Friday was my first full day of working on my Apple PowerMac G4 at the office, and I have to say that I didn’t miss Windows XP much at all. I installed Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) last week, and I’m very happy with it. Expose is addicting, especially with the way I work (with 10+ windows open at any given time), Mail is now more polished and easier to use, and Terminal now uses the [bash][/bash]4 shell. Life is good!
Most of my frequently used programs are available for the Mac OS and are up and running on my system, including Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (which actually works a lot better than the Windows version) and Microsoft Office v.X. TopStyle Pro (my favorite CSS editor) and Microsoft Visio are only available for Windows, but I think I can switch back into XP on occasional.
FeedDemon (created by the same developer as TopStyle Pro) is another Windows program I grew to love in the last several months. FeedDemon is a what is known as a RSS news feed reader, letting you browse information from dozens, hundreds, or thousands of web sites without even visiting them. I think of it as TiVo for the Web, pulling in news and information that is tailored to your individual tastes. Well, yesterday I finally discovered an equally capable news reader for Mac OS X. It’s been around for awhile, but I’ll plead ignorance due to me being largely “out” of the Mac scene for some time. It’s called NetNewsWire and is made by a company called Ranchero. If you’re using OS 10.2 or 10.3, I highly suggest downloading the trial version and giving it a try!