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Mac OS X 10.4 is officially in the wild now, and the veritable flood of new tips and tricks is well under way. Let me begin with another plug for TigerWiki.com, which has seen a number of great new additions in the last few days. Keep it up! MacOSXHints.com is now open for Tiger hints, and there are already some great tips posted, such as the ability to separate Dashboard widgets from the “Dashboard layer” and use them right on top of your desktop. Speaking of Dashboard widgets, Apple’s own widgets site is open now, and features some cool little utilities, and so does dashboardwidgets.com. Now, for something really impressive, check out Apple’s QuickTime HD gallery, featuring several videos and movie trailers (Kingdom of Heaven!) in ridiculously high quality H.264 video. I’m sure there’s plenty other great tidbits about 10.4 on the web that I missed, so feel free to add your finds to the comments.

So far, Tiger has been running smoothly and most of the applications I use daily work out of the box or already have a free “Tiger upgrade” available. A big thanks goes out to the Mac OS X developer community for continually supporting its users with each OS release. I really believe the Mac has some of the best software in the world, and it wouldn’t amount to anything without the effort of all the devoted developers out there.

If you have time to spare and are interested knowing more than you ever wanted to know about all the new technologies in Tiger, ArsTechnica has a fantastic article on all the changes in this revision of Mac OS X. It’s really incredible to see all the under-the-hood details that have been updated by Apple. Mac OS X has gone from a dog slow public beta of an operating system to a fast, stable, and powerful system in four years. I can’t wait to see what the next few years hold for the Mac, as Apple has laid rock solid groundwork for a truly next generation computing platform.