It's official: If you're running Mac OS X 10.4.x, you are officially
running outdated software.
Maybe you're ready to run Leopard - but your iBook G3 can't run it!
(Some might say you shouldn't run even "Tiger" 10.4 on a G3, but I have
a friend, running Panther with Photoshop CS2 on his 466 MHz clamshell G3 iBook, and Photoshop is
faster for him than Photoshop CS is on my original MacBook - that just shows you the
longevity of Macs.) So what is a poor G3 user to do?
Nothing.
That's right, you can do almost anything Leopard can do under
Tiger.
Now before the Apple Thought Police come to my door in the middle of
the night and send me to room 101, let me explain what I mean. Leopard
has plenty of new features that Tiger doesn't offer natively. And while
Leopard has all of it's features integrated, it also requires an 867
MHz G4 to run, at minimum, and for low-end Macs, that's just to
fast.
Time Machine
Time Machine has been glorified as the savior of backup utilities,
and it has a pretty snazzy interface to boot. So how can Tiger ever
come close to this marvel of Core Animation goodness?
It can't. But Carbon Copy Cloner can.
While Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) doesn't look like a galaxy blazing
thorough time, it does everything else. Right at this minute, I'm
backing up the hard drive of my MacBook (I'm writing on my eMac using
Mac OS 9.22) and have set up hourly, incremental updates of my user
folder. For everyone that knows what an incremental update is, sweet;
for everyone else, it means that as I have CCC set it up, ever hour it
will take my user folder and mesh it with the existing backup on my
external drive. By meshing it, I mean to say that CCC won't overwrite
everything - it will only change anything that changed in my user
folder since the last backup.
I can't scroll through time, but I can have hourly backups with a
little free software.
Editor's note: Carbon Copy Cloner 3 sounds powerful. We've been
using SuperDuper
at Low End Mac headquarters for years, and this commercial app (not yet
Leopard compatible) not only does everything CCC does, but also has
some very useful utilities to help you test OS updates before you
commit to them. dk
Spaces
Wow! That's all I have to say after playing with Spaces at the Apple
Store on Friday. How can Tiger ever do such a thing?
Well, there's Desktop
Manager. Desktop Manager was written for Panther (OS X 10.3), but
it works smoothly on Tiger. It provides you with as many extra desktops
as you want. I use four but if you need eight, have at it. Desktop
Manager is not as streamlined as Spaces, meaning that you can't just
hit F8 and see all of your desktops, but if you're on any on any of the
60 Mac models left out of the loop, Desktop Manager is perfect.
Desktop
So you really like how the new Leopard Desktop looks, but you just
don't seem to have the specs to be able to run it? Well for a couple
payments ($20 and $13), you can! First of all, ShapeShifter from
Unsanity has the ability to swap out the existing look of boring old
Tiger for something that looks Leopardish. Another option is ThemeChanger.
Secondly, you like all of those snazzy Leopard icons but don't have
then in Tiger? Candybar is
a neat little utility that changes any icon you want it to, to whatever
you want it to look lie. Remember, though, that Shapeshifter costs $20
and Candybar costs $13.
There are some things that you just can't change: Finder's cool
little cover flow of all your files, and the Quicklook option is quite
nice too. But when it all boils down to it, you can't miss what you
can't run. And for all of us running machines that just don't quite
make the Leopard cut, Tiger can do 90% of it all just as well.
This article was written using Corel Word Perfect 3.5 on an eMac G4 800 running Mac OS 9.2.2. 
