OK, I must admit, when I first installed Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and used it for the first couple of days I was fairly underwhelmed. Sure, some of the new features were cool and all but some of the most touted ones simply left me wanting more. The new Mail application for instance, why can’t I change the background color for the new mailbox “drawer” and why can’t I choose which side it lives on? Why do I have to press a button to bring my Dashboard widgets to the front. Why can’t they live permanently on my desktop like Konfabulator widgets do? I mean, if you are going to “borrow” elements of a great idea, why not “borrow” the useful ones.

Thing is, most of the cool features are little tweaks done here and there. The annotation feature in Preview for instance. Yet another step towards never using the painfully slow Adobe Reader ever again. That makes double for the inline PDF viewing now added to Safari.

You want more? Well Apple has posted a nice page detailing more than 200 new features in Tiger. Read this if you install Tiger and wonder what you got for your hard earned cash.