Let's take a break from writing about Mac OS X to announce that once again I'm caught up with my journal writing. Months of hard work and sacrifice to make up the 30-odd entries that I was behind have finally paid off. Sure, I'm way behind on work and my personal and everything else, but at least I'm caught up here. I figure with Mac OS X and the CRS skits, plus the regular Erzo and Star Trek entries, I should be able to keep up. Although it's always been the willingness to write rather than not having any material to write about.

On to little tidbits. Let's see... Sun Micro is not going to make a version of Star Office for Mac OS X. At least they're allowing OpenOffice.org do a port of the open parts of Star Office to Mac OS X. It'd be nice to have an office product not made by Microsoft yet can at least sort of read Microsoft files. AppleWorks is a bit too low end for many people and besides, MacLink Plus often fails at translating the formatting correctly.

The latest two controversies regarding Mac OS X are the lack of support for file type and creator codes for new files, and moving the OS to another partition. The second should be obvious: this is Unix, you *do not* just drag the system and other folders to another partition and expect it to work. The easiest solution seems to be to use Apple Software Restore, which allows you to copy a Unix partition to another partition.

As for the first complaint, get over it people. As long as it works, it shouldn't matter. What breaks is that a file type associates with an application, you can't associate individual files to an application (personally, I've found that to be both a blessing and a curse). You also have to have a file extension in the file name, which means you can change the file type easily by changing the file name (not necessarily a bad thing). Creator/Type codes don't work on a flat file system without ugly hacks (like hidden resource folders). HFS+ is not the only file system that Mac OS X works on. Mac OS X deals with resource forks just fine for existing files.

I do see problems trying to use files saved in Mac OS X under Mac OS 9. The files are all blank documents that you can't double-click at all (although that should work if you have the extension mapped in the Internet Control Panel). Another problem I've seen is that OmniWeb and TextEdit (and probably other applications) use linefeeds as line separators. Makes sense since it's Unix, but it does mean that the files look like crap outside of BBEdit, which auto-detects line ending format.

Have I mentioned today that Carbon apps look like crap under Mac OS X (mostly because Mac OS X apps look so good)? I'd almost resort to using Terminal rather than Carbon apps, that's how jarring they look under Aqua. Another problem someone brought up is that you can't empty the trash completely if there are files there that you don't own. Which makes sense again, this is a Unix system and chances are those files don't have other:delete permission. Unfortunately the only workaround is to go into Terminal and change the file permission or ownership, then delete the files. It'd be nice if the Empty Trash command asked for an Administrator password if necessary. I haven't run into the problem, but then again I haven't tried to trash system files.

Here's a story. Microsoft (which somehow keeps claiming it's not monopolistic) is going to hobble MP3s in Windows XP. It's included MP3 encoder software (which, granted, wasn't present at all in previous versions of Windows) will only encode up to 56 kbps streams. Good enough for me if it's a good encoder, though somehow I doubt it will be. Not only that, they're going to make sure that other MP3 encoders don't work with Windows XP, at least until people find a way around the "new features." The Microsoft encoder *will* encode Windows Media Audio files just fine.

And this is what happens when you have a monopoly. You leverage it and people take notice. Not that I think ripping CDs and passing the MP3s around is legally or morally right, but it is an open standard and Microsoft and other companies want to squash in favor of their own standards. RealNetwork's argument is that their audio encoders are significantly better. Granted. You know what? Technology advances. A year from now Real's encoding will be outdated, probably superceded by MP3+ or whatever the researchers come up with. Having an open standard is more important than a better proprietary standard.