14 DAY TRIAL // Mac OS X Tiger, the last stop before we get our hands on the upcoming Leopard, is an operating system capable of facing Vista without much trouble, although it was released almost two years ago, on the 29th of April, 2005. The fifth major OS release for desktop and server from Apple, Mac OS X Tiger has seen the light 18 months after its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther".
The Tiger came with a lot of new things, such as Spotlight, a fast searching system, a new version of Safari, the Mac OS X web browser equivalent to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, a new "Unified" theme, improved support for 64-bit addressing Power Mac G5 systems and, of course, the Dashboard. Apart from all these, Tiger is also the first version of an operating system coming from Apple that works on the Intel x86 platform, although it was designed to work only with Intel machines manufactured by Apple.
As you may expect, such a system with so many new features has also some new bugs, and Apple didn't stay with their hands crossed and watched them, releasing update after update to make things right. Now, the private test distribution of the Tiger got to version 10.4.9, build 8P125 for PowerPC, and 8P2125 for Intel. At this time, the bug fixes list is totaling 95 fixed flaws since the last official update to the Tiger, and the latest builds that I just mentioned are said to include at least eight new fixes over builds 8P122 and 8P2122, targeting OpenGL, ImageIO, Sync Services, iSync and memory leaks in the graphics driver code.
By the way things are moving at this time, it seems that Mac OS X 10.4.9 will be released sometime this month, bringing us one step closer to Leopard, and I would really like to see the next OS from Apple being launched exactly two years after its predecessor, but until then, prepare for what may be the last major update to Mac OS X Tiger.