I admit it - I was a little bit disappointed when Apple showed off Panther (the fourth release of Mac OS X) at their world wide developers conference. But over the past few months, the want has been building up.
I'm not going into my disappointments here - I have a longer article in mind for that. But there are a lot of things that are interesting, that of course only really come out when looking at new libraries, widgets, options, etc, that are available to developers. The Cocoa framework has picked up some incredible new features that just blew me away (that I probably can't share). It looks like a lot of work has gone into refining the user interface and making certain widgets more common in their look and feel. Looking at the few developer sessions that are available to me makes me realize how much the little touches add up into an ever more compelling system release and user experience. (A diatribe comparing the damage the mega-release strategy has done to users perception of software is another post for another day).
The feature I'm looking most forward to, however, is the new iDisk support. iDisk is personal storage on Apple's .Mac services. It's nice to be able to easily share documents between my three aging machines, but iDisk is slow to deal with. In Panther, there's basically an automatic/semiautomatic folder synchronization system running behind it. All of your iDisk files are kept locally, so that reads and writes happen at the same speed as all other local access. But the system can then synchronize those changes automatically or manually. This also allows for offline access, and is very tasty for working with personal college notebooks across all my machines.
I love Harper's. In fact, I finally dropped a subscription card in the mail this weekend after having bought it at the newsstand for over a year. I'm very late in coming to this magazine, I know. This is my first subscription since I let my New Yorker subscription lapse last spring. It's so hard to keep up with the weeklies sometimes. I am still looking for a second monthly to add to my subscription list, and am leaning towards The Atlantic Monthly. No commitments yet though - I just started my second issue. I like how both magazines look, and so far they read rather well. I picked up an issue of Time recently, and it was absolutely unreadable with all of its sidebars, timelines, thin paper, and abundance of ads. Ugh.
I'm still trying to figure out how I ever managed to read most of both The New Yorker and The Economist each week.
In the spirit of the great bullet series at Ars Technica, I had planned to make an entry here of similar size - a few nicely painted bullet points accurately set up for the PowerPoint Generation. Instead, the Bullet Arthritis series will tend to be shorter posts that are a tiny bit heavier on the emotion than some of the longer articles that are posted here.
I know that some people use their weblogs to only publish little bullet items, such as Scripting News (when was the last time Dave talked about scripting? Shouldn't it be called "blogging about bloggers who blog about blogging and the journalists who don't understand the bloggers who blog about journalism and blogging but don't blog themselves news?"), while others of us prefer reading and writing article-length entries most of the time. But due to the overwhelming lament-for-OpenDoc entry I have saved in an editor at work that I haven't touched for a week, I'm thinking I should lighten up for a bit. Hence - Bullet Arthritis.