Online retailer Amazon.com has published a page on their Web site taking orders for Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger, the company’s recently introduced next generation operating system. Amazon says that Tiger will ship on March 31, 2005 — Apple confirmed for MacCentral on Friday that Mac OS X Tiger is slated to be available in the first half of 2005, but declined to comment further on Amazon’s site.
System requirements for the operating system were not available from Amazon, but the price was listed at US$129; no upgrade pricing was listed.
Introduced on June 28, 2004 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mac OS X Tiger touts more than 150 new features.
Among the new features expected to draw the interest of consumers include a new search technology called Spotlight that enables users to search for any file, document or information their Mac contains. The software has been modeled to work like the search capabilities of Apple’s popular iTunes music software application, and can find e-mails, presentations, images, appointments, Microsoft Office documents and more, arranging its search results by kind, time or people. What’s more, Spotlight enables users to create “Smart Folders,” “Smart Playlists,” “Smart Mailboxes” and “Smart Groups” that work in the Finder and individual applications to automatically keep content organized and updated.
Safari, Apple’s popular standards-based Web browse for Mac OS X, will feature integrated support for RDF Site Summary, or RSS — an increasingly popular method of finding updated content on Web sites. Safari can operate as a full-featured RSS reader, and Mac users will be able to create their own news clippings service using the feature.
Also new to Tiger is Dashboard, an interface for “Widgets,” or specialized applications. The technology is based on Mac OS X v10.3’s Exposé feature, and provides ways for users to more conveniently access information like stock quotes, calendar information, calculators, Webcam interfaces and more.