Today I installed iMovie for Mac OS X. Can't tell if it's the full application but it does look that way. It's version 2.1 and you can get it from Apple (via the iDisk) and not pay the $50 I paid for iMovie 2.0. Not that it really matters all that much to me because it is a nice application that everyone should have. When starting up it's the only application I've seen that takes over the window, hiding the Dock (which you can bring up by cursoring to the bottom of the screen). It complained about not finding some QuickTime Firewire driver, which I hope gets fixed in the update. iMovie is still too complicated for me so I still need to get a book on iMovie.

Next up is Fire, a multi-protocol instant messanging client. It doesn't have AOL AIM support because AOL keeps blocking every client but their own out, you'd think contrary to the FCC stipulation for allowing the AOL-Time Warner merger. But actually they can keep doing that. The stipulation is that they have to open up their AIM network if they decide to sell AIM services. Since it is still free, AOL can keep being anti-competitive. It surprises me that they haven't done the same with ICQ, which they bought a while ago.

I downloaded Fire from Epicware and unzipped the file, but the resulting disk image wasn't recognized by Disk Copy. Then I got another disk image, this one from iDisk and that mounted ok. Once again installation is easy, a mere drag- and-drop operation and we're in business. Fire supports ICQ, irc, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo Messenger. I only have an ICQ account so I entered the info there and it logged in fine. I still need to add my friends and probably have to be validated again. Fire keeps logfiles and has some message filtering, but not as much as ICQ (and even ICQ is a bit lacking). But it does look quite nice under Mac OS X.

For an ftp client I'm using NetFinder, since I already paid the shareware fee a long time ago. It's a Carbon application and still very buggy. I couldn't get any bookmarks saved and it crashed a couple of times. Another potential ftp client, this one Cocoa, is iFTP ($30). This one has a "standard" ftp interface: two windows, local and remote. Not saying that that's a bad way of doing things, but I appreciate NetFinder's interface with multiple windows that behave mostly like the Finder we all know and love. iFTP is still beta and it crashed once while I was editing a file. Which brings up a cool feature of iFTP, you can select a file and click View or Edit to look at the file. It brings up the default text or image application and when you save it auto- uploads the file. NetFinder has a similar feature that only works with BBEdit, probably because that's one application that sends NetFinder an event when it saves the file.

The last thing I wanted to do was install GIMP, and it beats me if it stands for anything. It's an image editor, very much like Photoshop in power, that runs on X Windows. People have gotten GIMP 1.2.1 running on Mac OS X, but after looking at the instructions I don't think I'll be doing that. You have to install XFree86 and run it rootless and update a couple of libraries. I'll wait until the folks at MacGIMP fix it so that it's a friendlier application.

I was also thinking of installing OpenSSH, since ssh doesn't come installed in Mac OS X (or at least I don't think so). But it would only be the required libraries and the ssh command line utility. I hear that Apple will include ssh in the upcoming Mac OS X update, so I'll wait until then. I'm starting to realize that I'm really installing anything that requires going to the command line or that runs in Terminal. I really have to get a book on BSD so I have better idea of how to administer it if I have to. I'll at least need to do it to customize Apache and Sendmail and named.

The last thing to mention is that I'm now using OmniWeb to edit my web pages. It's not as nice as BBEdit and the macros I had set of course I don't have anymore. But it is possible and I'm slowly getting closer and closer to not having to use my Mac OS 9 environment for daily work. Tomorrow I will finish setting up Fire, look for an application or two to replace NotePad and the calendar/task list functions of Palm Desktop, and maybe try out a couple of Mac OS X games.