Lee relates his Mac OS X 10.3 Panther-buying experience from last night, where he also garnered an iSight. As for your humble host, our Panther hunt was a complete bust. I seriously undermined the attention given the release by the Dallas Macintosh-using population. Thinking that we could go grab a bite to eat, then get to the Apple Store some time after 8:30 and pick up a copy, we found, at 8:30, an hour-long wait in the line outside the store. Needless to say, I wasn't about to stick around, waiting in a line that long with a three month-old in tow. So we headed home, and I'll swing by and pick up Panther later today. I can do without the fake dog tags, thank you very much.

Michael has quietly updated his super-easy disk imaging utility to version 2.2.

In case you've been under a rock so far this week, some of the big news in the Mac/tech world is the new Cheskin report on the top innovative companies. Apple ranked #3--behind Microsoft and Dell. I'll give Michael Dull credit for innovative marketing, but his PCs are about as exciting as my wife's Volvo. (Okay, bad example, since the Volvo S80 departs from the boxy design of old for curves, and features a kick-butt turbocharged six under the hood, but you get my point.) I do enjoy the take on this from As the Apple Turns. (Thanks, Chris L.!)

Apple has posted the Power Mac G5 introduction movie online, for those who missed it from this year's WWDC.

ATPM contributing editor Matt Coates noted for the staff that the 'zine and his article on Xnippets made the Swedish edition of Macworld magazine. With staff members throughout the world, this bit of international exposure is hardly surprising, but very, very welcome.

Applelinks has a great interview with Fred Gallagher, the creator and meatspace alter ego of MegaTokyo's Piro. Fred discusses his relatively new switch from Windows to the Mac, for reasons which include stability, more power, and lust for a Cinema Display. And, of course, I am kicking myself for not thinking of getting this interview for ATPM...

Being the bad friend that I am, I failed to note Michael's release of SpamSieve 2.0 last week. At least I have the excuse of a new son. :D SpamSieve is an awesome app that is effectively killing 90-95% of my daily email spam, and I have had 0--that's zero--false positives for a good three months or more. Version 2.0 only makes a great product better. Outside of Apple's Mail.app, it supports practically every major email client for Mac OS X, and tightly integrates with my and Michael's client of choice, Mailsmith. SpamSieve is well worth the $25 registration fee, so support a shareware developer who will save you more than $25 of your time each and every day of your online life. (Too obvious that I'm bucking for an unprecedented 3d quote at C-Command?)

The September issue of About This Particular Macintosh is fresh from the oven. Two new staffers join up this month; Mary Tyler begins a series of articles focused on SOHO users, and Ted Goranson delivers a knockout on outliner application history. The usual accoutrements abound.

So Microsoft announced six new wireless optical desktop components, but none of them utilize Bluetooth for connectivity. Rather, one of your USB ports will still be eaten up by the RF receiver. Don't get me wrong, I love the freedom from clutter that the older Wireless Desktop Optical Pro keyboard and mouse give me at the office. I would prefer Bluetooth versions of the same for use at home, however.

Speaking of the 12-inch PowerBook G4, the folks at MacSkinz now have skinz available for the smallest PowerBook. I first saw the MacSkinz guys at Macworld Expo, when they had the side panels for desktop G3s and G4s. Looking through the skinz available for the PowerBook 12" (yeah, like I still need to get one of those, right?), my favorites include: American Flag, Urban Camouflage, Flames Blue/White, Silver on Blue Flames, and Hibiscus Green. Of the latter, how about some other colors, MacSkinners? I'm partial to blue, in case you couldn't guess from my other choices. :)

Thanks to the fine folks at Trans Intl., the PowerBook G4 12" can now have more than 1 GB of RAM. This clears up one of the few misgivings I have about the smallest PowerBook. Unfortunately, going beyond 1 GB in a 12" PowerBook is going to be a somewhat exclusive club, at least in the beginning: price for the 1 GB DDR memory module is $499. Now if Apple will just throw in a minimum of a 1 GHz processor, and bump up that video chip and video RAM, I'd be one happy camper... (via MacMinute)

Michael has a run down on his FTP app usage over the past few years. Transmit is what I use when I want visual feedback, or to do some things, like setting permissions, that I'm not as comfortable doing from the command line. (I even beta-test new versions, though I'm not much of a FTP heavy-lifter.) Otherwise, it's ftp or sftp in Terminal for me.

Thanks to Ric for pointing to the new Apple KB article on unexpected Safari quits. This has suddenly started happening for me within the past week on both my TiBook and my Cube. Reading through the KB article, I believe my problems with each are solved in section II of the article, regarding QuickTime preferences. Yay! Last night, Safari died on my Cube after I watched the Matrix Revolutions international trailer (rocks!), and I noticed Safari died on my TiBook a couple of days ago after listening to a QuickTime-encoded MP3 on a web site.

The August issue of About This Particular Macintosh is out, and available online or in three dreamy flavors. Some good stuff here: Matt Coates uncovers a software gem; Andrew Kator continues his excellent series on graphic design; Eric Blair gives a nod to departed software publisher Casady & Greene, as well as reviewing the the 30 GB iPod; and yours truly delivers a review on a product no Mac portable user should be without.

What is it about Safari all of a sudden? It's taking forever to pull up web pages. I've cleared the cache. I've quit and restarted Safari. The only thing I haven't done is totally restart the system, and that's because the exact same pages load like lightning in Camino. Is some weird Safari behavior going to cause me to flip-flop from it to Camino? Or Camino's kissing cousin, Firebird? Safari is normally faster than the others, and I like its bookmarking technology to boot. I'd rather not do the bookmark export-import shuffle yet again... What are you guys consistently using and why? Are you shuffling between browsers? How are you keeping your bookmarks straight? Third-party bookmark managers? Sound off in the comments, please. UPDATE, 4:00 PM: It seems a certain web site was at the root of my recent problems. Something is taking forever to load on that page, and subsequently is causing any other pages to load very slowly. It took a bit of time to load in Camino, too, though not nearly as long as in Safari. Care to take a look at that, Cory?

So I'm wondering... In the Finder found in the WWDC beta release of 10.3 Panther, will there be a way to take the iDisk out of the Places sidebar? After 8 October, I will no longer have a .Mac account, and therefore, no need for an iDisk. Just a thought about cleaning the new Finder window up.

USA Today reports that BuyMusic.com's first week in business has not been a bed of roses, as "early customers have found they can't transfer the tunes they buy on BuyMusic.com to digital portables." Whoops!

The problem: Unlike MP3 music tracks plucked from the Net from pirate sites such as Kazaa, music on BuyMusic is encoded in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The "digital rights management" coding limits what can be done with the files. The files will be recoded to allow for transfers, Blum says. Well, there you go, yet another reason to avoid WMA. I know the AAC format Apple is using is somewhat proprietary, but it is based on the MP4 industry standard, available to all. Not to mention that I've yet to hear a WMA file that sounded as good as a straight MP3. Say, BuyMusic.com, how's the first week of sales been? Apple has sold 6.5 million songs since April; BuyMusic won't release figures, but "it's not millions," Blum says. Everyone remember that Apple sold a million tunes the first week its iTunes Music Store was open? And that's to what, 3% of the computer-using public? Less, really, since not every Mac user has upgraded to OS X, which iTunes 4 requires. (The iTunes Music Store requires iTunes 4 for access.) Blum & Co. had 97% of the industry to pull from. Finally, Ric Ford is reporting on Macintouch today the experience of musician Jody Whitesides (and I hope Ric doesn't mind the copy/paste since he doesn't have permalinks): My name is Jody Whitesides, I'm an artist that is about to be brought to the Apple iTunes Music Store. Of course I recently heard about BuyMusic so I decided to point my Mac browser at it (with Javascript turned off you can see the site).

I did a search for one of my old CDs that will be going onto iTunes and it turns out my CD was there on BuyMusic.com, as were the CDs of several other bands that I'm friends with - all of whom were not contacted about being placed for sale there.

Here's what I've deduced... BuyMusic.com (which I will refer to as BM) got their "vast" music library of 300,000 plus songs from a company called The Orchard. The Orchard is a distribution company that has consistently shafted artists

[...]

So, without the express consent of what is likely lots of The Orchard's catalog, BM has put it up for sale at the bargain price of $.79 a song.

So, now they can tout they're selling tracks at $.79, and they can say they have a library of music of over 300,000 songs. But what they don't tell you is that it comes from musicians/bands who were not asked for permission, and who will likely not see a penny of any sale made through BM.

[...]

I'm currently looking into legal means to have my music removed from their site and strongly encourage users to not browse BM's site nor purchase from it. So: crappy file format, downloads that don't work, and screwing artists out of royalties. Better luck with BuyMusic.com v2.0, hosers. (via MacMinute)

So you're using Safari. You've enabled tabbed browsing (who wouldn't?). You have a two-button, scroll-wheel, wireless Microsoft optical mouse. Using the Microsoft Intellipoint mouse software for OS X, you turn the clickable scroll wheel's command function from Autoscroll (the default) to Command-Click. Now you don't have to hold down the Command key while clicking links in Safari to get them to open in new tabs...