Panther bits

Through Joi Ito, I found another Boris. I read his item about Crippled FTP in Panther. Basically, you can now (reliably – it was there in earlier versions, just didn't work that great) mount FTP sites on the desktop. BUT…it's read-only.

Yes, that's pretty dumb. Speculation ranges from "write-access FTP is a security risk" to "Apple wants iDisk to look more attractive". I would agree with both.

Text services seem to have gotten a major overhaul in Panther. I now understand why Adobe considers Apple a threat. I mean, scriptable/programmable image processing at the OS level?! And, of course, Text Edit reads/writes Word .doc files as well…

Mac OS 10.3.1 already appears to be on its way.