Apple Mac OS 10.4

The latest release of Apple's OSX, version 10.4, or 'Tiger', has taken longer to arrive than previous ones, which appeared more or less annually. It's 18 months since the last update, and Apple's engineers have certainly been busy. The headline features in the new release are: Spotlight, a powerful search and indexing tool; Dashboard, which provides easy access to desktop widgets; and Automator, which makes it easy to automate routine tasks.

Installation is straightforward; you can upgrade, opting to keep settings, or simply re-install everything after wiping your disk. We'd probably opt for the latter if we did it again - on our very old G4/400 with OS 10.2, we had a problem with an old application crashing just as we shut down. But aside from that, the system's performance was noticeably boosted in normal use. Where you will need a faster machine is when using some of the additions - Automator seemed a little sluggish on the G4/400 although, once Spotlight had built an index, it was very speedy.

There are various neat touches across the operating system. If you download a disk image that contains an application, a warning appears. Also, when you choose the Print dialogue, there's a handy option to save a page as a pdf to a Web Receipts folder, or to email a pdf. You can also view the image results of any search as a slideshow and easily import them into Iphoto.

Many of the applications have had a makeover. In the Safari web browser there's built-in RSS support so, on sites with a feed, an RSS button appears in the address bar automatically, and you can choose how much of each item to view.