Thanks to Apple’s Developer Connection, I got a hold of one of the latest builds of Tiger before it finally hits the streets next week (this acording to the latest updates) and finally got to install it yesterday. These are a few first thoughts on the new operating system out of Cupertino.

Spotlight: This was probably the feature I was the most curious about because of my interest on how to deal with file metadata, and how to use that data to effectively increase productivity. If you still haven’t heard of it, what spotlight does is monitor file save procedures, reading file metadata, and recording that metadata into a database. This catalogue of data is then searched whenever you click the spotlight icon and type a few keywords. It will automatically filter results on type, date, author and a few other tags.

Basically, it works. After the initial index (which took a while considering it had to go through over 140gb of my earlier work, email and junk), metadata was stored into the database and a few queries were enough to attest that indeed spotlight may be one of the best additions to an OS in the last couple of years. It works generally fast (I’m still not sure how many lines of debugging are still on this build to consider this a final statement), and results are good. The way you can sort everything is apple-like. It just works.

I will write post later specifically about spotlight and its underlying technologies.

Dashboard: Widgets that “do stuff”, Jobs said. Dashboard provides users with a few little applications that provide simple services to the user. You click an icon, or activate it the way you’d activate Exposé, and your widgets show. The standard package includes widgets like a calculator, an english dictionary, a weather monitor, flight tracker, stock monitor, a game and a few other things. Interesting, yes, but the real power of dashboard is what new developers will come up with, and I see a *lot* of potential there.

Service providing is the future of the web (I remember hearing a member of the IBM research labs talking about this on the Web 2.0 conference), and this kind of tiny life-helping utilities may become one major investment for developers. You can go from creating widgets that control stuff on webpages, to widgets that show you statistics on just about anything. Imagination is the key here, I’ll probably find myself exploring development for dashboard and writing about it in a near future.

Automator: Task automation. Basically automator allows a user to create workflows that go from filtering your email into folders on your desktop, to controlling your car and walking your dog (okay, maybe not these two, but trust me you can do a lot of stuff). This seems like apple trying to revive their idea of application services into a nicer package where you can actually interlink them into something automated and useful that users can run periodically to simplify their lives and work. Clever. Read more on automator on apple’s website to see what this is all about.

This is a promising update to an already great operating system. Apple finetuned a few details, added a couple of helping utilities, developed technologies to empower its users, and may just have hit the nail in the head with spotlight. I also like the minor update to the way aqua looks, but WHY is there still metal in here? That’s something apple should have changed a long time ago. We don’t need metal when aqua looks this good.