November 18, 2001
I finally got around to upgrading to OS X 10.1 yesterday, and wow what an improvement! Menus are faster (i.e. actually responsive!), as are screen updates. I no longer feel quite like I'm pushing at the limits of my machine, which was the impression that 10.0.x left me with.
Beyond performance, there were only a couple things keeping me from adopting OS X full-time:
- Email. Apple's email client isn't bad, but it's not really what I want. I couldn't configure it enough to my liking. Using PGP with it was a real pain, too. On OS 9, I'm using Entourage (what Outlook Express became with MS Office 2001), and I have to say that it's excellent...but I was having trouble sending and receiving mail unless I booted into OS 9. No good. With the download of Mozilla for OS X, which I can use as an email client, I'm set. I've been toying with the idea of switching to Mozilla for mail anyway. Something I might reconsider when Office X is released.
- Office suite, especially a word processor. AppleWorks sucks. I really can't stand it. Since I rarely have to use a word processor, I'm willing to use Office 2001 in Classic mode. Kiara, on the other hand, uses Word and Excel every day. Now, if there were an OS X port of OpenOffice available for us to use, I'd be all over it and I'm sure Kiara would, too. But it's not ready yet. I might give OpenOSX Office a shot — it includes such open source faves as AbiWord and Gnumeric (hmmm, I'm not sure that I'd call AbiWord a fave) — but I think I'll pass. In the meantime, we'll just have to be patient, or maybe break down and shell out the few hundred bucks for an upgrade to Office v.X.
- PGP. I could compile GPG, or maybe even PGP, if need be, but it would be pretty hard to give up the GUI. What with NAI looking to sell off PGP, I don't foresee an OS X port anytime soon. So I suffer.
Hrm, I guess the only thing holding me back was email. And performance. Now that those are squared away, more or less, I'm going with OS X full-time.
