Apple announced OS X.4 “Tiger” for April, 29th. Nice, so don’t have to get used to 10.3. Wait.. errr.. the Up-To-Date Program only applies to boxes bought on or after April, 12th, I ordered my Powerbook on april 6th. Tough shit.

Well, “This happens often and yet, Ricky doesn’t know why.”

It’s not like I’m not used to such things..

Safari really has a stability problem here. It crashes every now and then when visiting a site and It can’t be reproduced by visiting that same site again. Strange enough. Konqi is a lot more reliable, if it crashes on one site it will most likely do so when visiting that site again .

When trying to upload something to FTP, I hit <command> + <k> and easy enough, I’ve been asked for the login data and my ftp-server was accessible via Finder’s side panel. Unfortunately I had no write access. A quick search revealed that Finder indeed seems to lack the ability to do so. Bad luck, really. GPL’d Cyberduck works fine but having a external app for my very basic FTP needs.. oh, the Help states that Safari can do it.. no, it just opens Finder. nah..

There has been quite some feedback on the First impressions OS X made, more to find on OS news. Fish to some of those there, it’s even free! Speaking of which, it’s all about choice, isn’t it?

Anyhow, I’m crawling through the suggestions and hints just now. Thanks! Audio Recorder just seems to be what I’ve been looking for. Audacity is a bit oversized and the others only record to somewhat obscure formats. Well, my application needs are probably satisfied by now..

And speaking about GNU/Linux and broadcum, err com, I also have a D-Link DWL-122 stick (Prism2) here, should work just fine. 11mbits, though. Petition, anyone?

I’ve also been recommended MarsEdit over ecto. I’m writing this entry using MarsEdit but I’m just much more comfortable with ecto. There’s no simple switching between WYSIWYG and html, spell-checking doesn’t seem to work properly and formating is much more easier using ecto. Eventually I copy & pasted this into ecto

Thanks again for all the comments, I really appreciate it.

I’m playing with my PowerBook for about two days now and even though not being too tolerant when it comes to operating systems, I have to admit that OS X itself is pretty appealing. It has that Just Works(tm)-touch I sometimes miss with GNU/Linux. I’m afraid there’s probably not too much to write about, it’s nearly too simple and I found my way around pretty fast.

Finder itself is a really neat thing once you get used to it and so is the Dock. Once you found out how it works and how to find your applications quickly using Exposé, it’s very comfortable even without virtual desktops. This is nothing too new for I don’t use the kicker’s taskbar with KDE either. Instead I installed myself komposé, an Exposé clone which is not as nice or fast (no support for x.org’s new features, yet) but still works. Installing software also is a piece of cake. Disk Image. Demonstration closed.

Hooking up the Airport Extreme card to my network was somewhat confusing due to simplicity. I didn’t find anything to select the encryption method I use, enter four different keys or any other information I have to put somewhere when setting up a wireless device on other operating systems. After realizing that the request password was in fact the key and entering IP, gateway and DNS (no DHCP for me, please), I had access to my network. Easy.

With my new found connectivity Safari was the next stop. It’s a nice little browser and for using KHTML, rendering is as expected but a little bit slow. The search-box only supports google but I’m used to Konqueror’s Web Shortcuts anyway. Sogudi adds that functionality. Take a look at Pimp my Safari. Awful name but a useful site nonetheless. Also seems pretty fresh, so there might more to expect. Safari is the only application that crashed during the last two days. Twice.

I tried to mount some NFS-shares for easy data exchange and after crawling the web for appropriate information I went with a description explaing how to configure Mac OS X as an NFS Client utilizing the NetInfo manager. This worked nicely although the mounted shares did not show up in Finder’s sidebar. Dragging them there doesn’t work. Mounting via <command>+<k> works as expected. Dragging the mounted shares into the user’s start objects will make them available automagically after a reboot. File sharing also worked vice versa. Simply enabling Windows Sharing made my user’s home directory accessible with KDE’s SMB-KIO-slave.

I also have an external USB/Firewire HDD for non-networked storage purposes. It’s ext3 formated but integrates nicely into OS X using ext2fsx, an ext2 filesystem driver.

When it comes to multimedia formats I’m used to playback just about anything using mplayer or xine. iTunes doesn’t. It doesn’t even support Ogg Vorbis. After installing the Ogg Vorbis component for QuickTime, iTunes played ogg encoded files but still failed on ogg streams. After some more searching I installed Whamb, which is capable of playing ogg streams and even gets an acceptable look with the iTunes 4 skin.
Same for video. I have a lot of ogm files (xvid/ogg) here, QuickTime somehow doesn’t know what to do with them. Installing the XviD QuickTime Component didn’t help it but Installing MPlayer OS X solved the problem. Some apps just work, no matter which OS. I still didn’t find a tiny (and free) app to record from the PowerBook’s internal mic, though.

While speaking of Applications: I like to keep track of various system informations like CPU, memory and bandwidth usage. Under GNU/Linux I use simple karamba-themes or torsmo, for OS X it seems to be MenuMeters which is very customizable and resides in the menubar. Speaking the menubar, super OS X menubar items lists dozens of of them. Of course everyone also needs an office suite. After deleting the pre-installed Microsoft Office demos, I got myself NeoOfice/J, a Java port of OpenOffice.org. It doesn’t adopt to OS X’ style and isn’t very responsive, but it will do it’s job. If OOo 2 is out for OS X, I’ll probably switch.

Coming from a *nix derivative, I’m also curious about the inner workings behind OS X’ shiny GUI. Until now I only took a short look while getting my NFS shares mounted. It does look familiar, more command-line fiddling is to come – iTerm is just waiting for installation.
Just in case something comes up that I can’t resolve or live with, I took a quick look at Fink. I installed some applications to see how it works but eventually removed it. I want to stay native, at least for a while. Speaking of which, I downloaded the PPC live cd of the just released Ubuntu 5.04. I had to pass some startup parameters and after coming up the trackpad didn’t work. I didn’t look into this yet, this was a only quick test anyway. If I install GNU/Linux on my powerbook, which will happen eventually, it will of course be Debian PPC .

Well, enough scribbling of someone who has been using this system for barely two days. Both, PowerBook and OS X made quite an impression here. It _is_ simple. It is fun to use. The general performance is not as snappy and responsive as Debian/KDE 3.4 on my P4 2.4GHz XPC but it’s not exactly slow and I guess with all that eye-candy I have to compromise (not that KDE would look any worse here). I guess there will be a lot more entries covering my new Mac..

Backslash, anyone? Ok, after playing around with my new PB, there’s one thing that bothers me: Keyboard labeling. Compared quickly to my logitech keyboard, the de-layout keyboard misses the following keys (besides the multimedia keys, of course): \ {} [] ~ |. And yes, I actually use them on a regulary basis!

Well, anyway, pressing a bunch of key-combos (never liked beat-em-ups for exactly that reason!) revealed the following:

<shift>+<alt>+<7> = \
<alt>+<8> = {
<alt>+<9> = }
<alt>+<5> = [
<alt>+<6> = ]
<alt>+<7> = |
<alt>+<n> = ~

There are more oddities to that keyboard, but then again, it’s a new architecture. I’ll get used to it eventually.

One a sidenote, although using it all the time, I still find myself amazed when looking up things at Wikipedia. It even has a pretty extensive entry for Double Dragon. This was the only exception on beat-em-ups. I played that like crazy with a friend on my Atari ST, about 14(!) years ago. Fsck! Seems I’m finally getting old..