This is the first day of customizing Mac OS X for myself. Now that I've looked through all of the included applications it is time to see if I can make Mac OS X good enough for everyday use. The first thing to do is clear up the Dock. Remove all the applications and instead try to use a pop up folder with aliases of my applications, a la the hierarchical menus of Mac OS 9. Doesn't quite work as well as I hoped. You can't just click and then choose the application you want because clicking on a Dock item opens it. To get the hierarchical menu you need to click and hold for a couple of seconds, although at that point at least you can let go of the mouse button and choose your application rather than having to hold the mouse button down all the time. Hmm, looks like I'll have to keep a few high use applications on the Dock directly.

I've heard that Mac OS X is supposed to allocate all your memory. I have 640 MB of physical RAM, and when I run top I see that 175 MB are used and 465 MB are still free. It'll use more free memory as it needs it so I guess it's not a problem. Making aliases can still be done by Command-Option dragging to a new folder, though if you try to do it to a selected folder the cursor turns into a hand with which you can scroll the window. For some reason it seems to create a lot of aliases of one item, so you end up with alias1 to alias12 of an item. Weird. Moving stuff around I saw a Copy window a couple of times, so I guess moving an item converts to a cp followed by a rm command.

Every new user has a set of default folders created for them. Some of them are default targets for various operations (like Save). I've successfully replaced some of the folders with links to other folders on another partition, because that's where I keep all of my personal files. Next I switched my mac.com account to POP, in the mail program. That required deleting the current IMAP account and creating a POP account. I'm not going to use the Mail app yet because I don't want to download mail using two different programs. Once I'm ready to switch over full time I'll start using Nac OS X Mail.

I fooled around a bit with Mac OS X on Dave's Power Tower Pro 225 (upgraded to a G3/233). I had forgotten how slow the Public Beta had been on my old PowerBook. Makes me appreciate a bit more how comparatively fast the GUI is on my machine. I'm thinking that most people who don't have at least a G3/500 or a G4/whatever are going to be sorely disappointed with the some of the GUI slowdowns. I reiterate again that it only seems to be window resizing. I can type stuff in quite fine and the rest of the system is quite fine for me. One other annoying Finder thing is that when I open some folders under list view, the window is scrolled down so you don't see any items and have to scroll up to see the window contents.

The next task is to install the Keyspan USB Serial drivers for Mac OS X. It's still a beta but I do need it. 100 MB required, holy frak what is it installing? Darn, forgot to write down my modem settings so I can't set up the Ricochet yet. For a web browser I downloaded OmniWeb and threw away Internet Explorer. The OmniGroup, which makes OmniWeb, looks like a fine company, supporting OpenStep and Mac OS X/Server and I'll be happy to support them. Lots of configuration options, though not nearly as many filters as iCab (but iCab is Carbon whereas OmniWeb is Cocoa -- I'm trying to stick with Cocoa applications because they're cool). You can filter ad images but not scripts or other files. I'll have to test it more to see if I can actually use it everyday before I commit to it, although at this point there is only iCab as another option (no native Netscape) so I may not have a choice at all.

If I keep OmniWeb I'll pay the shareware fee next month. I'm trying to keep it at one paid upgrade per month and I've already bought a copy of Windows NT 4 to replace Virtual PC, whose Mac OS X version won't be out for a very long time. That's enough for one day. Next time I want to set up Ricochet and PacBell dialing and multiple interfaces so that I can use Ricochet at work. I upgraded the Airport Basestation at Shannon's but then I lost it when I turned off WEP. When I get it fixed I'll also need to set up an Airport config for Network. I also need to move my Netscape bookmarks either to web page or to OmniWeb and start converting my AppleWorks files to text, since I'm not planning on upgrading AppleWorks to Mac OS X.