Having bought an Apple PowerBook, last week I became preoccupied with Tiger, the latest version of OS X. So, I surfed Tiger rather than the Internet. The PowerBook itself is fine—a laptop is a laptop and this one doesn’t weigh much and, er, what else is there to say?

But, Tiger is impressive. If you’re interested in Tiger, you’ve probably read the reviews, so, yes it has a cute dashboard—which may please widget lovers—a clock, a calculator, a thesaurus, a calendar (what more could a boy need?). Apple’s Mail is improved—but it was always good enough. Apple is also pushing a two-program bundle, called iWork, which includes a new word processor (Page), which has genuine virtues (and is Word compatible) and presentation software (Keynote), which pretends to be PowerPoint compatible—close but no cigar. Apple may get traction with these, but they won’t disturb the MS Office hegemony—not any time soon.

The Tiger features that are useful beyond dispute are Spotlight, the Search capability and Automator, the workflow robot. Both have the possibility of changing the way that you use a PC.

If you load several gigabytes of data onto Tiger, it thinks for a while. Not surprising really—it’s busy creating indexes for all the data. Using these indexes, Spotlight lets you search every kind of file or record (from email through music files to log files) using any keyword or combination of them. This is very powerful—much better than the Google PC search capability. It works. It’s easy. It’s intuitive. And it makes you wonder whether there’s any point in putting stuff in directories any more. There wouldn’t be if you went straight into Spotlight when you clicked on the Open command in every application. But you don’t.

In the future you might be able to, either because Apple makes it possible or because the Automator capability does. Automator is a good attempt at providing a user-friendly capability to automate common activities on the Mac. It works better than any simple development capability of this kind that I’ve seen—applause goes to Apple’s software engineers. In combination with AppleScript (if you want to be ambitious) you can automate application integration. Automator is a bit like web services for the Mac and it probably has a big future. Having said that, my guess is that most Mac users won’t use it, even though it’s very usable. They’ll get their kicks from Dashboard because it looks so cool.

But the point is that the nature of PC computing is changing—towards better search and better application integration. You can count on Microsoft to try to mimic much of what Apple is doing with the final release of Windows Vista. However, it’s playing catch-up and it may not catch up. Don’t expect it to play leapfrog.