This is a question that I am always surprised by the answer.

Poll Closed.
<!– –>

I’ve been working from home for the last couple of days. This is I can get away from the daily grind of meetings and phone calls so I can concentrate on getting some work done. The plan was to use my work laptop and connects to my company’s network via VPN over my wireless network. However, thing was never that simple when technology is concerned. Even though the Wi-Fi card works perfectly well before the laptop is upgraded from Win2k to WinXP, now it refuses to work. Not that it does not see the router, it does, but XP somehow does not see the connection at all. So, I was forced to work from my PowerBook instead! What a hard life 😀

It turned out that I can be pretty productive on my Mac too. I get company emails via the Outlook Web Access on the web browser, chat to my colleagues via MSN Messenger, and I can get access to the client’s test site over the internet. The only thing I miss is the VPN connection so I can use Entourage for email rather than web mail.

I was sad to find out that one of the best OS X newsreader, Halime, is no longer being developed by its creator, Imdat Solak.

Unfortunately, due to a lot of reasons, I am giving up developing a PUBLIC version of Halime from now on. Please feel free to download the source code above, which represents the latest version of Halime.

Fortunately, the source is now available to the public under GPL and I have re-compiled it in Panther using Xcode 1.0.1. I will be testing it to see whether it is faster under GCC 3.3 and do some performance benchmarking next week between the last public release and my own compilation. This is because the internet connection in the hotel I am staying this week blocks the NNTP port so I can’t access the USENET.

After using Panther normally for a day, so far I’ve found a few things that annoy the hell out of me. None of them are Apple’s own fault, mind you. They are all third party software that has not been updated for Panther.

1. Mouse scroll wheel support. With my Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer driver installed. I can use all five buttons. But the scroll wheel does not scroll whole page. It can only scroll lines. The driver software suddenly does not offer the option to change either! Strange.

2. Safari Enhancer is not Panther compatible. This means I haven’t been able to remove the link underlining in Safari. My eyes are just not used to seeing underline on links after so many years of not seeing them.

Apart from these two, I think Panther is one of the best OS I’ve used so far.

Update: I’ve found out how to get page scrolling with the MS mouse driver. Apparently if I set the vertical scroll speed option to fastest it equals to page scrolling! How confusing!

Update 2: Safari Enhancer has been updated to be Panther compatible so no more underlined links!

After just over 3 hours of doing a clean install of Panther on my TiBook, I am just getting back to where I started this evening. It is certainly faster and slicker. I have yet to explore all the new functionality so I can’t really comment on them yet. But I think it is money well spent so far…