Tiger has been hyped up so much that even the Apple website(http://www.apple.com) highlights more than 200 new features. Admittedly, though, some are merely enhancements but there are quite a number of features that are really amazing. I have listed some personal favorites in my blog but I will give you a rundown of some of them here.

Built-in Dictionary. Big deal, you might say but this one is wonderful. Imagine highlighting any word on any document or page on your browser and hitting Cmd-Ctrl-D (Apple Key-Ctrl-D, for those of you who are not familiar with the Apple keyboard) and a small window will appear and provide you with the meaning of the word as retrieved from the Oxford English dictionary. Cool, huh?

Network-based Home Directory. Imagine synchronizing your PDA with your computer and having your data saved on both devices. Now, do this with your portable computer such as an iBook or Powerbook, and have it stored on the network. This is an automatic back-up of your Home directory. No need to worry about backing up your data everyday. If you don’t have a networked storage device, you can use the US$99 .Mac iDisk service but it is limited to only 250MB of space. I am waiting for Apple to provide us with Gmail-like storage space.

iChatAV 3.0. iChatAV is Apple’s instant messaging application. Previous versions of iChatAV supported AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Version 3.0 supports Jabber and allows you to connect to other messaging services that Jabber connects to like Yahoo! Messenger, Microsoft’s MSN and ICQ. I just tried it a few hours ago and it works! Now I have more multiple IM clients to run - just iChatAV and all my Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, AIM and MSN buddies are bunched up together with my iChatAV buddies.

In addition to Jabber-support, iChatAV now supports multiple audio conferencing (up to 10, I think) without needing a server. It also supports up to four clients in a single video conference but you need at least a dual 1GHz G4 or any G5-processor based Mac. I’m eager to try these new features but I have to find a G5 first!

VPN-on-demand. Virtual Private Networking (VPN) is becoming more and more popular especially among corporate telecommuters. VPN allows you to securely connect to your corporate network and do your business as if you are physically connected to the network. I do this in U.P. specially when submitting grades online. With this new Tiger feature, I just have to configure my VPN client to automatically connect when I try accessing a server that requires a VPN connection. There’s no need to launch it manually. It’s not really that exciting but hey, nobody ever thought of it before!

New Preview Features. Preview is Apple’s document viewer. Tiger’s Preview now provides much more than just the basic display of documents. Preview now supports JPEG 2000 and RAW Camera image files, PDF annotations (yes, it is built-in and allows you to overlay text and graphics on the PDF page and save it) and support for PDF Forms.

Using the same rendering engine, Tiger also allows you to encrypt your PDF. Since PDF is supported by the OS, you can produce a PDF file from almost all applications with just a few clicks with no need to purchase a third-party application.

Secure Virtual Memory. It has been pointed out that the previous versions of Mac OS X have a flaw in how it manages its virtual memory. Security experts alerted users that their passwords can be retrieved from unprotected virtual memory in the system (for this to happen, the hacker must already have access to your computer). With an encrypted virtual memory, Apple provides a more secure environment for its users. This may not be an issue with most users but for a paranoid person like me, it is very important.

These are just some of the features that justified my upgrade. It cannot be discounted, of course, that the major features that give Apple a big marketing boost are Spotlight and Dashboard.

Spotlight is the built-in search engine that allows you to search for any document, application, music, video, image or even e-mail within a few seconds. It also functions as an application launcher by hitting the Cmd-key to highlight the Top Hit and pressing Enter even while Spotlight is still searching. You can’t find this built-in in any of the current operating systems in the market today.

Dashboard is a nifty little application that allows you to run small applications called widgets while eating up a small portion of your CPU cycles (depending on which widget you are running, of course). What makes this cool is the fact that it runs in the background and can be accessed anytime with the press of a key (defaults to F12). Widgets such as a dictionary/thesaurus, calculator, world clock, weather, calendar, address book, phone book, language translator and even a flight tracker are provided for free. You can find more widgets at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/dashboard/. Again, this is built-in the OS; there’s no need to pay extra.

Recently, Dashboard has been found to be vulnerable to exploitation wherein malicious widgets can cause damage to the user’s files. There is no fix from Apple as of this writing but a way to prevent it is to disable Safari (the web browser), or any web browser for that matter, from automatically opening any “safe” file it downloads.

All these new features do not come without bugs as well. I, along with my Pinoymac (http://www.pinoymac.org) friends, have discovered some bugs -- some are simple, such as Finder not properly adjusting its display whilst in column-mode, but others are really annoying such as Mail.app hanging when synchronizing IMAP folders. I am sure that Apple will publicly release the fix soon with 10.4.1 already seeded to developers for testing.

What is important is that Tiger has exceeded most of the expectations of Apple devotees and even wow-ed some of the PC users, too.  The bottomline is Tiger is awesome and it is available now!