I finally made the switch to Panther (OS X 10.3), which has been sitting on my shelf for a month, waiting for a fee moment. So far it is treating me well, with a few quirks.

It seems zippier (and I haven’t add the new 512M of RAM which finally arrived from Crucial), but then I haven’t been pushing it yet. (when I start running Eclipse I’ll get back to you)

With the exception of the new icon hilighting, I hate the new Finder. Tog addresses this, “Microsoft also has huge, wasteful, low-density windows. They are also horrible, and Apple need not emulate them.”

Expose has not yet entered my work flow, but it seems cool. I also get the feeling that as I become more attached to it, I’ll start using tabs less and less, as tabbed windows are much harder to scan for in Expose. I backed up my media to CDs, checked my docs, and projs folders into CVS, and did an ‘Archive and Install’.

LaunchBar has entered my flow, and is critical. Computers aren’t worth using without it, the new 3.3beta3 adds “improved Panther compatibility”, so I installed it.

XChat-Aqua has a hiccup where the private message alert icon isn’t going away. (ooh, there is a new version [0.12.0] I should download)

The Cmd-Tab is functional, fast, and beautiful. The crisp, large icons (I’m only running a handful of apps) are very pleasing.

I’m having to re-install all my Perl modules (probably because of the ‘Archive and Install’, but they are installing relatively smoothly.

I also had to do a fink upgrade. Fink didn’t want to upgrade because the latest packaged version of jed requires x11. I could have installed jed-nox, but I took this opportunity to get Apple’s X11 working. Then I installed jed-nox, because its better :)

PEAR is broken in Apple’s default PHP (they failed to include System.php). curl http://go-pear.org/ | sudo php fixed that. However PHP was segfaulting for reasons unknown, so I switched back to Marc Liyanage’s PHP for OSX.

BBedit’s “Go” command when from the “File Open” dialog went away, and I can’t get it back. It never worked great, but it worked. I’m becoming less and less enchanted with BBedit. I should really take another stab at getting Nedit working.

Had to re-setup my stunnels. I use SSLEnabler.