I’m not going to comment on all of the new features, nor the changes to the GUI. These have been copiously documented all over the place. I particularly recommend John Siracusa’s extraordinarily detailed writeup in Ars Technica. No, in this piece I’m just going to list the problems I’ve encountered with Tiger, in the hope that it may help a few others.

• I’ve already mentioned the first-time conversion issue for Mail.app. Most of you won’t have as much email as I do, but if you’re low on disk space, watch out. The new format takes a lot more space; my ~/Library/Mail now takes 1.7GB.

• Before you run Mail (preferably before you upgrade), remove ALL of your Mail.app add-ins. I caught most of them, but I forgot the PGP bundle. This caused Mail to crash hard the first time I touched a PGP-encoded message. Delete everything in /Library/Mail/Bundles (and also ~/Library/Mail/Bundles). Until we get a fixed version, you can decrypt a message by selecting the whole body and then choosing Mail→Services→PGP→Decrypt-Verify. If the PGP app isn’t running, you may have to try twice. UPDATE PGP has posted a final candidate for PGP Desktop 9.0 which is supposed to be Tiger-compatible. I’ll try it shortly. (Since they have my email address from when I bought the product, couldn’t they have notified me?) UPDATE: PGP Desktop 9.0 works just fine. The only problems were: (1) It wouldn’t accept my PGP 8.0 license key – will this be a paid update? (2) By default, it tries to secure email connections and squawked about my IMAP/SSL connection to Sun. It shut up when I told it to ignore it.

• Bluetooth seems to work OK; I was able to send some photos from my Treo to the PowerBook. However I use Missing Sync to synchronize my Treo over Bluetooth, and this didn’t work: Missing Sync crashed with EXC_BAD_ACCESS half-way through a sync, and the Missing Sync Crash Reporter (which I didn’t know existed) also crashed, with a BREAKPOINT (so perhaps that was deliberate). UPDATE Mark/Space has a page on Tiger issues; I’ll try their suggestions a little later – maybe install the beta 4.0.5.

• I’ve had several other crashes, including an EXC_BAD_ACCESS in the X11 window manager, /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm and another in iPhoto. Neither of these was obviously repeatable. UPDATE: I’ve also managed to cause the Dashboard to reset a couple of times; while manipulating a widget, the dashboard disappears, and if I hit F12 I see all of the widgets restarting. Weird.

That’s it for now. More as I find ’em.

P.S. A couple of interesting things. First, I seem to be getting much better WiFi signal strength – 90% in a location where I used to get 40%. Safari RSS is very polite: it knows about NetNewsWire and lets it handle RSS feeds. And the latest X11 beta of OpenOffice 2.0 (the “Francophone version”) seems to run just fine.