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Red Hat Diaries/0048

Mac User

I have never enjoyed using a computer. I doubt if I have ever looked at things that way. I have at times had a passion for programming them, but never using them. Any use came from the fact that I was a programmer, not a user. Computers don't hold that kind of fascination for me.

But with Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), that could finally turn around, and I might find myself enjoying using a computer rather than programming it.

Applemania was everywhere tonight, as Apple pulled out all the stops in hyping this upgrade to their reincarnation of the NextStep operating system. Queues were long around Apple stores - Syd will have some pictures to publish by tomorrow, so come back here then to check them out. People brought drink coolers and had pizzas delivered to the queues so they wouldn't lose their places in line. It was a very good vibe.

When leaving this scene, and after Syd had taken all the requisite pictures, I remarked to her, 'I wonder if people ever do this for Bill Gates', and evidently I spoke too loud, for uproarious laughter broke out in the queue.

We went on to our own party with an Apple vendor for corporate clients, where things were considerably quieter. Companies are always going to take events like Jaguar with more salt, as they need time to assess whether upgrades are viable and desirable. Still, a few geeks turned up, even from a nearby 'Intel' store.

Lord of the Rings was blasting on a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display; PowerBooks and PowerMacs and iMacs lined the walls. Jaguar was running on them all.

Early reviews have claimed that the enhancements in Jaguar are too numerous to mention, and I must now admit that this was right.

Sherlock 3 was a great surprise. I've never run any Sherlock for OS X before, because I didn't like how it stored things on disk: a separate index file in each and every directory, no fun at all. But this new Sherlock - Sherlock 3 - seems to be everything but a disk searcher.

The translation feature is awesome. Want to translate your favourite phrase into Chinese? Be my guest - and the translation comes up in Chinese characters. Syd and I know a bit of Chinese (a very small bit, it is true) and we were immediately able to recognise the characters in the translation and verify that they were correct.

French to English? English to French? French, German, Spanish, Italian - a whole slew of languages.

Sherlock has a dictionary too - a right nice one, what I could see.

iChat was fun - we could send messages to one another in the local network. The interface to this program is in the same class as everything else - that is to say head and shoulders above anything else you've ever seen out there.

Jaguar is looking more and more like the worthy successor to NextStep.

Tomorrow, some pictures from an Applemania manifestation. For now, good night.

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