Status-Q

Today Apple released the new version of their operating system, Mac OS X 10.3, more commonly known as Panther.

Actually, they released it yesterday at 8pm, and when I woke up this morning a friend of mine was still online in Seattle (1am their time) after the big gathering of ‘hundreds’ for the launch at the local Apple store.

Here, in contrast, our local Apple dealer closed at 5.30pm yesterday, so we had to wait until this morning to get a copy. And they only had 25. It would have been much too nerdy to be seen actually waiting at the door when they opened, so I sauntered in at a much more laid-back five minutes past the hour, and one of those 25 copies is now mine.

I also treated my elderly PowerBook to a new hard disk (so I could do drastic things without destroying my chance of returning to safety) and so I have a completely fresh install of Panther. I copied my applications, documents, some preferences etc into it from a backup on an external firewire drive, and so far it’s all going very nicely.

Like 10.2, this is not a very major overhaul from the appearances point of view, but there are small improvements to almost everything which make the cost (100 UKP) definitely worthwhile for me. The big changes are well documented elsewhere; the main benefit I’ve seen so far is the much better integration with a Windows network, and with remote servers. I can browse the ‘network neighbourhood’, can print to the Deskjet connected to Rose’s Windows machine, and can interact much more seamlessly with remote WebDAV and FTP servers.

And the ‘Exposé‘ feature is lovely too.

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Just when Apple’s PowerBook line was getting nicely settled, they go and confuse things by upgrading the iBook to a G4 processor. This was needed – the G3 was getting a bit long in the tooth, but it used to be the main thing that defined the difference between the iBook and Powerbook ranges.

I don’t imagine they’ll be upgrading the PowerBooks to a G5 in the very near future, so it’s almost a question of how much you want to pay for the nice shiny colour… 🙂

Every now and then I come across a bit of Mac OS X software which does just what I want and is reasonably priced. Keyboard Maestro was one I wrote about in September. A plug for some recent finds:

• ImageCaster is a $20 bit of software which captures images, typically from a USB or Firewire-connected camera, and saves or uploads them to create a webcam. Many cameras come with such software, but if yours doesn’t, or if it doesn’t support OS X, or if it isn’t any good, this is worth a try.
• Audio Hijack captures audio from apps which may not support saving. I use it for saving RealAudio streams to hard disk or to my iPod. (I do wish the BBC wouldn’t try to do such complex stuff on their web pages though. They don’t work on the Mac, and I have to view the source of the web pages to find the URL to type into RealPlayer.)
• It took me a while to discover that my Powerbook has a built-in microphone. Almost nothing in the bundled software advertises this fact. But using SoundStudio I’ve been able to get some reasonable-quality recordings from it. SoundStudio is a general-purpose audio editor which is fully-functional for 14 days, after which it costs $50. Recommended.

Since upgrading my elderly Powerbook to ‘Jaguar’, the latest version of Apple’s operating system, I’m struck once again by an important contrast with Windows. As far as I can remember, every upgrade of Windows I ever did gave you extra features, sometimes even features you wanted, but at the cost of speed.

Mac OS X, perhaps because of its youth, has the wonderful characteristic that every version has been faster than its predecessor, which is especially good if your hardware isn’t the latest. This is particularly wholesome because Apple, unlike Microsoft, does make a lot of its money from hardware and so has a vested interest in encouraging you to upgrade.

Apple’s Bluetooth Cavity. [osOpinion] Apple led the world with USB support and is still well ahead of PCs when it comes to Firewire. It’s interesting that they haven’t yet jumped on the Bluetooth bandwagon.

Amazon’s stock of the new iMac sold out in four hours. Our local dealer has a couple of display models, but is quoting a six-week waiting time for new orders.

As a result of Mac OS X, BSD-based Unix is now apparently three times more popular on the desktop than Linux.