I've been blogging since early 2002 and am amazed that people continue to log in and check it out!
What you'll find here is my personal thoughts on family, technology, art and other things that happen to grab me.
Happy October 1st, 2007. For most of us, this isn't a particularly significant date but it does mark the fact that the next major revision of Mac OS X [10.5 aka Leopard] will ship at some point prior to month-end.
Apple has already posted information on what you'll need in order to get up and running with the new big cat:
• A PowerPC G4 (800Mhz or faster), G5 or Intel Processor • 512MB RAM (additional recommended) • DVD drive • Built-in FireWire • 9GB Hard drive space • Built-in display or an Apple-supplied Graphics Card
This will effectively end-of-life any older CPU's which don't have a processor speed of 800Mhz, so my old Rev 1.0 iBook will be completely relegated to a museum piece. Not that it was ever used for anything other than the "Wow, it's blue and has a handle" industrial design comments.
Of course we've all seen the major new features in Leopard and I'm sure that there won't be any last-minute surprises chucked in at the 11th hour... but still I'm looking forward to taking the new OS for a spin.
Reading the numerous 10.5 blogs it appears that some 10.4 features will be deprecated and there'll be some minor workflow improvements when 10.5 is used on conjunction with "other" Apple devices - I'm guessing iPhone, here.
I think the biggest impact for me will be the closer integration of the new interface tools [SpotLight, Spaces, Stacks, etc] which will make navigating around the ever-increasing number of files a much easier proposition than with 10.4.
Of the 300 or so new features, Apple seems to be pressing Time Machine very heavily but for me this is one of the major downsides... the functionality is great, but they've kind of thrown away the Human Interface Guidelines on this. I - along with lots of other Apple users - really hope that 10.5.x transitions us to a more homogeneous user interface.
