Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Expose is great. The current implementation is good, but I see some room for improvement.

Safari is definitely faster. I’ll have to experiment with the new khtml opacity properties and CSS2 text shadowing.

The very annoying high CPU load audio playback jerkiness that was introduced with the 10.2.8 update has vanished.

The Dock has not improved much. I had already modified my Dock plist to enable the Hide menu item, so I don’t really consider that a new feature. Hopefully, a future update will focus on improving the Dock.

The Activity Monitor application makes a lot more sense than five small utilities that are less functional. There are plenty of simple freeware CPU/Disk IO/Network activity monitors. Apple providing a more complete tool is nice.

My iSight’s microphone(s) can now be used with Speech Recognition. Some people were able to do this prior to 10.3, but no amount of trickery allowed me to do so. This may prove to be more effective because of the noise canceling feature not found in the iMac built-in pinhole mic.

Both YoupiKey (now known as iKey) and Searchling (now iSeek) are still fully functional. I am perfectly happy with the features of these rather out-dated applications so I was happy not to have to go looking for alternatives.

My father ran into the “out-of-date Unsanity software causes all applications to crash almost immediately after launch” bug. Nasty, but easily resolved by holding down Shift while logging in (disables login items) and then removing the offending software using the Unsanity installer/uninstaller.