Old fruit and new wild cats
Arrived at work today to discover that an old Blue & White G3 mac had been deposited at my desk. This was part of a lab being gutted, and I thought it would be nice to have a desktop mac, and if no one will buy me a G5 (trust me, it’s not for lack of trying), a free G3 beats a kick in the teeth. My iBook, whilst lovely and faster than the Blue Meanie, lacks the screen real estate for lots fo hacking: applications like Matlab and Interface Builder are just a pain to use at such a resolution. This Mac has a nice vid card, so I was able to put it up to 1200x1000 (or there abouts), and I might hook it up to my 22" CRT and pump it up to 1600x1200. Yum. Not exactly the fastest machine though, but that’s why I have an account on the department’s XServe…
Anyway, the G3 came with no OS, so I put the Panther preview I have on it (the joys of being on the department’s Select Developer membership). Panther is nice, with some new things I like, and some I don’t, but over all it’s a positive thing. The GUI is certainly quite snappy, and I think that Panther on the slower G3 is on par to my iBook running Jaguar in terms of responsiveness. The Expose stuff is quite good, and whilst I didn’t object to the pinstrip theme of mac os x, the new slicker look is quite good. The metal themed finder is a step backwards IMHO, but then I prefer zsh to finder, so it’s of little consequence to me. The GUI is generally more helpful too, but they’ve replaced the gaps between menu items with hard lines, which I think looks a little harsh. Oh well. But all in all it’s quite groovy. I’ve got the new dev tools, Xcode, installed, but I am yet to give them a whirl.
Now ask me how productive I was today ;)
Actually, I did get some stuff done in Matlab as you can see here, but it’s a large 3D graph, and it sapped my iBook to do it. I think for that sort of thing I’ll need to find something more beefy to run Matlab on, at least client wise, as trying to manipulate that graph takes forever. Perhaps I should just do the graphing in something else. But Matlab is quite cool - it was but the work of the moment to generate that graph from the data I had.
