The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

Mac OS X 10.2 arrived in my mailbox this weekend and I have been busily testing it on my TiBook DVI. Quartz Extreme does make a huge difference. Where my CPU Monitor had previously been showing maximum use just opening a Finder window, now it leaps up briefly and then drops down to a tiny line, even when I drag the window around.

The Dock occasionally leaves visual artifacts on the screen, which is annoying as hell.

Battery life is a full hour shorter than under OS 9, which is similar to previous versions of OS X.

As some have reported, the version of the Developer Tools that comes with Jaguar is seriously flawed -- Project Builder and Interface Builder in particular cause crashes and result in unusable applications. There is a Developer Tools update online that fixes all of the obvious problems.

The Energy Saver does not automatically switch between battery and powered settings on my TiBook, so I have to remember to change settings whenever I pull the plug.

I used the "update" feature of the installer instead of doing a clean install of OS X 10.2. I performed a custom installation without the international options or drivers for printers that I don't use. The installation took 50 minutes. It went very smoothly and apparently preserved all of my settings except for iTunes, which lost all of my playlists. iTunes 3 would not import playlists from any previous version, so I was forced to recreate all of my playlists from scratch -- an incredibly tedious task. The preferences for iTunes were also reset, which caused iTunes to attempt to copy my entire 20 gig folder of (perfectly legal copies of music that I already own) mp3 files from my file server to my local user folder. Luckily, I realized what was going on a caught it before it filled up my hard drive with duplicates.

An additional problem with iTunes 3: it defaults to the same uninformative list-view every time that I create a new playlist, which forces me to change my view-settings for each and every playlist in order to see such important information as track number and EQ setting. The appropriate behavior for a new playlist would be for it to inherit the behavior of its parent -- that is, each new playlist should have the same view-settings as are used when viewing the main library. This is one of those inevitably stupid things that Apple foists upon us every time that they release a new i-App. With iTunes 3, they are promoting their rating-system and play-count views, and so they set iTunes 3 to always show that information rather than letting the user create a global setting.

More on OS X 10.2 will follow as I install updated versions of my favorite OS X patches and Dock replacements.