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Footnotes for Mac users:

Along with all the amazement at this so-valuable freebie, I react strongly to an insidious increase in both chauvinism and a 'big brother knows best' mentality which has come into Apple's products since OS X:

• shocking that the US Oxford team doesn't in its choice of title distinguish between 'America' and 'US', ignoring the fact that - by their own definition - very large parts of 'America' speak other languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Inuit, and hundreds of Indian languages
• there's no mention of any future expansion to include any other dictionaries or thesauri (or as the Oxford team suggests, 'thesauruses')
• the default key-commmand for showing/hiding widgets is already used for ejecting DVDs/CDs on my TiBook, F12, and that function is even printed on the physical key.

Just for the record, I tried copying the programme and its dictionary and thesaurus files to a Mac with Jaguar (OS 10.3), but it wouldn't launch.

On Tiger's widgets:

• of course you make your own selection from all the available widgets, but those you have selected always show up all at once, dimming the rest of the screen, until you change the selection, but they themselves are either in the foreground and 100% opaque or else completely hidden - odd and irritating, there are plenty of times you would need to refer to the details of, for instance, a dictionary article, at the same time as you're working in the windows of another programme
• you can't change the colours of some widgets, the calendar for instance is a hideous red which many people might find fits poorly into their life-style
• there's an assumption, often tacit, that you have broadband, while as far as I know it's still only a minority of internet users who have it, and some of us live and work where we can't get it for love nor money.

Anyway none of them is going to change my life - they're not fundamentally different from the desk accesories in earlier Mac OSs, and I already have very functional shareware utilities for all the functions I want - including Webster's dictionary and thesaurus included with Spell Catcher: that gave me 118 synonyms for hideous, compared with the 36 which Apple's built-in Oxford work gave me, but then I did pay money for it.