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PC Mag Gives Panther 5-Star Rating
Cycline3 writes "The subject says it all. PC Mag gave the big black cat a five-out-of-five star rating. I really like Panther, but I never would have imagined that this would happen. Pretty cool. PC users take note!"
Sorry- I should have been more specific. I meant third-party cases and motherboards, and the like
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
How about webcams? It seems Logitech and Orange Micro are the only ones that support theirs on the Mac.
I disagree. The find function is nice, but from the most exciting thing about Preview is that it now knows about bookmarks in PDFs, making it very easy to navigate large PDFs quickly. I write a lot using LaTeX (TeXShop is a very nice app for this, by the way) , and regularly deal with documents in the tens or hundreds of pages range. Being able to jump to a specific section quickly makes my life a lot easier. I've always been able to do this with Acrobat Reader, but now I can do so from preview.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The new interface functions are really just icing on the cake (not that icing is unwelcome). Panther fixes a number of restrictions facing developers and offers some new widgets. For example, 10.3 allows custom cursors larger than 16 x 16 pixels. There is a new rotary slider control, a new webview, and so on.
These are features in Panther that will only become apparent as developers release products that use them. By buying Panther you're getting more than is immediately apparent.
It's a historical accident. When the IBM PC came out, everyone just started using "PC" to mean "IBM PC." (In fact, didn't IBM try to trademark the name?) When the clones hit, "IBM-compatible" faded fairly quickly, to be replaced by "PC-compatible" or just "PC" -- which of course meant a machine with an Intel (or compatible) processor running MS-DOS. This usage has survived into the Windows era. I don't like it either, but I suspect it's too late to do anything about it.
Microsoft, of course, has proven far more successful than IBM at taking names that should be generic and turning them into trademarks: Windows, Word, SQL Server, etc. Hell, even "Microsoft" itself is about as generic a name for a software company as I can think of.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I have long hated Macs but as of yesterday, I now own a 15" alum Powerbook.
I absolutely love this thing and while I still am an admin on a Windows network here at work, I think I am done with Windows on my own.
I have increasing problems with Windows and having increasingly fewer reasons to hate Macs.
As of OS X 10.3 and Xcode, I now have very few reasons to dislike it.
The only few gripes that I have right now are:
1) The aluminum keyboard feels like dragging my nails on a chalkboard if my nails (esp thumb) hit the hey instead of flesh.
2) The integrated Google search doesn't have buttons that let me search directly to images and/or discussions, and when the search comes up, there aren't buttons of the words that I just searched for allowing me to search within that document.
3) Many web pages totally break using Safari - I am going to debug one page that I use all of the time and send the fixes (JavaScript) to the person that maintains it since it is sommething I use daily when analyzing stock charts (well, nightly).
4) The resolution on this laptop isn't so great - but the screen does look fantastic.
5) I'm not sure that my backlit keyboard works. It is turned on and no matter what changes I make via F9/F10, I still see no backlighting. Not a huge deal, but still a gripe.
6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.
7) I wish Komodo 2.5 was ported to Mac OS X 10.3 - I really like the way that it deals with Perl.
8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.
9) The single mouse button works if you press in the center, but not if you get it off to one side - which is usually where my thumb is (perhaps out of habit).
10) I'm still getting used to the kepay layout for shortcuts - fortunately my misstrokes have yet to do anyuthing harmful.
11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.
12) The iChat thing isn't as configurable as I had hoped. I hear there is another thing out there, I will test it out in a bit.
But the things I LOVE are:
1) Its weight - this thing is so light and thin. The battery is tiny and WOW 4+ hours on a charge.
2) The wireless is fast and VERY easy to setup (no real setup, just turn it on).
4) Mail app - this thing is great. Nice looking and all the features I want. I love it.
5) Snappy! Everything is quick on it.
6) Feels very stable.
7) FreeBSD command line - nuff said there.
8) Xcode is cool.
There is a ton that I have yet to figure out yet, but I really like it so far.
I am going to try to get OpenOffice on here and Xemacs and then I think I should be all set after I try to bring over my documents from my pc laptop.
I am also going to benchmark this laptop against my other one and my stateside server to see how it performs - initially will just be running Perl scripts that I use a lot.
My previous laptop was an Athlon 4 (the mobile chip) 1G, and the server is an Athlon XP 2200+.
The laptop gets warmer than I had hoped - just to the edge of comfort, if not just over - but it doesn't melt any part of it like my pc laptop is doing now (its heatsink fan is broken - hence why I got a new laptop, will then take my time to fix that one).
Anyway - I love it - any suggestions from old pro Mac users would be highly welcome as I look for cool new things for my new shiny toy.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.