Tiger First Impressions
I upgraded to Tiger today. The question on everybody's mind is, would I have paid for it? The answer is still probably no, but there are some very important improvements over Panther, at least from my perspective.
First, Dashboard is just as cool as it looks, although not as fast as I'd imagined (there are noticeable delays in e.g. the hula dancer almost every time, and CPU usage is nearly pegged while it's open). Spotlight looks useful, but I'm not yet sure whether the indexing is going to be bad for my battery. More investigation will be needed there.
Tiger has ruby 1.8.2, and unlike Panther's 1.6 it seems to be fully enabled with Tk. (I can't say for sure that that's not because I had installed TkAqua prior to upgrading in an attempt to get Tk working before) The upshot of this is that you can write ruby GUIs that don't require users to do any voodoo, not to mention all the benefits of 1.8 over 1.6.
Some say it's faster. I haven't noticed. If anything it seems slower (and my laptop seems hot). This may be temporary or configurable; more investigation is in order. I do understand that gcc4 does a superb job of optimizing for the platform though.
Last, but not least, Tiger supports remapping CAPS to Control right out of the box.