One of the downsides to a weekday-only broadcasting schedule is that when something exciting happens on Friday night, we're pretty much relegated to playing the less-dramatic "follow-up" role on Monday, because everyone's already heard the news. That said, we're still almost as excited now as we were on Friday evening when faithful viewer George W. first told us that Apple had finally released the long-awaited Mac OS X 10.0.1 updater. Why? Because the devil's in the details, and this seemingly minor update has made Mac OS X a lot more fun to use.

We aren't entirely up on what exactly 10.0.1 is supposed to fix-- it certainly doesn't add DVD playback or CD-burning capabilities, for example (not that you should have expected it to), and Apple's own terse description simply states that it offers "better support for third party USB devices, Classic compatibility and overall application stability as well as support for the popular Secure Shell service." Oh, and if you're a Japanese user, you can also get "an update to the Epson printer drivers." Now, personally, we at AtAT don't use Epson printers, we don't use Secure Shell, and the only third-party USB device we ever hook up to the PowerBook is a gamepad for use with Virtual Game Station-- and we have to boot into Mac OS 9 to play that, anyway.

But that improved "overall application stability" sure is nice. We've noticed a significant drop in app crashes since installing 10.0.1, most notably in OmniWeb; maybe it's a coincidence, but we haven't seen the 'Web crash even once since we upgraded. Classic applications seem faster, and when Classic is starting up, we can actually do other things-- it's almost like pre-emptive multitasking really works, or something. Everything just feels a bit zippier, like Apple poured a little caffeine in the Aqua. Perhaps most importantly from our perspective, for us, at least, launch times got a lot shorter-- some applications seem to start up in less than half the time that they chewed up in 10.0. And while the volume and mute keys on our PowerBook are still useless, at least the brightness controls work again.

Perhaps best of all, the updater doesn't appear to have introduced any new problems, so thank Steve for small blessings. As for actual bug fixes, well, with 10.0 we had exactly two OS crashes, both in exactly the same situation: we'd wake the PowerBook from sleep and even before the lid was all the way open we'd see the unmistakable lettering of the dreaded kernel panic. Since installing 10.0.1, however, the closest we've come is waking the PowerBook from sleep and staring at a grey screen with an eternally-spinning rainbow cursor. Depending on your optimism level, you might choose to consider that progress. Works for us!