Tread lightly on the things of earth

Woo-hoo, it’s the day of the Panther.

Apple releases Mac OS X 10.3 Panther today. And FedEx tracking tells me my copy is now waiting for me on the porch at home. Yes!

I hardly know how I could like Panther better than its predecessor Jaguar (10.2) that I’m using now, ‘cause Jaguar on a TiBook is pretty damn dreamy. But I’m game to pace the panther, baby. I can use the excitement.

2003-10-27 update:
Panther is indeed wonderful — faster, even more aesthetically pleasing to me than Jaguar (taming the horizontal pinstripes down to almost nothing pleases my eyes), and lets me keep work state through a log out.

Whither uw-imapd? But one important thing doesn’t work: I can’t get my local fink-installed uw-imapd daemon to authenticate connections. This is critical to me as I keep all my mail in local IMAP mailboxes (which I like because it lets me use any IMAP mail client I feel like using at the moment). My hunch is the authentication solution is simple but I don’t see it yet.

    later … I see sbromlin provides a partial Panther authentication
    explanation and a temporary brute-force kludge for uw-imapd.
    Works! Now I can start living in Panther.

[2003-12-02 update: Norman Gall provides a proven Panther-friendly PAM imapd solution at Installing UW imapd/pop3d on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther). Thanks, Norman.]

I like Brad’s post about switching to Linux leading him to buy — surprise — an Apple PowerBook. Agreed, Unix rules: Mac OS X on Apple hardware for hands-on use, Linux (or *BSD) on PC hardware for servers, all seamlessly and almost identically administered — and I’m happy. (Microsoft expunged is icing on the cake.)

Brad links to Mark’s article about Apple’s almost-obsessive attention to “grace and simplicity and aesthetic warmth” instead of hawking “just another suckass hunk of plastic and wire and metal.” Oh, yes. Aesthetics matter. Not to everyone, apparently and inexplicably, but to me — always.