Patch It Up
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 30, 2002
Apple's latest Jaguar update includes more bug fixes on its list of improvements.
At the risk of making a rotten joke, may I say that Apple has put some new spots on the Jaguar. Not long ago we had what you might call a "dot update", taking the official title of the version to Mac OS X 10.2.1. Now we have 10.2.2.
It's a lumpy download - 30MB - so if you work through a 56K modem, make sure you have plenty of coffee and a good book to while away the wait. That grumble out of the way, we must concede that the update covers huge ground and is worth the time and trouble.
Apple says that you have two ways to handle the download. Either go at it through Software Update, which you'll find by opening System Preferences - it's usually kept in the Dock - or use the stand-alone installer from www.apple.com/swupdates/. There are two versions of the installer: one which updates from 10.2.1 and the other from the original bones of the Jaguar, 10.2.
The list of improvements, bug fixes and attention to detail in this update is long and impressive. It covers Digital Hub, peripherals, networking and modem performance, address book and mail enhancements. There is improvement in the handling of certain applications, including PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat and FAXstf. Thanks to my irreverent attitude towards computer-speak, my favourite item in the update log is the bit about avoiding "a potential kernel panic situation when using three video cards and more than 512MB of RAM". That's stuff for the big boys with muscular G4s and heavy video work to do. Also, the Find function of the Finder no longer finds items in invisible folders.
In Windows file-sharing, volumes may now be browsed by their assigned names. Another improvement is the destruction of a bug that stopped some internal Apple modems responding when connecting to the internet and one that stopped some modems producing sound until several seconds after a connection had been made.
Playback of large media files has improved, while work has been done on problems with printing TIFF documents and printing more than one copy of a file to a PostScript printer from Adobe Photoshop 7.0. And good news for the CD-burning fraternity: the family of burners automatically accepted by the Mac has grown again, with the addition of the LaCie 48x24x48x drive, Sony CRX-820E, Toshiba SD-R2212 and SD-R1202, Pioneer DVR-105 and Yamaha
CDW-F1 44x24x44x.
Writing tablet
Over on the Wintel side of the hill, we are seeing new Tablet PCs from such names as Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba. Essentially they are notebook computers with touch-sensitive screens running handwriting-recognition software from Microsoft. This raises questions for Macintosh and TiBooks, because built into Mac OS X is software called Inkwell that is almost certainly the best handwriting-recognition stuff around.
By the time Steve Jobs mothballed the Newton for reasons of business efficiency, the handwriting software was good. I had a Newton MessagePad 2000 that recognised my scrawl with uncanny accuracy, and that's like identifying dinosaur footprints in the sands of the Sahara.
Tablets won't be for everyone but could be very useful for road warriors annotating files in coffee shops and so forth. Their appearance among PCs obviously raises speculation that some such system will come to Macintosh - or that there will be a completely new hand-held device using Inkwell. One notable advantage of Inkwell over the Microsoft stuff is that Inkwell can be used with any application. In Wintel, you must write into the application and then migrate the resulting text to your word processor.
But if you have a Wacom or similar tablet on your Mac you can use Inkwell to scribe text into Word, Excel, AppleWorks or even Photoshop. Combine it with Stickies and it starts to look like old home week on the desk. Hey, it's a paperless office that looks just like one full of paper. Ah, progress.
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald
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