As I write this message I am filled with a sense of disappointment. Some of this disappointment is reserved for Apple OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, with its raft of bugs and flaws, and some is reserved for myself for having built up such excitement about this release in my head.

To be sure, all the promised “200+” features are there: Spotlight dutifully indexed my hard drive and search results appear fairly quickly. The graphics have edged closer to “Teh Snappy” thanks to Quartz 2D and Core Graphics taking advantage of my Powerbook’s graphics card (probably the sole benefit I will ever see from maxing out my graphics card’s RAM to 128MB).

But these are all features that are best utilised to turn your coworkers green, and are fairly useless if you cannot, for example, authenticate to your proxy server from any web-enabled applications. Also, the updated features of iCal will be great once iSync recognises my iPod again, or can access my .Mac calendars. I am positive that my registration process would have been smooth and effective if the update wizard hadn’t shat itself at the first sign of network trouble and just sat there spinning in a loop with no way to close it.

COME ON PEOPLE! I know, I’m an early adopter and I am willing to accept some bugs in a new major release, but these are things that worked perfectly in Panther. Just what did you do to fuck them up so badly? And how the Hell did the proxy bug make it through Beta? Does nobody in the Beta program authenticate to an NT proxy server? Was there a regression test for this? I can just picture all the Apple engineers hi-fiving and eating chocolate bars as the release approached because their Mac-only network running on Appletalk and Rendezvouz Bonjour worked as smooth as silk.

In the meantime, I’ve set up a local ntlmaps proxy that allows things to work. The only reason I was able to download it is because Firefox uses its own networking libraries and therefore still worked the same as before. Otherwise I would have been screwed until I made it to a network outside the Windows world of my office.

I wonder, if the userspace parts of OS X were free software, would this bug have made it through?