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November 16, 2003

New Stuff to Play With

I've been on a Windows kick the past few months, thanks mainly to some work requirements and an unwillingness to do long-haul editing on a laptop. But I did pause this weekend to update the iBook to OS X 10.3 (Panther) and grab the latest update to BBEdit.

Panther is pretty nice. Pieces of it seem, to use the subjective phrase of choice among people with low-end hardware, "snappier." The new Exposé feature is cool, and the changes to the way the Finder works make a lot of sense. Pleasant upgrade. I'll be happier when it's running on a G4 iBook.

If you're at all tempted to buy an iBook with the thought that you'll run something like Microsoft Word or PhotoShop Elements on it, save your pennies and hold out for at least one of the G3/800 or 900's, which will confer the benefit of Word running at a speed that doesn't drive you into a killing frenzy waiting for it to catch up to your typing if you try to listen to an MP3 at the same time. In a few months, market inertia will put decent refurbs of those models at way reasonable prices.

Just my $0.02. I'm sure there's someone out there who thinks Word peels his lips back with its blazing speed on lesser hardware than I have.

BBEdit on the other hand, finally introduces something I've been pining for since I first started using it: SFTP copying, which means I can move stuff around untrusted networks (including the wireless one in my home) without (much) fear for my security. Yay. One less thing to be paranoid about.