So this is what happens when post lengths keep on getting longer while blogging opportunities hit a period of work-induced scarcity: Not much. What’s more, the time allotted to blogging matters has been taken up by non-literary pursuits that will bear fruit soon, though not quite yet.

In the meantime, I thought I’d try a revolutionary new idea. Short blog posts! Here we go…

Item! Yes, I stood in line with the geeks and bought myself a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 a few hours ago so I could spend my Friday evening installing it. Luckily, I was doing it as a public service so I could blog it for you all, and not for my own enjoyment.

First impression: Amazing, and not even for its two most anticipated features. I have yet to use Spotlight (the search function that I fully expect will forever change my relationship to my data) because it will take hours to index my files. And I am underwhelmed by Dashboard, the undeniably pretty eyecandy that lets you drop widgety mini programs all over your screen, because you can.

So the gripes first. The default Dashboard widgets are not all that well thought out. There is a dictionary widget, but you can’t copy the results of your search to the clipboard. This gets even sillier when you find out there is a stand-alone dictionary application outside Dashboard that does exactly the same thing, except that here you can copy/paste, and that — unlike with the widget — you can keep it open next to your other applications, where it is useful.

The same goes for the calculator: There is a castrated version in Dashboard, and then there is a newly beefed up standalone version that includes a brand new mode (standard, scientific and now programmer).

So I guess I don’t “get” Dashboard, but no doubt before long there will be plenty of pretty things you can do with it. Come to think of it, my parents will probably love it. It is undeniably simple, conceptually. (And by that I’m not implying that my parents are.)

On to the cool things. iChat now lets you use the Jabber protocol, so you can set up an account that lets you talk to MSN Messenger people. The ability to show iChat buddies what song or radio station you are currently listening to is now built in, with the added clever “feature” that you can click directly through to the song in the iTunes store. Sneaky.

Safari’s RSS-reading ability is no replacement for the power-user features I like in NetNewsWire 2, but again, it makes RSS look extremely simple, and I predict this will finally lead to mass-utilization of RSS as a content consumption method. My parents don’t currently use RSS. They will after they get their hands on this browser.

This focus on RSS gets leveraged in a luscious new screen saver, where the feeds get visualized as floating text snippets. It’s a new favourite for staring at.

Automator, a GUI for AppleScript, sort of, finally provides simplicity where I’ve always wished things were simpler in the Mac OS, and I think I will find myself using it very often. BBEdit just today was upgraded to support it, and in conjunction with Mail and Spotlight and smart folders I can already see some possibilities. For example, if I were to write a PHP script that lets people RSVP on the web and which then sends the information via email, I could use my inbox as a sophisticated triage system, and then use BBEdit’s text-handling prowess to collate the responses into a single snug text file. However often I want.

But by far the most impressive thing in OS X is the return of the Graphing Calculator, now called Grapher. Apple hides it in the Utilities folder. It’s a real jawdropper, and simply gorgeous to look at. It lets you do all manner of fancy mathematical manipulation on equations (integrate, differentiate, find roots) and then graph the results in rotating 3D. Far too much to recount, so I’ll just leave you with a screen shot.

That wasn’t exactly a short post, though, was it?