So, with a nice, fresh, clean -- some might even say virginal -- install of Tiger on my big, beefy, hefty -- some might even say manly -- Dual 2.0 G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM, I'm giving it a go and still finding things that I either just plain don't like, or that downright piss me off. This will be a running list:
• In Mail.app, tabs turn into spaces after being typed, and are not constant in length -- are basically not tabs. This is not a new problem, just really, really fucking irritating. Really.
• Ha! Oddly, you can have tabs in the To, CC, and Subject fields if you cut and paste them in (typing the tab key, of course, tabs you to the next field). Cut and paste into the message body, though, and the tabs become spaces. And that's just really, really fucking stupid.
• Today I had my first Spotlight problem on the new install: was searching for some stuff and got the beachball and the unresponsive Spotlight window.
• After that (don't know if it was actually related), noticed mds taking 90-100% of the CPU. Rebooted. Problem seems to be gone for now. I'm pretty sure this was a bug, as there was nothing I was doing that should have prompted Spotlight to be indexing anything, and if it was indexing stuff, why didn't it continue after the reboot? Yup. Bug.
• I later checked the system log for instances of mds and found this one line that seemed to occur right about the time I had the above problems:
Jun 23 15:35:28 systemsboy diskarbitrationd[33]: mds [158]:24067 not responding.
Yeah. That could do it.
• It's been said that Tiger updates items in the Finder "instantly." This word "instantly" sure gets kicked around a lot, doesn't it? And while it's true that running:
mkdir /Desktop/test
will instantly show you your new folder on the Desktop, there are some changes in the Finder that are far from "instant;" in fact they're downright slow. Try this: Open a new window in column view. Create a new folder. Now rename it something that would cause it to change its alphabetical placement -- something like aaa. Wait for it... Wait for it... Ahh! There we go. Took it a few seconds, eh? WTF?
• In Preview, you used to have a setting that told the app to show any PDF document it opened as full screen as possible. Meaning, you open the PDF, Preview zooms in as far as it can without clipping. This was one of the many reasons I chose it over Adobe's PDF readers (whose names are constantly changing -- stupid and irritating, in and of itself). You can still set this up in Preview, but there's a hidden trick that always takes me forever to find: Make sure View->PDF Display->Continuous is checked. Otherwise, Preview assumes you want to zoom in 100% without clipping the full page. It's just like the old saying goes: when you assume, you make an ass out you and me.
• So wait... You're telling me I can only have one Spolight window open at a time? Yup. That's what I'm telling you. Yes, it's true. Do a Spotlight search and choose "Show All" from the drop-down list of results. Then do another Spotlight search, and choose "Show All" again. The original Spotlight window results get replaced by the new results. Too bad. Looks like if you want multiple search result windows, you'll have to use command-f. And that's just command-f-ing stupid.