Apple has posted the Java 1.4.2 Update 2 Final Candidate on the Apple Developer Connection (registration and Mac OS X 10.3 required). Apple warns, "Please note that this is a prerelease build which will overwrite the existing Java 1.4.x installation on Panther. Please install this build on non-critical systems if you are concerned with changes that may affect your work or Java applications. The only way to revert to the standard Panther 1.4.1 will be to archive or erase reinstallation of Panther." No word yet on what's been fixed in this version.
I'm in the process of combining three different computers onto a single Mac OS X desktop. So far it's mostly going well, though the Mac has had some troubles talking to my SGI monitor. But the SGI 1600SW monitors I use are very funny beasts that predate the introduction of DVI, and Linux and Windows both have had trouble supoorting them. Software wise, almost everything seems to work, with the notable exception of Java 1.5, which is a pretty serious omissions, and means I'll have to keep the Linux box going for awhile longer. The latest scuttlebutt out of Apple is that Java 1.5 won't ship until Tiger does (Apple's Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4; not Sun's Tiger, JDK 1.5) and likely won't ever run on Mac OS 10.3 and earlier. Unnecessary obsolescense to force paid upgrades is a bad thing, and something Apple didn't use to do. Microsoft is much better in this respect.
Other notes from the transition:
I've been using Mac OS X (on another machine) for a year and a half now, and I'm still weirded out about how file names in the shell aren't case sensitive.
Expose didn't impress me when it was announced, but it's actually quite useful. On the other hand it's very annoying that the Finder doesn't behave like asny other application. Specifically, it's windows don't come to the front automatically when I bring it to the front like they did in Mac OS 9. One step forward. One step back.
The Scripts menu is a very nice touch.
Why won't any browser except Mozilla (not even Firefox) let me type my Google searches in the location bar? More importantly, why won't any browser (not even Mozilla) default to a Google search when what I type in the location bar contains spaces and is obviously not a URL or host name?
I just used Mozilla Mail for a little while until I could get Eudora installed on this new machine, but I like it and I think I may stick with it. That's one less payware program to upgrade every year. The decent Unicode support is probably the killer feature for Mozilla. I'd only put the switch off this long, because I hadn't noticed that you could configure Mozilla to open messages in new Windows like Eudora does. On the other hand, I do miss Eudora's on-the-fly spell checking; and neither Mozilla nor Eudora for Mac OS X comes with any screen font as nice as the old Mishawaka from classic Eudora. I'll have to find where it's hiding on my old machine and copy it over. I do wish Mozilla had an option to queue all messages instead of just sending them immediately.
The wireless keyboard and mouse are a nice touch. However, the keyboard is too low for me and doesn't have legs like previous flat boards. These would have been a lot easier to set up if the Bluetooth antenna were built into the case, rather than being an extra two centimeter long part I had to plug in (and which was not mentioned in the wireless mouse and keyboard installation instructions, on top of getting lost in a huge box.) My fingers are already hurting, and the number of my typos has gone through the roof. It may be time to switch back to my big, clunky, USB keyboard.