Ah, another Xmas season has come and gone. Nothing really to add but that I find myself enjoying VB.NET more than I thought I would and that I finally saw a PowerMac G5 in action (dual 1.8 GHz). Very fast. The dual proc trick took an end run around Moore's Law, and you've now got no issue but price standing between picking a Mac OS X box over a Windows one. If you compare experiences, I think you'll begin to find the Mac is a better deal. I did bag Halo for Xmas, and that runs bearably well even on my 1 GHz G4 iMac. That with the iPod-giving-a-rama that apparently went on over Xmas, and you've got one happy Steve Jobs.

I take that back -- I do have one more bit to add. I played with REAL Basic 5 a bit over the holidays -- about three hours or so -- and I'm all but sold. Will probably sink in the $99 entry fee Jan 1st.

What's to like:
* Resizable GUIs in about a tenth of the time (maybe less) than it'd take me to get things going in Java.
* Visual Basic like scripting speed
* Compiled applications, not easy to decompile bytecode

What's to dislike:
* Very immature language (though this could certainly be partially my limited exposure). Object-oriented approach is lacking, as it does in VB6. A better list:
* No interfacing
* No polymorphism
* No inheritance

But for quick utilities -- and even GUIs on top of something serious -- there no better way on the Mac platform, OS 8-X. Now if I could just get the JNI-REAL Basic [currently nonexistent] plugin bridge figured out...