Jaguar
Friday afternoon, I took the plunge and did a clean install of Mac OS X 10.2 on my 2001 iBook (500mhz G3 CPU, 384MB RAM). It's certainly better than 10.1.5, but I'm glad I only had to pay the education price of $69 for the software, I'd feel ripped off if I'd paid the $129 retail price.

Installation went pretty smoothly, except I missed the option to do a clean install until I'd already started an upgrade, so I forced a reboot and then did a clean install, after finding the option in the manual. Now, granted, I could have read the manual ahead of time, but I think that they could have made the hiding place of that option a little more obvious. I didn't install the extra 20 languages I don't speak, nor the drivers for the 2 brands of printers I don't own. The printer drivers I understand, but what I don't understand is why the default installation needs to include 300 megabytes of obscure languages. Why not make the default NOT to install them? But, I'm picking nits here.

After the installation (took around 40 minutes or so) I booted into OS X 10.2 for the first time. The finder is snappier than it used to be, that was my first observation. My second observation was that spring-loaded folders are cool. My third observation was that the video redraw speed is still too slow for me to make this iBook a serious work machine. This brings me to my first big gripe about OS X 10.2, it's still not fast enough. My iBook is only a year old, but in OS X, it's simply not fast enough to be used as a much of a productivity machine. It works fine for checking my e-mail, surfing the web, or instant messaging, but you can't really multi-task with anything resembling speed on this hardware. It pauses for at least a second every time you switch applications, which may not sound like a lot to you, but normally I chat online while running at least two browser windows, plus my e-mail, switching quickly is important to me. I also dislike how the dock needs to use two spaces for every minimized application. I don't need a little picture of every window I'm not looking at, the little arrow next to the application icon is all I need to remind me it's still running. Update: Dan Black told me to use Command-H to hide the windows, that fixes my gripe about the dock, thanks Dan!

iChat shows promise, but once you get over the novelty of having people's little pictures spit words at you in cartoon bubbles, it falls short. Apple could have made a lot of headlines by making iChat talk to ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN Messenger protocols, but they sold out to AOL instead. Most of my chatting is done via MSN, second place is ICQ, and AOL is a distant third, so iChat is a nice distraction, but not really worth the price of admission.

The Aqua interface buttons look a little flatter now, to increase the speed, I imagine, and the entire interface is well polished, and OS X finally feels done. It's still not fast, but I could see myself working in it all day now, if I had a dual-processor machine with a much faster video card. Mail has received a minor update, and it's an improvement, but it still gives me no options to hide the .folders on my Linux mail server. Entourage does it for me, so I'll probably stick to the Microsoft mail package, sorry Apple. I have no idea how well their spam detection works, but I'm sure it's not as good as SpamAssassin, which I already run on the server.

Sherlock 3 is a nice application, even if it is a compete rip off of Watson. I showed the Movie feature to a couple of people who were impressed. The new Address Book program is a nice start, the LDAP queries work very well, but there need to be some more fields in that address book, like options for other Instant Messaging programs, middle initials, and a myriad of other personal details, more like the address book in Microsoft Outlook. iSync will be nice for those people who have Palm OS devices, but I ditched my Visor for an iPaq this summer, so it holds no value for me.

In fact, the entire .Mac initiative holds no value for me. I could join now for only $49, and get absolutely nothing I want or need. I already have an online calendar system here at work, Steltor (now Oracle) CorporateTime. If iCal was compatible with it, I'd use it, but it's not. If I could sync my address book between my PC and the Mac address book, I'd try iSync out, but I can't, so I won't. I don't need another e-mail account, I have one already. I don't need 100MB of online disk storage, I have a whole FTP server already. I don't need cheesy web hosting at homepage.mac.com, I already have sethb.com. I just don't understand who's going to pony up the $100 for .Mac, when people who are inclined to spend money for these types of services already have something that's more serviceable, and those that aren't inclined to pay money will probably seek out free alternatives.

So what do I want to see in OS X 10.3? I want to see a button in Display preferences to enable "Ugly Fast Mode", where I can turn off all the things that suck CPU and GPU time, I want to see even faster drivers for the video card in my iBook, and I want to see an even faster Finder. I also want to see Apple buy up NetNewsWire Lite and turn it into their next killer application, iNews. I want to see the iApps and .Mac adopt the real-world perspective of Windows interoperability. Apple finally caught on to this with their iPod devices, more people will buy Macs for home if they know that they can easily share data (not just documents, things like their calendars, address books and PDA information) between their work and home computers. I also want to see Apple hire the Chimera developers and create iBrowse from the Mozilla engine, and ditch the pig that is Internet Explorer.

The bottom line: OS X 10.2 is worth $69, it's a serviceable upgrade, and it's very polished. The new power management options make it very useful for those of us with portable machines. OS X 10.2 is not worth $129, in my opinion, if it turned my 2001 iBook 500 into a snappy little productivity machine (I mean for basic web work, not super photo-editing and graphic rendering apps) I'd say it was worth $129. In fact, I'm going to switch over to my PC to add all the URLs to this article. Attention Apple: I shouldn't need a PowerBook G4 to create my weblog.



- posted by Seth @ 2:19 PM    

 
First Day.
Today is the first day of classes here at UNI, too bad the campus isn't really ready for it, check out the list of things that are still closed for construction. There's nothing that makes my day more fun than having to walk 300 yards to reach a building that's only 50 yards away, while pushing a cart laden with computers over sidewalks and roads torn up by construction equipment.
- posted by Seth @ 6:38 AM