Part 2: Review of the Tiger, osx 10.4 Inside the Mac Welcome back to the MAC review! Again, this is Tamas, and today, I will continue on writing more about the Mac, with the Tiger operating system. Not many people have the luck and be able to use a MAC over the weekend. And just the past one, I was one of the " many lucky " people. One of my friends shown me his MAC book pro laptop. Dick, if you are reading this, thanks a lot for you're support! Anyways, I was able to get at least 20 minutes of hands on experience on the Mac laptop. This was also special for me, since I never felt a macbook before. It seems to be larger than my Lenovo laptop is. The keys are arranged the same way as on the desktop models. So, as a result of this, all information that is in this long part is based on my experience. I did not use ANY tutorials for aide. Ok, so let's talk apple. I told you all about voice over and it's usage in part 1, and so it's now time for you to learn about some of the applications and settings that a mac may offer for you. Let's start with settings, also known as system preferences. Fire up the mac menu, and down arrow to this option. Press enter, and after a while, voice over will say system preferences, search editable text. By the way, if you are a Windows Vista user, look for similarities between Vista and the Mac. You just passed one, as this search box also exist in Vista's interface. This also works about the same way, you type in a text, hit enter and spotlight, the search tool, comes up. For the technical readers, I criticize spotlight because it indexes the files within the folder. I plugged in my I Pod, and a bunch of weird spotlight folders were created. But anyways. Tab over once, and you will land on on something called " appearance " . You might be used to having all your items in the control panel being in a list view. Not so much with the MAC. All items are placed in a links view. Move around with the tab. Here are just a few things you might find: appearance dashboard and exposé, international, energy management, speech, keyboard, spotlight, dock, universal access. Ok, so we have a big list to go through. I will try to explain as many things in this list as possible. appearance: That looks good! This is where you would set you're screen settings, such as themes and other such visual imagery. Dashboard and exposé: This is a french term (exposé) This lets you control how the dashboard works. The dashboard, which is common on most MAC systems, displays useful; information on certain things using widgets. Wow, doesn't that sound familiar? international: Going for the other languages This is where you would set you're language preferences. I'm not sure if it's possible to install a multilingual pack for the MAC, but I'm sure that people have created something to supplement this, if it's impossible. energy saver: Use Earth less This is where you would, obviously, set power saving options. Enter this panel brings up a nice dialog with a few tabs: On the first one, you set up battery saving things. For instance, what to do when you're battery reaches below a percent level. There's also a check box which is labeled something like " Turn off disks when not used " , which let's you turn off the hind drive. I never actually saw the power plans (if any) in here. speech: You want it spoken, you got it! This applet contains two tabs, just like you would expect to find in XP or Vista. According to this window, there's speech recognition built into a MAC, something I never put to the test. well, anyways, the text to speech is where you can look at all the great voices that are on the MAC. Apple, in my opinion, is very immature in the terms of voices: The MAC has about 20 of these: Some sound very funky, like Bad News, Bells, Albert, etc. I used bruce, which is a more natural sounding mail voice. But in a way, I wish they could port these to the Windows system. spotlight: Here you can configure this feature, including indexing and some other advanced options. dock: Keep you're recent apps and running ones in one place I did forget to explain what the dock is in part one of the review. Ok. Think of it as the task bar and start menu in one place: On the left side, you have the applications you can run. On the right side (which is separated with a line) , you have the running programs. This might look visually attractive. universal access: Easy to access, easy to use This is where you can turn on all the handy accessibility features that a MAC may have in store for you. This is also another way to turn on voice over. Each option has it's own radio button. For example, you might hear " voice over on " with the arrow keys, you can turn it on and off. One nice fact about this scheme is that the option does not turn off immediate. You have to press ok and it will shut down. That's all for system preferences, at least for now. For me, it is very interesting to see the different styles an operating system present itself to the user. Curiously enough, there does not seem to be an Add Hardware wizard. I plugged in my I Pod, but it was detected right away. Maybe there is, but it's hidden from the user. Applications: Now let's get down to business. In this section, I will talk about the default applications that are included in a MAC by default. IWeb: The family friendly web editing tool I Web let's you create websites. The interface seems to be pretty graphical, and so Voice over is not the best with reading it out loud. Nevertheless, here is what I know about it: It is a great way to design simple websites using templates. Meaning that you can just load rather create a template, and edit it to your needs, to edit the page information. However, this is very simple, and a major computer user would not want to create a flashy and cool looking website with this. ICal: Mac's approach to creating a calendar ICal visually resembles Window Calendar. That's a true fact. And just as Windows calendar doesn't work with a screen reader, voice over will not really support it either. Sure, you can select a calendar. I was unable to look at the menus, but maybe there is some way will could use voice over with it. Garage band: A cool audio editing program Although I never tried this app out, I did ask many people's feedback on it. Garage band is a very cool and pro audio editing program. It let's you add effects to your mpblec or recording, as well as erase clips from it. And of course, you always have I Movie HD, a quality movie recording software. It can also play back movies that you created with a camera or what ever. The default media player in I Tunes, of course. It is equal to, or even better, than Windows Media player. I will never really get used to it's weird interface. Quick time is used for playing back interactive contact and mov files. As I mentioned in part 1, Finder is equal to Window Explorer. It functions similarly to Explorer. However, finder has partitioning and disk utility tools built into the tools menu. This is a nice way to manage partitions, however, an unexperienced user might not know what they are and erase one by mistake. As far as I know, that's all or most of the apps that a Mac should have. Most of the ones that were released for other platforms are about the same as these. Obviously, safari is the default browser, and for what you need it, it's fine. Before I drop into my conclusion mood, let me tell you about the file systems that apple can handle. This is more to those that like to be technical. After I plugged in my I Pod into the Mac, I Tunes came up and stated that Windows file systems are not supported. This means that if this review convinced you enough to actually go out and purchase a mac, and you want to use any mpblec player with it, you would have to reformat it first. This is not so convenient for those that have thousands of songs on their IPod, as they would have to back it up somewhere, and once you get you're mac and dispose of Windows, this could be a challenging task unless you have all your songs burnt on disk. Mac systems however use file systems that Windows will never support, which means that you would not be able to use your player on a Windows system again without redoing the steps outlined above. I'm not sure if Linux file systems are supported or not, but judging by the above facts, I would think it isn't. conclusions: I still have a long ways to go with the mac. Not just with tiger, but also with Leopard, which should come out in a few months. Tiger itself is not bad, if you consider the interface. Sighted people could achieve the same tasks in about the same manners as they would in Windows. The transition between Windows and Mac for the sighted is not bad. Office and some other popular applications are also available for the Mac. So it's not like you wouldn't be able to run Microsoft Word with a mac. Plus, you can always use a program called parallels. This applications lets you boot up more than one operating system at once. This statement is only applicable if the processor is an intel xblehf type. So, you can run Windows Vista and the Mac at the same time. You're applications would not carry over to the Mac, however. It would still be nice to find out how screen readers would react to Parallels. For the blind, it might be more challenging, as you would have to learn new key commands. However, on the topic of universal access, MAC is not the best. Voice over is definitely not a screen reader you would want use every day if you are working. So as time passes, I will go on and continue look more into Apple. Of course, I will still continue to support Microsoft, as they are a great company as well. I hope that you got something out of both parts of this reviews. It should clarify some of the rumors that have been circulating about the MAC. April 30, 207