I’ve just installed Tiger on my iBook and, I must say, some of the new features are great. The RSS support in Safari is very nice (now I don’t need a separate news aggregator), Dashboard is quite nice and Spotlight has already been useful. I’m not sure I like all of the changes to Mail (when you “wrap” to the next most recent message when paging through them with spacebar, it remembers the old position in the next message instead of going to the top), but I think I can get used to them.

All in all, I feel that it was well worth the investment, and I’ve only been playing with it for an hour or two. I’ll get some more fiddling done when Monolingual finishes removing all the useless translation data from the newly installed stuff. With Panther, I saved about 750MB by removing all the languages I don’t need (i.e. all of them but the various English variants), with Tiger it was just over 1GB.

(On the down side, it looks like I’m going to have to get some more RAM. Dashboard, spotlight and everything else can’t be cheap to keep in memory.)

Whilst this is pretty cool, I’ve been thinking that BibTeX is a little annoying (what with it wanting to rewrite capital letters unless you use braces as the string delimiters, etc). Lately I’ve been thinking that perhaps an XML format might be just what the doctor ordered. DC probably supports as many fields as necessary. The only problem might be the bunch of publication types that bibliography styles typeset differently, though I’m sure that there is a DC element (and maybe a dictionary of terms) to describe document types.

In any case, I’m too lazy to switch from something that works (BibTeX, et al) to something that I’d have to write myself (because using someone else’s would defeat the purpose :-).

Other things that might be useful are some software to convert PDF and PS documents to text and an automatic text condenser and an outline editor. The former would help process those pesky documents without abstracts, whilst the latter would help note-taking and the like. If anyone happens to read this and knows of any free software (for Mac OS X, or UNIX) which fits the descriptions here, post links in a comment.

The part of this situation that I like is that I only realised this because I’ve been working in Xcode on my new iBook for the last two days. The iBook is seriously cool. If anyone on the OS X team ever reads this: you rock (and could you tell the hardware engineers to read this next bit). If anyone of the Apple engineering team ever reads this: you rock (and could you tell the OS X people to read that last bit). This is probably, of all the computers I’ve owned, my favourite.

The only problem is the I now have the urge to switch completely: the Mac mini is looking quite tempting. I’ll be able to hold out for a while (primarily due to a lack of disposable income), but once I’ve got my enrolment, accommodation and various other fees out of the way, I think that some small part of my scholarship might become available for conversion to a more solid, white, Mac branded form.

Another benefit is the software. I’m starting to get used to everything “just working”. Unfortunately there are a few bugs in some things I’ve been using (like Bibdesk, a bibTeX database editor), but on the whole, I like it.