Some holidays couldn’t come at a better time. Taking advantage of today’s relative quiet, I’ve been trying to get my (personal) e-mail under control again, with mixed results.
It turns out that Parallels e-mailed me a free upgrade to version 3.0 (I bought 2.0 at the right time, so I was eligible for Upgrade Protection) which I had neglected earlier, which probably means I won’t be shelling out for VMware just yet.
I’ve also been keeping track of the WWDC fallout (and have finally had time to watch the keynote stream), so I have a few more comments:
- Stacks are nice (especially the Downloads one), but I’d rather have them on the desktop than on the Dock. It’s just how things feel like they ought to work for me.
- CoverFlow in the Finder seems awfully gratuitous. Yeah, nutcases will soon start rambling on about how useful it would be if Apple were to ship 30” touch-screen displays and whatnot, but I’d much rather have a list view that didn’t suck.
- Mail.app seems to store To Dos and notes server-side (which is good), but no mention of how it does so seems to be available (I sure hope it works with standard IMAP servers, otherwise it’s pretty useless).
- .Mac finally has a feature worth shelling out some cash for – remote access to your machines. No mention of how it works with NAT, but I expect Apple to have that bit figured out by now (what with they shipping pretty decent wireless routers for a few years and all).
- iChat persists in not being able to do standards-compliant video conferencing. Sure, it’s fun, has basic application (or should I say content?) sharing and all, but I’d be a lot happier if it actually interoperated with something.
- Leopard Server pricing is a bit of a disappointment. If Apple thinks searching other Macs and plugging a disk to an AirPort Extreme is enough for the digital home, they’ve got another thing coming. I’d love to see a 5-user “home server” edition at a more sensible price (maybe with a different feature set like a simple mail server/archiver, central iTunes storage, etc., etc.)
- Finally, Safari for Windows vanishes when it’s maximized on a dual head setup – it apparently miscalculates the screen rectangle and maximizes just outside the right edge of my tallest screen (a bit of tinkering with
Alt-Space
and the cursor keys gets it back, but it’s annoying). Feels a bit on the crashy side for now, but I’m using it and enjoying it. Won’t run the beta on my Macs, though. At least, not just yet.
And now, to see if I can do something about some caching bugs in Yaki (and this site).
Netcabo (which insists on using transparent proxies) helpfully unplugged my service all morning (which is ironic in several ways, some of which will only be apparent in the near future), so I’m trying to fix it locally for now.
Just hit refresh on your browser now and then, OK?