OSX neepery

[avram]

I’m pretty much set on the notion of moving over to MacOS X permanently — Jaguar is that much of an improvement over its predecessors, even if I haven’t figured out how to get Apache working again. I’m in the process of working out the rest of the move, how to get either OSX versions or alternatives for all the stuff I now do under 9.1. I’ve got Microsoft Office covered (Thanks, holyoutlaw!), and Photoshop 7. I’d be happier yet if I could get Adobe’s Photoshop-Illustrator-InDesign package, which would give me drawing and page layout capabilities. (Hm, I wonder if they offer a competitive upgrade from QuarkXPress.... Ah, looks like they used to.)

The thing I’ve been spending the most brain cycles on is the scanner. My current scanner, a Umax Astra 3400, doesn’t work at all under OSX, not even under Classic, and Umax is showing signs of not caring. I can get a roughly equivalent scanner for under $80 from a number of sources, so I’m hunting around for the best feature set. I need something with OSX native drivers, and I’d like something that uses Apple’s ColorSync technology, but while plenty of companies seem willing to give me either one of those features for under $100, nobody seems willing to offer them both for less than $300. Something’s wrong here. And it was a royal pain in the ass assembling that info. Apple’s website has a databse of Mac-compatible products (great idea), but doesn’t really give me enough of a front-end to let me build a specific search. I can search for all scanners, or for all products that use ColorSync, but not all scanners that use ColorSync. I wound up having to do both searches, copy the URLs in my text editor, and assemble a custom URL, which isn’t all that hard, but is still much harder than it should be.