Full report on Tiger WWDC build with many screenshots.

UPDATE: A Mirror for the screenshots is provided by Kevin's server here,

In this report, I will detail some Mac OS X Tiger WWDC build (8A162) new features that are illustrated with many screenshots. I will try to focus on features other sites did not report on yet. The screenshots will be hosted at a home server and you may encounter slow downloads. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have the possibility to mirror them on your server. For those who don't understand what this article is talking about, take a look here before reading this.

The first noticeable change in Tiger is that a user settings import assistant appears during the first boot. Actually Tiger asks you if you would like to create a new configuration or import an account either by finding your account folder or by giving your .Mac details which will allow a .Mac synchronization of your account.

Also notice that the installer mentions "built-in FireWire" as one of the minimum requirements to run Tiger. This means a lot of older Macs should not work with Tiger, though not tested. On the other hand, Dual processor Macs should see a big boost because Tiger has an improved kernel that does better file grain locking.

Once Mac OS X has booted, it starts the indexing of all your hard drives. This can take a rather long time and it consumes a lot of system resources. It can't be compared to the indexing method of Mac OS 9 though because, once it has finished the initial indexing, it will index file as they are created.

Spotlight is the biggest feature of Tiger, it searches any kind of files that are on your hard disk very fast and you can access this feature in many ways. The most obvious way is to access it from right corner of the menu bar. This feature also replaces the search window and is also integrated, along with smart folders, on many applications like Mail.

Now let's take a look on the System Preferences. Most of them remain the same but I could notice some new little features. The most improved panes in this build are Printing & Faxing, .Mac, and Sharing.

Printing & Faxing has now a third tab called sharing in addition to Panther's Printing and Faxing tabs. It is dedicated to printer sharing but also allows you to share your modem to let other send a fax from your Mac. The biggest new feature is that we can choose the printers that we'd like to share though.

Sharing pane adds some great features. On the firewall tab, it is now possible to Block UDP Traffic, to enable FireWall Logging and Stealth Mode which doesn't even send a response to some uninvited traffic. For those who are wondering, yes it is powered by IPFW2 ;).

The Exposé pane simply adds a key choice for Dashboard which is F12 key by default and QuickTime pane adds the possibility to control the cache size and to empty cache. The .Mac pane has two new tabs. The first is called Sync and it allows you to manage and schedule .Mac synchronization, and the second is called Domains and gives you the option to make your .Mac files available to others through the internet with an address like this : yourcomputername.user.members.mac.com.

Although the Applications folder doesn't have anything new, the Utilities folder shows a new Assistant icon and two new applications : iSync Device Utility and Sync Manager. Apparently, iSync has disappeared and was split into two separate applications, the first manages the devices and the second manages the synchronization itself. That implies iSync is not longer an iApp and I wonder if iSync Device Utility name is still justified. These two utilities do not seem to add any new features but there is a mysterious Backup tab on Sync Manager that has yet to be implemented.

Safari brings some great improvements with version 2.0. As shown by Steve Jobs during the conference, Safari can detect, render and search RSS feeds and adds a private surfing feature that will make Safari stop storing cache files and sites history while surfing with this mode enabled. Safari also allows you to suggest an RSS feed to a friend by mail. One source noticed that in the build that was given to the developers, Safari doesn't work with encrypted sites (https) but I guess this feature has only been temporarily disabled.

Dashboard feature has been subject of a lot of controversy since its announcement because of its resemblance with Konfabulator. The main advantages of Dashboard over Konfabulator are the ability to access or make disappear the widgets instantly and the fact it widely uses core graphics and, by the way, has great effects. I hope the Konfabulator team will have the intelligence to continue to innovate because they can do nothing about that injustice. Note that David Hyatt offers on his blog an explanation on how Dashboard widgets can be programmed.

QuickTime ships as version 6.6 with this build of Tiger and it adds support for the H.264 codec. It looks like this is an unprotected Pro version. Let's hope they're at least not going to lock that full screen feature again on the final version. Some tests were performed to see if QuickTime supports SMIL 2.0 specification but it looks like it doesn't.

I will not provide information or screenshots on iChat as it won't be easy to hide the identity of the people that are conferencing, as you can guess, and anyway all the features are detailed on Apple's web site.

As you can see, Tiger brings some great little new features but nothing really revolutionary in terms of user experience. I haven't looked very closely at xCode and Automator yet but I think there are some interesting things to discover in them. One good point with Tiger is that it brought several SDKs and API's for developers which means many great applications will be made based on these.

I hope you enjoyed this detailed report on Tiger WWDC build. I might post another report on this build. It all depends on if I receive a lot of questions from you. If there is another report, it will be posted before the end of the week, so if you have questions, a mirror server for the screenshots or interesting information to report, mail me as soon as possible.