Last night I was in town and treated myself to the new OSX – Tiger. This afternoon I’ve installed it and have been playing around with it – asking myself how it will improve my blogging.
Dashboard – one of the main things that Apple have been selling this upgrade with is the new Dashboard feature which allows users to download desktop widgets. At the click of a button these widgets appear on your screen giving you up to date information on a variety of topics – ranging from stock prices, weather, world time, dictionary, calculator, wikipedia look up, mini rss reader. I’m going to enjoy this – I’ve already got an array of world time clocks which are going to be very handy as I think about posting times and talking with my many international blogging friends. Another useful widget that I’m going to enjoy is the Translator’ that converts words and phrases between English and 10 languages (including Dutch and Germany – which I always am trying to translate as this blog is read by and linked to by many bloggers of writing in these languages). If there are any widget developers out there – I challenge/beg/suggest to you to please develop a widget for Adsense statistics (like the firefox plug in). Please?!?!
Spotlight – another new feature for this Operating System is the long awaited Spotlight – a desktop search for mac that will search a hard drive for files with keywords in them. I know this is old hat for many of you PC users with Google search – but I’ve been hanging for this as I am always looking for files. The only downside for me with Spotlight is that it does not search Entourage – my email client. This upgrade is one that I’ll eagerly await – but until then it’ll speed up my searching through the masses of pictures and other files that I have on my laptop and use with my blogging.
Safari RSS – this was the feature I was most curious about. I am a big fan of Safari as a web browser and when I heard it would be integrating RSS a few months back my mind began to see some real advantages of being able to track feeds in a more integrated way. I’m still yet to explore this feature but my initial use of it leaves me with mixed feelings.
In terms of finding RSS feeds it is handy to have the blue RSS button in the URL field (pictured). I’ve already used it to identify pages that I’d not previously been aware of as having a feed. However the actual RSS feed reading functionality I’m not convinced about – yet. I like the design and layout, some of the features are also quite handy, however when I compare it with Bloglines my initial reaction is that the Safari RSS feature is probably not for a heavy RSS user like me. I track 350+ feeds at present and I’m not sure following them all via my bookmarks is feasible.
Having said this – its early days and I haven’t yet given it a fair go – so this week will do so in the attempt of proving myself wrong. I actually do hope I’m wrong because I’ve had a number of issues with Bloglines of late.
Automator – I’m yet to explore the Automator feature – but I suspect it will be useful for some of those time consuming repetitive tasks that we all face like resizing photos. I’ll be interested to see what automator workflow actions developers come up with that have a blogging application.
I’ve only been playing with it for a couple of hours but the feature list of the new Tiger OSX is promising. I’m yet to play with the new offline archiving of pages feature, bookmark search, inline PDF viewing but I’m sure all will add to the blogging experience. The only other reflection that comes to mind is that things are operating a bit faster now. Pages are definitely loading faster in Safari which will save a few seconds each post and perhaps increase productivity.
Are you a Mac user? Got Tiger yet? How’s it going to impact your blogging?
Update: I’ve found that quite a few of the RSS feeds that I follow are not working with Safari – it does not recognise them and will not accept them being added manually either. This includes some of my own feeds unfortunately. Not sure what the issue is.
Also I love the RSS Screensaver – very cool. Would like to be able to add more than one feed though.
Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.
Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.
