here, again, I'm approximately as extreme as a post office substation. Amusingly, it's BrylCreem Xtreme Gel, which flows like ``Alan B DuMont Xtreme Television Receivers.'' The brochure includes a four-step guide to applying extreme hair gel, no step of which is screaming.

While I saw some of the OS X Tiger unveiling, I didn't buy a copy -- too big a crowd and I'm not so eager for appealing widgets as to buy the point-zero release. But it looks neat. The various widgets appear on-screen (though not on iBooks) with a ripply-water effect, and include things like airplane flight trackers (which requires an Internet connection, so I could not use it to track the flight I'm on), weather forecasts (Singapore's to be hot and muggy, with afternoon thundershowers), a dictionary (which has ``coati'', ``volant'', and ``zeugma'', though not ``nocent'' or ``xerotic'') which I couldn't figure how to copy text from, and a thingy able to translate ``My hands are soaking in dishwashing liquid?'' into French (``Mes mains imbibent dans le liquid de vaisselle?'') and almost into Chinese (it couldn't figure out ``dishwashing'').

It also comes with a lot of support for ``RSS,'' which a lot of computer-oriented people seem to feel strongly about, although I don't have any idea why or what it does. The letters just sort of started appearing a year or two ago, like complaints in Livejournal friends lists about ``Quiznos'' commercials, and figuring out what for never seemed that urgent. I guess it's a good thing, since it comes with a simple but pleasant icon.

They moved stuff around in the ``Get Info'' window, too, putting comments on top. I can't figure out if they put back in the option to, once you've opened the info window, have it report the information on whatever item is selected, instead of sticking to the information of whatever was selected when you called ``Get Info''. Back in 10.1 or so they had it so the ``Get Info'' updated as you switched files, and I really liked that and can't seem to get it back. Too bad.

Trivia: McDonnell's original contract for Project Mercury was for it to produce 12 capsules for a cost of approximately US$18,300,000 and a fee of $1,150,000. Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201.

Currently Reading: Beyond the Quartic Equation, R Bruce King.

Comments

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I see, thank you ... I suppose it's nice to have, but I don't think I'm going to get all that worked up about it one way or the other.

[buran.livejournal.com]

I think it's an example of hype. Tiger really does run nicely and smoothly and I'm happy with it and Spotlight and Dashboard are pretty nice, though a lot of the improvements are in tuning, better backend, and so forth, so there are fewer new "wow!" things the users can actually see. So they mention relatively minor stuff.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I see what you mean ... looking over the list of improvements looks like a decent list of structural improvements but nothing all that really exciting or fun. There's only so much to be done with new graphics formats either. I'll get around to upgrading at some point, certainly, though do want to give it a few weeks for the worse surprise bugs to get shaken out.