The Brad Hole

I just installed Panther on my main desktop Mac, and so far so good. There were some minor casualties - Menu Calendar acts oddly now, and there was the usual inconvenience of having my httpd.conf blasted, but nothing major. I had to update a few haxies from Unsanity, and all appears to be well now. I say that, not having run CodeWarrior yet. Hopefully it'll still work, but I'm prepared to do a clean install of Jaguar on a clean partition for testing anyway, so that's no biggie.

That's really all to report so far. Within the next few days, I'll start experimenting with Mail.app to see if I can migrate to it from Entourage without sacrificing any usability in the process. I really like the new look of the Panther controls. The tab groups and image wells look fantastic. I'm going to try and change my habits to include Expose. It looks pretty sweet so far, and I hope it'll help when I have a bajillion windows open in the Finder and CodeWarrior and I'm searching for the right window. The new fonts in Panther are taking a little getting used to. Everything looks slightly off now. I'm sure that's just a matter of time though.

I've only got two gripes so far. The Finder has a habit of spawning metal windows even though I don't want that. Also, the new file picker dialogs no longer let you type in a path name at the bottom. For Unix system paths, I'd gotten into the habit of typing /etc/httpd/ to get to those special folders. Now it seems I have to select them manually. It's not a big deal since that's what I was used to doing under the classic MacOS.

Sometime very soon, I'll be reworking MacMAME to build under XCode now that it supports CodeWarrior-style assembly syntax. That should make a lot of folks happy.