So Tiger arrived today from Amazon, a day before they said it would, but clearly after the date I expected based on my pre-order. Anyway… installation was smooth. All told it took about 45 minutes on my Powerbook, which is the only machine I’ve worked on too make sure the kinks don’t plague other people’s worlds here at home.
I definitely had a pretty serious issue which took some time and was frustrating to work out. I’ll explain in case you find the same so you’ll have a way to work around it. I chose to archive and reinstall which I thought would be an easy and safe way to go, leaving a fresh system but maintaining a local inactive copy of my previous system if I needed to look back for something.
Mail was set to launch on startup and that carried forward so when my refreshed system rebooted Mail launched as I expected. For some reason, there was an issue (not surprisingly) with some of the bundles (plugins) I had previously installed and as a result, my accounts could not get online. It took a lot of thought and I even deleted and recreated my main IMAP account in order to try and refresh things but even after that I had nothing. Initially, I was told repeatedly by Mail that ALL my online folders (quite a few) could not be found because they did not exist. I was able to confirm they did exist through both webmail and my Treo so I knew my computer did not do something awful…
I was able to finally get past the warnings about missing folders and look through my accounts, but nothing was showing up in the message pane. Aigh… my heart was definitely sinking but I finally recalled the plugins, and nuked them. When Mail restarted, it began to import my previous messages and accounts into the new application which surprised me as I had not seen that the first time around. This took about 15 minutes but when it was all done, Mail was back to normal.
Now that Mail is back, (or actually there) I have to say I like the new interface. There are some subtle changes to how you view folders and unread messages from main and sub-folders within that I really like. The widget at the bottom is cool and gives you similar access as control-click would if you selected a single account. Spam Sieve is nicely integrated into the menus if you use it rather than having to track it down in the Script menu…. I also like the updated HTML and slide show capabilities if you receive a few images. All in all a nice update. The buttons on the bar are totally revised and I don’t really have any feeling towards them other than they feel less friendly and more computer like. I usually cruise by keyboard when possible so it does not really impact me all that much…
Spotlight seems very cool, though it’s going to take more than a few minutes. I like Dashboard a lot and think I’ll be finding myself there several times daily. Still have yet to open Automator, but am looking forward to playing around.
Still much more to play with as well as machines to deal with… overall now that my Mail issue is cleared I like it a lot! My system feels fresh and seems quite responsive too boot!