Untitled Posted October 24, 2003 at 12:00 am

It was a normal day of classes until VLSI let out at noon. From there it was a mad dash to compile a servicable report to turn in for phase two of Introduction to Databases. It was a frustrating and, at times, humiliating experience. The difficulties were largely due to having to deal with Word and all of its idiosyncrasies. I realized that Word is not the decent word processor from a large multi-national corporation I thought it was. It’s a lousy word processor from a large multi-national corporation. For reasons unknown to me, Word insisted on butchering my careful formatting whenever I would insert one document into another. This approach was necessary due to the team-based nature of this project and various group members would frequently do a portion of work on their own and then send their part back to be combined with everyone else’s. In the end we had four different Word documents with custom page numbering such that they could be printed separately and recombined. The final page count was slightly under 50 pages.

My copy of Panther had arrived by the time I got back. After retrieving the package from the leasing office, I finished the backup process that had started days earlier and proceeded to do a clean install of 10.3. Three CDs and an hour or so later I was up and running again. Initial impressions are quite good. Everything seems much more fluid and responsive now. Eye candy effects like the genie minimize effect are smoother now than I ever remember them being in Jaguar. Xbench would back this up too, seeing as my raw score rose by about 12%. A number of applications including Mail, Sherlock, and TextEdit have received minor makeovers. Expose is probably the most significant feature that 10.3 brings to the table. Its ability to automagically arrange windows for easy access and manipulation can be activated via hotkeys or hot corners, depending on how it is configured. The Command-Tab hotkey now has a graphical element, not unlike that of Windows, that I also like. So, at the $70 student pricing you get a full retail copy of Apple’s latest and greatest on three CDs plus one developer CD. Looks good to me.

I watched three more episodes of “D.N.Angel” (episodes 4-6) with Titus. Now I have to find episode 7 before we can continue.