MacWorld has come and gone. Once again I didn't go, not that I would have enjoyed it much. I'm just not into that kind of spectacle anymore. In any case, there were a couple of product announcements that are quite interesting. The PowerBook G4 is the hardware that interests me most. I've often said that I'm more interested in a transportable computer than a true notebook computer. Less weight and thinner isn't much of a plus to me, faster processor is a plus. Bigger screen is a plus. No expansion bays is a wash, since I don't use the expansion bays now. No sound-in is unfortunate, as I wouldn't want to buy another adapter just to capture sound (the cost doesn't bother me, having to lug around a bunch of little accessories does bother me).

The new G4 desktops are nice. Especially the Super DVD drive, as it's nice to be able to make both DVDs and CDROMs. Mac OS X will be released in March, and the server version a bit later. The Mac OS X Server page on the Apple site changed, to reflect the upcoming version. It looks like it will be a nice server, certainly worth the $500 for the nice front-ends to the various BSD applications.

Also, Mac OS 9.1 was released, rather quietly. I'm not too sure if I'm going to install it anytime soon. I don't have the urge to keep my system running the latest OS, especially since I'm going to eventually get Mac OS X and don't want to go through the "reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything" routine twice in one year. My system works well enough now, with the exception of sharing removable volumes. I deleted and recreated the "File Sharing" folder in Preferences, but now when I mount a removable volume I get a "can't share volume" error message. Not a big problem yet.

And as I read over the growing reports of incompatibilities and problems with OS 9.1, it just seems like upgrading is such a hard thing to do. Even something as minor as a point release still has problems. I'm starting to think that it should just be bug fixes and major releases, no minor releases with both bug fixes and new features. Systems are way too complicated to be anywhere near bug free. It's too bad.

There's this web page with instructions on getting the Tomcat server running on a Macintosh. Tomcat is the Apache Project's reference Servlet/JSP server. Basically it's a simple web server with Servlet/JSP support. Since it's a Java server, it only needs Mr J to run, though I'm worried about the speed on the Mac OS. Still, it's kind of neat and if I could just remember why I was looking for a Servlet engine I'd be tempted to install it.

I read an article discussing nVidia's entrance into the Mac market. Their stuff is supposed to be better than ATI's for low resolution (800x600) rendering, which is perfect for first-person-shooters. They also don't make their own boards, just design them. Apple makes the boards used in their computers, so presumably it's a higher profit margin than using ATI boards. I don't care as I can't really tell the difference. Or I can tell the difference in a side-by-side comparison, but if I'm using an inferior graphics board and I don't have a good one to compare it to, I'm not going to notice that I'm missing something.

iTunes is a nice piece of software. It's written by the author of SoundJam, and he wanted to improve on some concepts. Quite buggy though. But, like every other MP3 player out there, it treats playlists as arbitrary lists. I use playlists to recreate the organization of a CD, so I tend to play a half dozen playlists at a time, one after the other, which SoundApp handles just fine. But I haven't found a way to do that with iTunes. You play one playlist then have to physically start the next playlist when the previous one finishes, you can't have playlists in playlists or mark certain playlists to play right now or queue them somehow. Oh well, I guess I'll stick with SoundApp.