Didn't get much of a chance today to figure out Java, but I did get a lot of work done. In any case, today we'll start out with X-Assist, by Peter Li, one of the developers of NetFinder. X-Assist tries to restore some of the Mac OS 9 features that were removed in Mac OS X. It's an application that puts up a task menu on the right side of the menu bar, showing the current application. You can click on it and it shows you a list of the running applications, it also has a shortcut menu with entries for recent applications, documents, and servers, much like Apple Menu Items. And like AMI, you can also set up a folder structure where you can put aliases.

X-Assist supports plug-ins, the two included ones play MP3s and change the volume. The last thing X-Assist does is that if you click on an application's window, it brings to the front all of the application's windows. Mac OS X's individual window behavior can be an advantage if you work with two different applications, but it does take some getting used to. What would be better is if applications were smarter so that when you click on a document window it also brings to the front other windows associated with the document.

There are still few bugs in X-Assist, though it's a good initial version. You can click on it to bring up its menu, but it's not a regular menu in that you can go to the other menus and activate them while the X-Assist menu stays pulled down. In fact, the X-Assist menu stays down until you click on it or until you press a key. The other bug is that the hierarchical menus don't support folder aliases. Too bad. At least I have a better application launcher than the Mac OS X Dock, though I don't have a document launcher.

The next application is a game called JewelToy. You start out with an 8x8 grid semi-randomly to randomly filled six objects. You can click on two adjacent objects to switch them, but it only works if by doing so you create a row of at least three of the same objects, at which point the row is removed and the objects move down to fill space, new objects falling down from the top. There is also a timer to make things interesting. JewelToy is a colorful game that requires a bit of thinking ahead, though I played my first game without looking ahead and did ok. It's the kind of simple game that's fun to play and doesn't require too much investment in time.

Moving on, we have Goldberg, a little freeware image viewer and manipulator. Basically it uses the underlying QuickTime layer to do most everything. It can read lots of file formats plus movies and even PDF files. You can crop, copy, and rotate the picture. Last but not least is you can apply one of about a dozen QuickTime effects to the picture, like changing the colors, sharpening, brightness, and blur. Unfortunately, there are no resize picture options, which is the main feature that I really need. Oh well, it's still a nice little program.

Our last application for today is a graphical program called Cellular. It has several simulations: 2d-cellular automata with a really big grid; Mandelbrot set which is not that exciting but it does draw instantly; 2-d galaxies which looks to be a gravity simulator; and the world of Wator which is like cellular automata. That's all there is too it. It's colorful and fast and reminds me of the Mandelbrot program I ran on my IIsi, which was abysmally slow until I got the FPU co-processor, and then it was merely slow. Wow, computing power sure has advanced.