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.
We're counting down the week until the release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.5, otherwise known as Leopard. Judging by the feature list, this is going to be an excellent update which should go a long way to improving many aspects of the Mac workflow. I know a lot of human interface commentators have a number of complaints about the direction the UI is going but it appears that Leopard has a lot of improvements "under the hood" that should allow developers to ship applications with a more uniform appearance than 10.4 Tiger.
With an operating system as mature as Mac OS X, there's a limit as to the number of "new" things that the majority of users would actually benefit from. For me, the key highlights are:
[a] Spaces [b] Stacks [c] Live Previews
I know lots of folks who are raving about Time Machine. I'll most likely learn to like this once I have solved the issue of having my hard disk drives physically broken rather than accidentally deleting files :-)
As a test, I ordered my copy of Leopard from the online AppleStore and we'll see if it arrives on the 26th or ships on the 26th and arrives several days later.
Either way, the combination of Leopard and the rumoured new portable will probably trigger a hardware upgrade this side of Xmas 2007.
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.
