I've gotten used to using the Mac OS X Finder in column mode, where you have multiple columns in each window and when you click on an item everything shifts one column left (quite annoying by the way). In 10.0 each column in the window stays the same size so when you move around it's nice and neat. Not so in 10.1! As you move around the right-most column size can change to show a scroll bar. The scroll bar is additional space rather than being part of a column, and it pushes the leftmost column to the left a little so that all the icons are half hidden. A bit nitpicky but it is a glaring defect to me.

Back to the review. Mac OS X 10.1 comes with almost the same application suite as 10.0. Acrobat Reader 5 replaces PDF Viewer and that's a good thing. PDF Viewer was a capable renderer but had few usability enhancements and I switched to Acrobat Reader 5 on 10.0. When you first start Address Book it imports the old Address Book database and apparently I have 905 entries, mostly the automatic ones created by Mail. Hmm, now it shows all 905 entries that it imported. Looks like I have a lot of deleting to do...

Wow, most of the new entries are eGroups and Yahoo! Groups notification messages, which use unique addresses you can reply to so that you don't have to go to the web site to do administration. Aha! All the automatic addresses have the Category of Temporary. Now I can just sort them and delete them all easily. You can now specify which fields to display in list view. The little VCard view at the bottom can be turned on and off. I leave it off since you can't configure the display and it never shows the information I want. When you look at the details of an entry you now have a simple view with an expando-arrow to get more information. Again I'd rather have full view immediately but you can't turn that on. Strange, I guess it stores fields comma-delimited or something because it splits up the entry into multiple fields based on the commas. Annoying with AIM numbers. Hmm, the birthday fields are fine though. So I guess it's a programmatic error.

Chess now has speech recognition. Maybe it did before. Don't particularly like speech recognition because I don't like making noise. Hey, now there's a DVD Player. Unfortunately, it says my machine is not supported when I thought it was. Sigh. Oh well, I shouldn't be spending money on DVDs in any case. The first thing QuickTime Player does is connect and try to download a "Hot Pick" movie, which freezes the application for a bit and then I get an ad. Ok, I immediately turn off that "feature". Oh wait, I was wrong. Preview is still there and it still sucks with PDF files. Sherlock seems to be just as bad and it's a good thing I eliminated the ads. Pay $180 ($30 for the Beta, $130 for 10.0, $20 for 10.1) for an OS and you still get advertisements. Offhand, Mail looks to be the same. Certainly the filters are still very basic.

And now for Internet Explorer 5.1, no longer a preview version. The weird part about every browser is that they interpret local file paths differently. Internet Explorer has the format "file://localhost/Volumes/..." while others don't want Volumes or localhost in the file path. Window resizing is still bad, maybe worse. Hmm, it looks exactly the same as far as I can tell. No obvious new features. Maybe Java support is now on (I don't remember if the previous version had Java support). It seems to render pages the same, interface is the same. When I get to work I'll run it through my test suite and see if it's any better than the Preview.

Ok, after getting to work and testing IE 5.1, I see that it's much worse than before. https sites error with a -192 error. Java doesn't do anything at all. Only three out of nine tests passed, compared to about seven out of nine for IE 5.1 Preview in Mac OS X 10.0. Now, this could be some sort of environment problem or maybe I haven't configured things correctly or maybe the Security update broke things. Whatever. The fact is that IE 5.1 does not work with my system.