• 800 Mhz PowerPC G4
• 15-inch LCD flat screen
• 256 Mb SDRAM
• 60 Gb HD
• SuperDrive (CD-RW, DVD-R)
• NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX
• 10/100 Base-T Ethernet
• 56K internal modem
• Apple Pro Speakers

Hooking up the computer was a cinch; speakers connect to computer, ethernet cable connects to computer, power cable connects to computer, keyboard connects to computer, mouse connects to keyboard, and we're done. Turning on the machine and booting OS X for the first time took nearly as long as the hardware installation.

The Mac had OS X 10.1.5 in the computer but OS X 10.2 in the box as a bunch of CDs, so it took about an hour to upgrade (good opportunity to have lunch!). After 10.2 was installed and rebooted, Software Update immediately asked me to download 10.2.1 (and other updated software from Apple and Microsoft) from the Apple Web Site.

Immediately used Internet Explorer to download Mozilla, Chimera, and Netscape. My initial impressions of Chimera are good, but it crashes too often, so my everyday browser will continue to be the Moz.

Opened File Sharing with strudel.math, my original iMac, running Mac OS 9.2.2. The first time I opened a connection and went into a few of my directories, strudel crashed, but upon reboot, the connection works fine and strudel has not crashed (yet).

I'll be using Terminal.app a lot. I explored Darwin (the Unix file system inside the Mac) for a bit, but I mostly use Terminal to login to the math department server.

Here's a screenshot a few hours after I bought the computer.

Cool freebies: Two blank CD-ROMs and one blank DVD-R. And, of course, two Apple stickers.

Initial impressions: I'm staying away from Mac OS 9 forever! The flat-panel display is a beauty. I still have to get used to the transition from OS 9 to OS X, but the user-interface seems completely intuitive for a person who is comfortable with OS 9. I haven't been able to switch the menu bar clock to 24-hour time; is it a bug in OS X? I also put the Simpsons Season 2 DVD to give the SuperDrive a test; works flawlessly. 256 Mb of RAM seems plenty but I think I'm still going to get another 512 Mb later.

To be included: A comment on OS X's directory structure.

As much as I don't like Microsoft, I can live with their office suite, after all Microsoft Word and Excel are originally Macintosh products. My work requires Office, so the Department of Mathematics paid for my copy (only Cdn$110 for the university license). Other than the Aqua eye candy, Excel v.X behaves just like Excel 98. Worse, the fonts that are displayed on screen in all documents are not anti-aliased. I guess I haven't taken advantages of the new features yet.

Paul Gries came by to visit. He has a PowerBook G3 running OS X 10.1. He enjoyed playing with my Mac, but he likes the dock at the left on the screen. I think I'll keep the dock at the bottom. The Department of Computer Science is buying him a PowerBook G4 in the near future. At the moment, though, I think he's jealous.

I can't select Mozilla as my default browser! For some reason, it always switches back to Internet Explorer! Aaugh!

The fact that any document can be saved into PDF (without needing a full version of Adobe Acrobat) is just awesome.

A comment on iCal will appear later.

If you are obsessed with fonts, and you want all your apps with the lovely Quartz layer so that all fonts are anti-aliased (including your Carbon apps), you need to get Silk. Microsoft Office now looks great!

As much as I like Apple's optical no-button mouse, I still like my Wacom Graphire. After downloading the right drivers and plugging in my Wacom, now I can use the pen to draw stuff. OS X also does handwriting recognition, which is really cool. (Screenshot to come.)

Despite the "60 Gb" hard drive, I only have 47 Gb left! The reason? Actually, the hard drive contains 60 billion bytes, which is really is 55 Gb. The iMac contains full installations of both OS X and OS 9 which takes up 8 Gb. This means that there are tons of drivers that I probably will never touch. But it's also got international fonts for different languages, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese [screenshot].

Wow, I was able to print directly from my Mac to any of the two printers the math department has installed for coxeter, our departmental server. I don't think this is supposed to be allowed; I'm going to be a nice guy and ask our system administrator about this.

I didn't think I needed to download the Windows Media Player, but BMW Films released a new season of short films. The first film, Hostage, is directed by John Woo! You can save the entire 9 minute video, and it's only 66 Mb (at 200 Kb/sec, it doesn't take long to download).

I needed to plot a mathematical function, but I didn't feel like getting up and walking two steps to strudel to run Graphing Calculator, so I decided to download XonX/XDarwin and run xmaple on the math department machine. Installation was a breeze, and it works great. (Screenshots to come.)

I fixed the 24-hour clock problem! It turns out I needed to fix the International System Preferences so that the Region is set to Custom.

IP Printing: Yep, it turns out that I'm not supposed to be able to print directly to the Math Department printers from my iMac. Apparently, a fix is in the future so that the printers can only print from coxeter's print server. <SARCASM> Nice going, Joel. </SARCASM>

Windows Media Player uses quite a bit of CPU power; the video stalled when my desktop background changed (which it does every five minutes). Maybe I should get my 512 Mb RAM sooner!

The operating system has not crashed yet.

The latest milestone release of Chimera 0.6 seems to be much improved over the previous version in stability. I've used it for a day and so far I haven't experienced any crashes yet.

Just Released: New PowerBook G4s (with SuperDrive) and iBooks.

First Chimera 0.6 crash! Thankfully, 0.6 is TalkBack-enabled which sends crash data back to the Mozilla organization.

Default Web Browser problem fixed! According to Mac OS X Hints, quit all applications, delete ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.*, change the default web browser in System Preferences, and restart the machine. Let's hope this problem is fixed in OS X 10.2.2, which is rumoured to come out soon.

Well, I had to do it. I bought myself an extra 512 Mb of RAM for Cdn$279. A pretty good deal considering many authorized Apple stores are selling it for $299. Installation took about 10 minutes and it works great. Paul Gries is still jealous.

Next major imminent purchase? The iPod (but I'll wait until at least mid-January in case Steve Jobs announces new iPods at Macworld SF).

Ed Leung has put up pictures of his trip to Italy on my machine.

Well, the updates are less frequent; I've definitely comfortable with the setup I have with my iMac. Having owned the new iMac for over month (has it been that long already?) Mac OS X still hasn't crashed, although I know about some nasty ways to cause kernel panics. Several programs have crashed occasionally (MS Office, Real One beta, even QuickTime 6).

Three films from BMW Films are available for download. Regardless of where you live, choose USA as your country; you can then download the films in QuickTime (each about 100 Mb in size, which takes only a few minutes if you can get over 500 Kb/sec).

Despite my knowledge of the Mac and Unix, I'm still pondering whether to get David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. I think I'll take a look at it; after all, I've got a $5 Indigo coupon to use.

Since the last update, I bought myself a 20 Gig iPod. Man, I love it.

Although Chimera will still be my browser of choice, there are some nice reasons why Safari could be the browser of the future (even if it doesn't have tabbed browsing). One reason which is not mentioned is how web pages with Unicode text encoding are displayed properly. To illustrate, here is a screenshot (524 Kb PNG). Chimera and Mozilla is unable to display this page properly with the Default Text Encoding setting.

What you see on the screenshot:

• On the menubar:
  • Net Monitor 2.9b8
  • Meteorologist 1.2.1
• On the desktop:
  • Terminal
  • Safari (Demetallifized) displaying Google
  • xmaple (X11) running on a different server
  • QuickTime 6 (with a lovely picture of Nadine and Sage)
  • Firewire-mounted iPod. It's an external hard drive!
• On the dock:
  • Finder
  • Chimera
  • Safari
  • Terminal
  • iTunes
  • Sherlock
  • ChimeraKnight
  • QuickTime 6
  • Graphic Converter
  • System Preferences
  • X11
  • Home Directory
  • Applications Directory
  • X11 xterm (Minimized)
  • iTunes (Minimized)

Apple introduced two new PowerBooks, the aforementioned Safari web browser, Keynote (Apple's PowerPoint killer), and iLife (iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, iDVD 3). I'm disappointed that the new versions of iPhoto and iMovie are arriving a week late, but I'm certainly looking forward to downloading these programs later this week.