Panther released, but some users might have to switch to Windows instead.

Today Apple finally released officially Mac OS X Panther 10.3. This week we also had some software updates (Keynote 1.1.1, QuickTime for Java, iSync 1.3 and iPod 1.3.1) and a major hardware release which is this wonderful new G4 based iBook that I guess will meet a big success.

On my last posting, after reviewing some cool new features of the final version of Panther, I also mentioned a problem with Greek language support on Mac OS X. I finally linked to a blog page of a friend of mine, Cosmix, who was describing very well the lack of Greek support on Mac OS X. Since I posted the article, I received tons of mails reacting to my article, a lot of readers confirmed the fact that their only choice today is to switch to Windows to use greek on their computers, others claimed that this problem also affects Hebrew and Turkish language users. I and some other sites that noticed my posting, linked to Cosmix' blog and drove a lot of traffic on this site. Readers showed their interest on Cosmix" article with their lots of comments.

Cosmix' actual name is Dimosthenis Kaponis, my first contact with him was when he had launched his first petition for Greek support in February 2002, we then kept contact. At that time, the only I could do to help him was to contact some French Mac sites and one very known US Mac site to ask them support. Only the French sites MacGeneration and MacPlus had supported the petition.

Today, along with the release of Mac OS X Panther, Dimostenis has started a new petition asking Apple to fully support Greek language on Mac OS X. The problem is very particular with Greek support so he decided that this petition would focus on this language but several topics of the petition concern most non-roman language users: in the list of requests for Apple are unicode compliant applications and multilingual or fully unicode fonts

MacosXrumors is mainly a rumors site but I believe that whatever may help Mac OS X to be improved has to be supported by every Mac site and especially by rumor sites which are known to be read by Apple staff and sometimes executives. Stay tuned as a lot of exciting rumor information is also confirming these days.