Sunday, July 21, 2002 |
18:55 - Another Lazy Sunday
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Yeah-- the Apple Store was actually really hopping. It was about as crowded as I've ever seen it on a non-opening-day, which is to say there were some 40 people inside at any given time. It's really a festive atmosphere in there, with lots of jocularity over the PA from the theater and lots of engaging employees who are genuinely fun to talk to, and it invites people to come inside; it always seems like there's some kind of party going on. And it's not all Macophiles, either. I kept overhearing snatches of conversation like "Oh, I need to get a laptop, and my wife said to check one of these out," and "Oh, those are so cool," and "I'm sorry, if you have to move it yourself, it's not as cool as in the commercials". There are a lot of curious prospectives walking in. The stores are working.
The widescreen iMac is wider in person than it looks; it's got a higher aspect ratio even than the Cinema Display. And 10.2-- sweet, man. Everything's there. It's plenty fast, well more so than 10.1.5; the new Aqua look is crisper and more immersive; and there are little things that I'd only guessed at before now, like how folder windows now zoom in and out from their source locations using the Scale effect-- a suggestion I put in last March. Woo-hoo! Zooming windows X-style. (No, it's not just eye candy-- it's genuinely useful from a UI standpoint to be able to see the spatial relationship between an icon and the window that opens up from it.)
Disappointment of the day, though: Clarus the Dogcow is MIA again. In builds that were showing up a month ago, the Character Palette used Clarus as the menu icon in the Keyboard menu. But now the Character Palette has its own new character-palette-looking icon, and Clarus is once again relegated to the annals of folklore. Though at least we know that some engineers deep within Apple are still seeking loopholes...
I got a lot of comments on my Jaguar t-shirt. I had to rattle off "mac surf shop dot com" five or six times to people who asked me where I got it.
Now everybody's here watching wrestling on pay-per-view, and I'm so relaxed I'm actually enjoying it.
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