The one thing I’ve missed the most with Mac OS X is PC card support. I’ve never been that fond of using the USB cable for downloading pictures from my digital camera, but I had to dig it out of the junk drawer and press it back into service with Mac OS X 10.1

At least the inconvenience of having to use a cable again has been offset by Apple’s cool digital camera application, Image Capture, which I’ve become quite fond of using for downloading my images. It allows me to preview thumbnails and send the pictures to various folders on my hard drive.

But when I read today that PC Card support lives again, I figured that I’d be saying good bye to both my USB cable (yaay!) and to Image Capture (sigh)

Well, I was half right.

I anxiously took the Smart Media card out of my Olympus camera, put it in the PC card adapter, and inserted it into the PC card slot on my TiBook. Lo and behold, a drive icon appeared instantly on the desktop. My heart soared!

Then, just a few seconds later, Image Capture launched and was ready to go to work just as if I had been connected via the USB cable. How cool. The TiBook figured out what type of media I had inserted, and launched the digital photo software.

Except now the shots I selected for download transferred from the Smart Media card at triple the speed of the USB cable.

After spending the better part of the morning wrestling with my Windows laptop to even recognize my PC card, tonight’s experience with Mac OS X has me grinning from ear to ear.

Once again, the software team at Apple has done a sweet job in adding this new feature to Mac OS X.

If you’ve had any new discoveries with this latest update, let us know.