Here are some more of the best and worst of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. If you haven’t read part one yet, read it!

Missing the target
When exporting images to JPEG, earlier versions of Preview had a “target size” field where you could enter how large you wanted the exported image file size to be (in bytes). This was useful for posting on online forums, many of which have restrictions on the sizes of files you can upload. Now you are left to guess. Bummer.

Be safe
Safari 2.0 not only tells you if the file you’re downloading (.zip, disk image, etc...) contains an Mac application, but also a Windows application. Also, when viewing a secure page, click the lock icon in Safari’s title bar to view a certificate information dialog (useful to verify the authenticity of a site).

I wonder if I can hack that!
Speaking of Safari, apparently the error pages are ordinary HTML/CSS pages. Also, the RSS reader page is really just an HTML 4.0 document. If you knew what you were doing, you could conceivably hack these documents and customize them. Where they are is for you to find out (Note: I am not responsible if you decide to mess with Safari and render it unusable. Hack at your own risk).

Missing in Action
It appears a couple Sherlock channels are no more. The Stocks and Movies channels are gone in Tiger.

Biggest ripoff, revisited
Last time, I commented on how I felt the lack of full screen playback in QT is an unbelievably dumb move. That issue has been partially resolved by the fact that iTunes 4.8 now plays back some video formats, although rather awkwardly.

Where did all my RAM go?
Do you notice your Mac is eating an absurd amount of RAM? Dashboard widgets eat up anywhere from 15 to 25 MB of RAM. Each. Ouch. No wonder OS X’s RAM requirement doubled with Tiger.

Mathematicians’ best friend
Grapher can do some impressive stuff that is not only useful the the math majors of the world, but also looks pretty to the rest of us. Yay, more eye candy!

Most useless alert message
In iChat, I have received the following AIM error on several occasions: “None.” If there isn’t a problem, why give me an alert in the first place?

Come again?
Raw Spotlight queries are a pain in the ass to make. Instead of using operators like OR, you end up using more cryptic symbols like “|”. For most users, this effectively neuters a good deal of this feature’s usefulness. It’s too bad, because such a feature cuts down on the amount of time spent constructing a query.

Oopsie
Why is it I can make a Finder search where a file’s name contains something, but I can’t make one where it does not contain something? Huh?

Terrific troubleshooting tool
Have an app that repeatedly crashes? Tiger now allows you to override the app’s preference file when launching a troublesome application (basically, “safe mode” for an application). This helps identify any possible preference file corruption. Nice!

Terrific troubleshooting tool too
Network Diagnostics is an indispensable part of Tiger. It’s a great way to solve any internet connectivity problems you may encounter.

Where’d that video go?
Web archives in Safari do not appear to save QuickTime videos embedded in a page. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe they’re worried about copyrighted material being stolen?

Wash your Mac’s mouth out with soap
You don’t want little Johnny to be ably to look up certain more, er, intersting words of the English language on OS X’s built-in dictionary? No problem; just enable Dictionary restrictions on the Parental Controls tab in the Accounts preference pane. Apple thinks of (almost) everything, don’t they?

Color it broken
The color adjustment tools in DVD Player do not work on my iBook, it seems. Instead, it just scrambles the video. I’m assuming that these tools leverage Core Video and therefore require a newer GPU that what the iBook has. Can anyone confirm this? And if that’s true, why doesn’t Apple just disable the ability to make such adjustments on lower-spec machines? An oversight?

Information Overload!
System Profiler has been updated to report more information about your computer. Enjoy.

That’s good to know
One last tidbit: “About this Mac” now displays the name of your startup disk as well. Useful if you have multiple partitions or drives you boot from.

UPDATE: Your Mac unexpectedly quit.
Here’s an odd dialog from Tiger (Thanks to Rosyna Keller for the screenshot):

Rosyna got this dialog after restarting her Mac because of a kernel panic. Interesting, eh? I wonder if we will one day see something like XP’s “spontaneous restart of death” on OS X.