Jason Gilman's Radio Weblog

Jason Gilman's Radio Weblog
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Wednesday, January 5, 2000

MacOS X Debut
The live webcast is working surprisingly well. I guess that Akamai network technology really works. The new iDrive technology is fairly intriguing. Looks like they're going to be rolling out Mac OS X throughout the next year with sales starting during the summer (presumably around MacWorld).

Wow! MacOS X looks great! Makes me want to run out and become and Apple Developer so I can get the new betas later this year.

The only disappointing item in the presentation was that the Microsoft Rep sounded like IE 5 for the Macintosh won't be out until the end of January. I guess their official press release will be in a half hour.

One new IE 5 feature that is definitely a good thing is that there is a mode to make pages render at the 96 dpi industry standard and end the micro font rendering woes that occur when reading PC generated pages. I noticed Mozilla build 12 for the Mac does the same thing a while back as well. Standardization is always a good thing!

10:19:00 AM

MacWorld Keynote
I've successfully connected to the live web broadcast of Steve Job's keynote. Boy, do they play some cheezy music while we're waiting for it to begin.

I am really looking forward to the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer. Hopefully it will be released today sometime, rather than later in the week. I checked the Microsoft Mactopia, but there was no sign as of yet. Of course Steve Job's keynote address isn't for another half hour anyway.

Lest everyone think I'm a freakish Microsoft loving Mac user I should point out I'm also really looking forward to the next version of Netscape Communicator, although I wish it was going to be a standalone browser rather than integrated with composer and email. Mozilla build 12 is definitely promising and if the final product works better for me than IE I will make the switch.

Right now I prefer to use IE 4.5 for the Mac, but I'm forced to use Netscape Communicator as well because it works better with Blogger. Communicator also crashes more and seems to want use its own, older Java run time rather than Apple's newer improved model (which IE uses).

8:33:00 AM