Address Book will give you a link to the relevant entry, Mail will give you links to any emails to and from this person, and so on. Among the headline non-musical features you'll probably have heard about already is Spotlight, which is a new searching technology that allows you to find files based on content and metadata: for example, if you click on the new blue and circular Spotlight icon at the top right of the menu bar and type someone's name, Spotlight will find all information related to the name in all supporting applications on your Mac. Most of Tiger's new general features will be fairly well known by the time you read this, since there's been a large amount of coverage in the mainstream computer press and, of course, on the Internet. Rendezvous, the technology for automatically locating computers, devices (such as printers) and services (such as the one used to share users' iTunes libraries across a network), is now known as Bonjour in Tiger, and literally every reference on Apple's web site and in the operating system to Rendezvous has been changed to Bonjour. It's worth mentioning right away (as we'll be coming back to it later), that one well-known technology introduced back in Jaguar has been renamed due to a trademark settlement. Considering the functionality now in Mac OS 10.4 - codenamed Tiger - it's amazing how far Apple have come in just four years.

And the release of 10.3 (Panther) made everyone feel much more confident. The release of Pro Tools 6 probably helped, but Jaguar was really when Mac-based musicians began migrating to the new operating system in serious numbers.

With the later releases of 10.1 (Puma) and, more significantly, 10.2 (Jaguar), the audio and MIDI feature of OS X matured and stabilised. However, while some Mac-based musicians clung to OS 9 for the first few years of OS X, the new Mac operating system, while not initially great from a MIDI and audio developer's standpoint, just got better and better. 2001 also saw the release of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, but while musicians and audio engineers were up and running pretty quickly on this operating system (an evolution of Windows ME and 2000), Mac OS X represented a more radical change for both users and developers of Mac audio and MIDI software, breaking away from 17 years of the 'classic' pre OS X Mac OS tradition. Without wishing to be too nostalgic, it's hard to believe that Mac OS X has been with us in a final, released state for over four years - v10.0 was released on March 24th 2001 after many public and developer previews. Is this one OS upgrade you won't mind performing on your studio computer? The latest version of Apple's Mac OS contains some excellent new features aimed at musicians and audio engineers.

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