A little too busy today to blog properly with links, etc, but I can't decide if I like Apple's "Quartz Extreme" that they've announced at WWDC.

Quartz Extreme, afaict, just means the normal "windowing system" or "that thing that draws the desktop" is now hardware accelerated *if* you have 32 megs of RAM on your video card.

So much for iBook users like me.

I have noticed that turning the iBook's display down to 800x600 with "thousands of colors" instead of 1152x768 (iirc) with "millions" speeds things up a heck of a lot in OS X, but is a less than optimal screen resolution both to get things done (not enough real estate) and b/c the iBook kinda fudges 800x600, splicing together pixels to get as close as it can and, in the end, making everything sorta fuzzy.

I'm betting "legacy Mac" users, like older rev A-C iMacs and older Power- or iBooks, aren't going to get any of the Quartz update benefits, and with developers' common desire to get phat hardware and to develop, like it or not, for what they're used to using at the office, older Mac users are, once again, going to be forced to upgrade for acceptable performance.

Course, as I say, performance in X right now is abyssmal due to screen drawing problems (have you seen the spinning beach ball of death? That's why) and something had to be done. Fixing the problem for future users is better than nothing (and anyone with a tower can just update the blamed video card). A bittersweet fix with a horrible name, that's Quartz EXTREME!!!1!!!!

Jobs also announced the "death of OS 9 [support]" as far as Apple is concerned. I'm not upset by this one at all for some reason. There's tons of quality software for 9, and as long as Mozilla keeps targeting OS 9 with its builds I'm going to be happy booting into 9 unless I absolutely have to have something from X.

Like Samba. Samba is cool. But more on that later.