My main beef with OS X’s native email client is that it has no message queue: mail gets sent immediately from the Compose window, without a one-click “Send Later” function. Moz gives you a “Send Later” and a message queue, but it’s nestled in the File menu without any kind of quick access. Opera (which had exactly what I needed, and was my primary web-and-email client in Windows) looks nowhere near a decent full release for OS X, with no guarantee that a new version will have what I’m looking for; so I’m wondering what’s left. Eudora, perhaps?

Where’s the CD Burner? Apple’s CD Burner only appears in OS 9; OS X has no data burning capability built in outside of iTunes and the Disk Imager! They’re not going to make us shell out $90 for Roxio Toast, are they?

For now, I’ll have to settle for CD Session Burner (shareware) or Missing Media Burner (freeware).

Most of my priority-purpose software has now been installed on the iBook:

VirtualPC creates a virtual drive on your Mac which emulates a PC environment, in a window or fullscreen. I was about to buy VirtualPC with Win98, but I found that you could just buy the DOS version at half the price, and just install a licensed copy of WinNT/9x/XP onto it anyway. I needed this for three things: run Windows apps if needed, test websites on Windows browsers, and download images from my pencam, which has no MacOS drivers. Bad news, though: VirtualPC hangs when connecting to the pencam, no matter how much RAM you have. Not feasible.

Fortunately, I remembered macam, which works like a charm, downloading photos from the camera to TIF images in any folder you wish, at a decent speed. Even the support rep at Aiptek suggested it.

(TIF. Sniff.) :(

I had initially intended to use the full Mozilla suite for all my email and web browsing needs, but it suffered from plodding speeds and some UI cruft. I settled instead for the lightweight Gecko-based Chimera, and OS X’s own native mail app suffices for email, though I detest the lack of a “Send Later” message queue. Hopefully a new Opera for OS X will be out soon, with all the functionality I desire from it.

iChat, while cute and functional, is AIM-only, so I downloaded Fire, an excellent little universal IM client for OS X. Not quite as tight as Trillian on the PC, but again, it suffices.

Of course, what digital artist can be without Photoshop? I borrowed my landlord’s Photoshop 7 CD, which he wasn’t using, though I intend to buy my own licensed copy when the money presents itself.

For text and coding, BBEdit Lite and JEdit. The latter looks very, very promising as a GNU programmer’s editor, but being Java-based, it’s a bit slow.

Palm Desktop, of course, to keep my Palm synced. I would use iSync, but my Serial-USB adapter only works with OS9. I may just buy a new PDA in the near future. Again, if the money presents itself. Not likely.

I’m still wondering about FTP GUI apps, but it looks like you can just use the Go to Server function in the Finder. Besides, I really should get down to learning how to do it from the CLI.

Okay, it’s late/early, and I need to work on a multimedia project tomorrow. I’m soooo swamped. Good night/morning.

The iBook is safely home at last. It was a long journey for the little thing; from the shelves of SmallDog, to the shelter of my home, to the back rooms of Apple Towson for warranty repair, to the #8 bus back downtown, and finally back to its rightful home at my desk for some tender sweet luvin’.

In the process of installing the Airport card and RAM, I managed to scratch a not-too-pretty pattern into the RAM shield, and at least one screw fell irretrievably into the machine’s deep dark innards (it’s a lot bigger inside than it looks from the outside). The struggle paid off; the iBook now breathes a bit easier: it has 384MB of RAM, and the Airport card provides blazing supa-fast wireless access in the vicinity of access points at work and in school.

Coming soon: a word on software.