I already read my local newspapers online, but I am an exception. My wife still buys the physical issues when she wants to read the paper.

Will magazines work in an online format? Zinio's advertising copy says that the online format has all the same layout, pictures, and advertising as the print versions. I'm not sure that that is a good thing. I certainly want the same media available, and perhaps enhanced with stuf that can only be done on a computer (like video or sound), but I don't think presenting the content in exactly the same layout is a good thing. I don't want to scroll up and down and side to side to read a two or three column page layout. Aren't they just recreating the PDF problem all over again?

But I'll give it a try. I'm all in favor of reducing the amount of paper that gets shipped into my house each month. We used to get over 30 magazines each month, and that was a lot of recycling.

10:27:26 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

Yeah, I wanted it anyway, but that's the bit that pushed my impatience over the edge.

9:55:36 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

Sounds like he knows what he's talking about.

9:27:52 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

There is an option to run the Setup Assistant and use it to migrate your old settings to the new Panther installation. I chose to let it do it's thing, and pretty much it worked, but there was an unexpected speed bump along the way. After the installation finishes, it shwos you the login screen. I selected my user entry, and typed my password, but nothing I typed would work. This had me a little scared. Then it occurred to me that the Setup Assistant probably had not run yet, so I hit the "Restart" button, and hoped for the best.

Sure enough, upon reboot and automatic login, the Setup Assistant ran, and now all of my passwords work again.

It also occurred to me that letting the system log me in renders things like File Vault and other security measures pretty much useless (what use is an encrypted filesystem if the system automatically unencrypts it for you every time you restart the machine?). I'll probably be changing that in the near future.

I played with Fast User Switching briefly, and the screen rotation was breathtaking and smooth. It really takes you by surprise if you've never seen it live before. I was thinking that that should become the standard way to transition between the login screen and your normal account desktop. I suppose it'll get old after a while, but if it was a preference setting, that would be no big deal.

I've been playing with Expose quite a bit. I've taken to just zooming out all of the windows to watch them all chugging away on something. It's amazing that you can see all of those tiny windows doing something, even though they are zoomed out.

It used to be that eye candy annoyed me, because it was taking cycles away from my stuff. But now that every machine seems to ship with an accelerated graphics adapter, that is not as much of a complaint. Watch a CPU monitor when Expose zooms all of the windows out. There's barely a blip, because the vast majority of the work is being done by the graphics coprocessor.

Funny, this is what made the Amiga cool. The Amiga worked from the assumption that it's easier to make something fast in hardware rather than software. (I realize that I am touching on a subject that inspires great flame wars, so I'm going to apologize in advance for the obvious errors I am surely going to make.) There was a chip devoted to graphics, a chip devoted to sound, and chips devoted to other things that I can't remember here. The problem with the Amiga was that the specialized hardware processors were not keeping pace with the power curve that the CPUs were following. I had an Amiga 3000 (the UX model, actually), and it was based around a 25MHz 68030 (with the floating point chip as well). I remember getting this neat little utility that sped up text scrolling quite a bit. And how did it work? It patched the OS to use the 68030 directly to move the bits rather than the display coprocessor. Of course, the total system throughput would probably have been faster if they let the coprocessor do it's job, but it increased the percieved speed of the system quite a bit. Not to mention that for me, being a command-line oriented hacker (yes, and yet I'm a Mac freak as well), fast scrolling made all the difference in the world.

But back to the original topic -- it's very cool that hardware has improved to the point where eye candy doesn't carry that much of a penalty. And because Apple makes it's own hardware, it's easy for them to make sure that their systems have the graphcs horsepower necessary to do what they want to do.

I like Panther. I'm glad I installed it.

9:18:17 AM    comments ()  trackback []