Neato thing: Search Google Service. With a keystroke combo, you can search selected text in Google; it opens your default browser. Doesn't work in Microsoft apps, but just fine for all Cocoa and some Carbon apps.

"Uses your 3D hardware for no apparent reason!"

I like the way this guy thinks, and I find myself opening GLTerm as often as Terminal for the same tasks. I won't argue the relative merits other than to say that I do fine GLTerm to be much faster but I prefer Andale Mono in Terminal. I think you should try them both out for yourself. GLTerm is shareware, 10 bucks I think.

Also, I've discovered a Firewire 2x DVD-R, 1x DVD-RW, and CD-RW for $500USD!! One of these days...

Apple's list of OS X software is pretty darn handy.

I struggle with keeping the AppleScript menulet in the menu bar. It disappears sporadically after a restart.

My toes are cold. Mm.

Whoa. Blogger struggles with Opera 6 on Win2K. This <textarea> is really small and crammed into the upper left-hand corner of the total available space it ought to be using. Odd.

I can't believe myself sometimes. I posted a little while back about commonly used apps under OS X I really like and find interesting and I neglected to mention Fink. Fink is a Unix-based software porting and packaging engine modeled on Debian GNU/Linux's "apt" package system. Version 0.3.2a just got released recently, with new features and bugfixes, as well as new updated software packages. If you're used to Unix, or want to indulge the anti-social geeky side of your iPersona, check it out.

For a company that prides itself on an intuitive interface, placing the setting that switches between a standard and a military 24 hour clock under "International" is pretty unintuitive. Especially when that option was under Date & Time in Classic. Grr.

But I quibble. My transition has been rather smooth. Or rather, forced migration. I'm starting to see support and development drop for Classic applications. (Opera's recent release of the final version for Classic sounds pretty ominous).

And I'd be all right switching over, except stinky things like this keep popping up: I can't watch my Rushmore DVD on my Lombard because the OS X DVD player doesn't like my old, creaky machine. A development ploy to force me to get a G4 eventually? I wouldn't be surprised if more and more applications will have these kinds of limitations.

But, as my Amazing Internet Machine, it's faaaaaantastic. I agree with Dan that Fire is awesome. Too bad no one talks to me online anymore except Big Brains Jenson.

Dan informs me that for those times that I lose mouse control with MacMAME that I can use Universal Access in System Preferences to assign keystrokes to just about anything. rock.

Along with dan, I'm posting some of my more used apps under OSX:

Eudora is a pretty good alternative to Entourage but it's still in beta.

The E language works under OSX now.

Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer beta2. This is the bone thrown at us while Windows users get to play the full version.

Snak: a pretty damn good irc client.

HP48: HP released the ROM to this modern class to the public, and an emulator is available under the GPL

Omniweb: a good alternative to Internet Exploder

Quake 3 Both Arena and Team Arena have been played a lot lately.

MacMAME has been giving me lots of trouble but I'm sure things will be fixed soon enough

Mr. Moniz here,

I thought I might mention some apps I've discovered since switching over to OS X that I've been thoroughly enjoying (I'll leave my migration rant for another time).

Most recently, breve is a neato-keen donationware Cocoa simulation lab for alife, genetic algorithms, and the like which makes ample and very nice use of OpenGL. It's fully hackable with it's built-in object-oriented simulation language, "steve" (no relation to Mr. Jenson), which takes most of it's cues from Objective C. There's also a plug-in API which you can download if you want to hack breve plug-ins in Objective C itself (with Apple's OS X Developer Tools).

And now, in no particular order...

F-Script is a neato-keen freeware open source Cocoa scripting environment for OS X that takes it's cues from Smalltalk and array-oriented languages such as APL. It allows you to dynamically design apps using Cocoa objects but through a Smalltalk/APL hybrid scripting language (although, truth be told, it's mostly Smalltalk-ish with bits of APL essence thrown in where it helps out, and since there's no real APL character set nastiness one could even say it's more like bits of J essence). Check out the new FScripter tool as well.

TeXShop is a Cocoa TeX/LaTeX editor and previewer that makes use of teTeX and the Quartz DisplayPDF layer to go directly to PDF.

Fire is a freeware open source Cocoa multiprotocol client for many instant messaging services including AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, and Jabber.

And, finally, for no particular reason,

Graph-O-Matic is a shareware Cocoa 2D and 3D graphing calculator by the maker of breve with extensive OpenGL support.

My biggest complaint about OSX is how often I find myself rebooting: Everytime I play a quick game on MacMAME, I lose my mouse cursor and have to reboot. Also, everytime I play an OpenGL game (like Wolfenstein or Quake3),I have to reboot if I wish to play another OpenGL game else I get an error: "Cannot initialize OpenGL".

Mail.app really seems to hate my IMAP server but I get the impression that Mail.app is rapidly changing. Mail.app's IMAP support is pretty young.

XEmacs refuses to read my source as anything but read-only so I use Project Builder's code editor for everything. PB is actually pretty pleasant and much, much faster than JBuilder ever was for the feature-set I need. I guess that it'll be 3-6 months until a full port of XEmacs 21 is ready for Aqua.

the weekend before christmas, I picked up a g4 powerbook and switched to OSX. It's two weeks later and it dawned on me that blogging my experiences might be useful to somebody.