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Greetings from sunny Pendleton, Oregon, where I am typing this blog posting in a hotel room that smells like lilacs puked in it. Apparently Apple has run out of cat names, which is why we have OS X 10.9 Mavericks named for places in California that allegedly inspire them, which will rapidly become James Garner's favourite operating system, in addition to introducing a new Mac Pro that looks like a cross between the G4 Cube and the Master Control Program from TRON.

So, since I'm on vacation, I wanted to remind you of some possibilities Apple has for future versions of OS X after places in California that have inspired me:

• OS X Fresno
• OS X Bakersfield
• OS X Clapper Gap (thanks Bill Childers on ADN)
• OS X Brawley
• OS X El Centro
• OS X Wasco
• OS X Pumpkin Center (Kern county is just a gold mine for fun place names)
• OS X Barrio Logan
• OS X Rio Linda
• OS X Compton (requires optional Thunderbolt Glock .40)
• OS X South Central Los Angeles

  and, of course, something that I know inspires Apple a lot,

• OS X Weed

Jason Rehmus on ADN also proposed OS XXVIIII Palms for the next version. Makes perfect sense.

To make this blog post actually have a point, though, this presents any app that supports versions prior to 10.9 (and most will, though 10.9 appears not to drop support for any 10.8-compatible machines) with a problem: the new flat visual style in 10.9 is rather different from 10.8 and before, which itself is rather different from 10.6 and before. I expect to see a new skin appearing in Firefox to make this work correctly, which should be rather unfun given that they've only just gotten the 10.7-era scroll bars to behave like the rest of the operating system. It also further complicates our own support, though I have always planned to break apart our widget support and maintain it independently, probably after 10.6 support is dropped sometime between Fx24 and Fx31. We'll just have to see what happens.

By the way, I already have an iBook that works with Mac OS X. Oh, that's not the same thing?