Second day of customization. First I ran OmniWeb and visited all my standard Mac news sites. It is definitely faster than Internet Explorer (a little bit because it's not loading most ads) and the pages are just as nice as Netscape. OmniWeb has the same problem Netscape has with proxies, it's an internal preference and it doesn't look at what's set up with the Network preferences, so I'll have to keep switching manually when I travel between home and work. Auto-completion is not as nice as Netscapes, more like Internet Explorer which shows you a small pull down of choices. But I hit all my sites fine, and even our division internal site which uses a lot of JavaScript and that looked fine.

Setting up the Ricochet proved to be harder, and in fact I don't think I got it working. I think it connected with the Ricochet (since the Ricochet showed a connection) but I couldn't get any data with OmniWeb. Then again OmniWeb had some proxy preferences set so maybe it got confused. Now it doesn't seem to access the port at all. I'll work on it some more tomorrow. I just noticed that we don't have Finder Labels anymore. A shame since I actually used them to categorize the shareware I had.

Whenever you click the Finder icon to bring up all the Finder windows, it also creates a new Finder window, very small (though maybe that's the size of my last window). If you do something with that window (close it or use it to navigate), then next time you click the Finder icon it opens up yet another window. To stop that behavior (because when I go to the Finder I almost always want all the windows to come forward) I move the new Finder window somewhere else. Then when I click the Finder icon it brings up all the windows and selects that new Finder window. Not the best solution but it works.

Another application I'm trying out is OmniPDF. Once again, this will be some sort of commercial application but right now it's beta. You do have to get an updated beta license key from the Omni Group web site. It's better than Preview for viewing PDFs. Preview has awful zoom controls and you can't see the PDF index (useful for jumping to a section). In OmniPDF though I can't use the PDF index to jump anywhere -- I assume that's a bug. Other than that though I don't see enough of an advantage in OmniPDF to justify any sort of shareware fee. I won't make my final decision yet, maybe the final version will be something special.

The last application I'll take a look at is iTunes for Mac OS X. This is a half finished version without CD burning or the cool psychedelic animations window. It still insists on using a hardcoded folder (~/Documents/iTunes), ignoring whatever you set as the Music Folder Location in Preferences. I was able to replace the folder with a link to the real folder though, so it's not that bad. I've said before that iTunes is not as good for me as the venerable SoundApp. But I don't know when or if SoundApp will be converted to Carbon or Cocoa, so iTunes it is. One thing iTunes does better is volume control. In SoundApp the lowest you can go is 10% which is still too loud for some of my MP3s. iTunes uses a more sensitive slider so I can have the volume quite low, aaaahhh.

Lest you read my writings and think that I sure have a lot of complaints about Mac OS X, let me assure you that I think it's a great operating system. I read today that Linus Torvald blasted Mac OS X as having a bad interface. Who knows if his comments were taken out of context or are even true, but I'm pleased with the Mac OS X user experience. It takes some getting used to, but it does work. Aside from my oft-said problem with the speed of some window operations, it's really a pleasure to work with. I only expect that as I become more and more familiar with the GUI, I'll like it more and more. A missing manual book would really help though.