My God, It's Full Of Stars

Upgraded to Jaguar over the last couple of days, and used its enhanced built-in networking to (un)wire the house. Printer sharing a breeze, file sharing ditto (we need better/more signal coverage, but I take it this is a common complaint). Is it my imagination, or does Apple keep releasing stuff that you can't believe is better than last month's latest and greatest -- but you kick the tires and it turns out it is? More toys in the chest: Sherlock actually is something I'll use now, and its built in Dictionary/Thesaurus is so nifty it's making me plot how best to accomplish all my briefwriting on my non-work hardware. Says Apple: "It’s best, though, to think of Sherlock as a service provider that just happens to use your browser to fetch web pages as one of the services it provides. Need something translated from one language to another? Ask Sherlock. Want a real dictionary definition of a word alongside a real thesaurus listing of related words? Ask Sherlock." The thesaurus accesses Bartleby, which is what I already use, except it eliminates the need to go through Google (which I inevitably do: e.g., typing "thesaurus inevitably" into Google generally does the trick), and it provides a slick interface that lets you thread through the related words, and their related words, to your heart's content. This philosophy seems to permeate the native applications in Jaguar (see Evan Williams/Ken Bereskin on the calculator), all to the good.

Now, I've never sat down and played with an XP box, so for all I know the two platforms are neck and neck on this sort of end-user extravaganza. But my Win 3.1/95/98 experiences leave me needing to be convinced.