According to Apple there are more than 200 new features in Tiger. The three that are used most often are the Dashboard, Spotlight, and Safari RSS. To find out more information on some of the other features you can visit http://www.apple.com/macosx/

Dashboard

The Dashboard is a collection of mini-applications, called widgets, that run in the background on your computer. To access the widgets simply press the key (in the upper right-hand corner of your keyboard), and they will fly onto the screen. Pressing again will remove them. Widgets can be written by anyone, and most are available to download for free at http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/.

To manage the widgets on your screen press to bring them forward, then click on the plus sign (+) in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen (highlighted in yellow above). The plus sign will change to an x, and a list of widgets installed on your computer will appear at the bottom of the screen. To add a new widget to the ones already on the screen, simply click on it in the list at the bottom. You should also notice that after clicking on the plus sign to make it an x, every widget on the screen now has an x in its upper left-hand corner. To remove a widget, simply click on this x.

Spotlight

Spotlight is the new search tool included in Tiger. There are several ways to access Spotlight, but the easiest is to click on the Spotlight icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The Spotlight menu should drop down. In the text box, simply type what you are looking for and results will start to appear as you type. The results will be grouped by file type. If the file you are looking for does not appear try clicking on the Show All (xxx) option at the top of the menu.

From the Spotlight window you can change the way you see some types of files. To see more information about a file click the i with the circle around in the far right column.

Spotlight not only searches the file names, but also the comments in any document (you can access the comments by clicking on the item, then clicking on File>Get Info) and the contents of text files, PDFs, emails, your address book, and other text documents. More information can be found about Spotlight at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/

Safari RSS

Resource Description Framework (RDF) Site Summary (RSS) is a technology used by news organizations and others on the web to gather together several articles in a convenient easy to browse way. The new version of Safari, Apple's Web browser, has a built in RSS reader.

If you visit a website that supports RSS, such as http://www.cnn.com/ or http://news.bbc.co.uk/, you will see an RSS icon at the right end of the address bar. Clicking on the RSS icon brings up a list of articles. On the right you will see a search bar, and on the left you will see a list of articles and a brief summary. To read the full text of the article simply click on the article title.