Finished the first day back on full-time employment at GlobalStreams. Spent most of it working on getting the G4 and the Sony laptop set up with the applications and my dev environment.

Got set up on the G4:

Purchased software:

• Macintosh OS X 10.3 (Panther)
• Adobe Creative Suite Premium
  • Photoshop CS (8.0)
  • Illustrator CS
  • In Design CS
  • Go Live (probably won’t use this at all, but it’s included anyway)
  • Acrobat
  • Version Cue (we’ll have to see how this works, exactly…)
• Microsoft Office v. X
• Macromedia Flash MX Professional (will install when the upgrade package arrives)

Downloaded software:

• VNCDimension
• MacCVS
• Fink
• others…

Apple is providing a really nice search for software resource at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/.

The Mail application worked flawlessly with the mail server, including hooking it up to the LDAP for address lookups.

On the PC:

• WinCVS – GUI CVS client
• Firefox – Mozilla-based web browser
• FileZilla – Good FTP / SCP client for Windows
• Crimson Editor – Very good freeware text editor
• Cygwin – Unix environment on Windows – my preferred choice for ssh, vi, etc…
• JustZIPit – Winzip replacement, freeware, no ads, does the job.

My first impressions from using Macintosh OS X 10.3 (Panther):
Everything is antialiased. I think I like it pretty well, gives a pretty feel to everything. All the graphics are rounded, smooth, slick. I DO NOT LIKE the placement of the window controls (Close, Minimize, Maximize) on the left side — so different from OS 9 and Windows, that I’m constantly going to the upper right corner, then, Doh! left corner. Maybe there is a switcher or something that puts them where they should be. Also, the top file menu bar seems to behave a little erratically – sometimes I have to select an item, then hold down the mouse button to get it to select the items. Maybe it’s because I’m running it on an older G4, but seems like something that should be a little smoother. Overall I think I like it pretty well. Still like my Photoshop 5.5 on my G3 at home, though. We’ll see how it all works out.