It’s here (literally)!
by Leon on October 26, 2007
Enough said!!
Thats my Leopard disk right there on my MacBook today at about half two. Thats right – before it was officially released. I pre-ordered and it was delivered by special delivery.
This is my first blog entry written in Leopard, and what a breeze it was to install. It was as simple as: put the disk in, click install and sit back and relax. No troubled updates, hardware upgrades or re-formatting of disks for me (aka Vista). In all it took about 45 mins (although it did say 3hrs 38 when it first started)!
At the moment, Time Machine is working in the background making sure i’m backed up (wow is all I can say). The interface is so much better than the preview on the Apple site. Anyway, I won’t go on too much about how great Leopard is – i’ll let you judge for yourself. All that is left to say is, this is one amazing upgrade and well worth the money. (I’ve not even mentioned Coverflow, Spaces and Web Clips yet!!)
Are you ready?
by Leon on October 23, 2007
Are you ready for the most hyped software release of the century (I have no supported facts on this, but considering that the personal computers haven’t been mainstream for that long, and this is the best there has been so far, its a pretty safe conclusion)? No doubt blogs worldwide will go mental with reviews and posts about Leopard, filling up places such as Digg with repetitive headlines about new features. I will try and refrain from posting such blogs (although technically I suppose this one counts as such a post). Oh well, not long to go now, the weekend will be taken up, wasting hours messing with Leopard!
Proof (if needed) that IE7 is rubbish!
by Leon on October 17, 2007
So I thought that with the release of IE7 some of the bugs would be fixed. Who was I kidding? I recently found some code to create an RSS feed from a database, set it up and got it working. Brilliant I thought. But like every web designer checked to see if it was cross browser compliant. There is a PDF of the screen shots I took of the feed in various browsers and environments to test it here. I don’t think I even need to say that IE failed. Oh and by the way, I checked the feed to see if it had errors and it didn’t so why the hell doesn’t it work. Just for interest this is a breakdown:
Works in:
- Firefox
- Camino
- Opera
- Safari
- iGoogle
Doesn’t work in:
- IE
Pretty conclusive?
Perfection gets better – Back to my Mac
by Leon on October 17, 2007
Just when you thought that Leopard was perfect with its 300+ new innovations Apple decides to give us another treat in the form of ‘Back to my Mac’. Put simply it allows you to control and view your Mac from any other Mac (running Leopard) via your .Mac account. Without going into too much detail i’ll allow you to read Apple’s rather stunning review. This is just another reason why Apple is beating Microsoft – a better OS with even better add-ons.
Front Row in Leopard
by Leon on October 17, 2007
Just a quick note. On the Apple site, it states that you must have an Apple Remote in order to use Front Row in Leopard. This may be a bit of a bummer for you guys that don’t own one. Fear not, Front Row is always there and can be accesed by hitting Command + Esc. You may already know this, but I thought i’d share it anyway. I wonder why Apple haven’t publised this?
By the way the Command button is the one with the ⌘ logo. You could also press F1, depending on the age of your machine.
If you do have an Apple Remote, head here to see some nifty little functions you may not know you can do with it.
Also this blog is brilliant for adding functions to Front Row, such as internet radio. Cheers guys.
OS X Portable Apps
by Leon on October 16, 2007
You may of heard of Portable Apps for Windows which allows you to run portable versions of your favourite software such as Thunderbird, Firefox, Audacity and VLC. Now there is a Mac version which allows many more apps for download.
A 512MB stick should suffice to run the majority of apps. Unlike the Portable Apps for Windows there isn’t a polished GUI to select the apps, however there is a sync tool that allows you to sync between portable and local applications.
By the way, Portable Apps for windows allows you to run Mac Classic 7.0.1 from a stick
Two more great Growl plug-ins
by Leon on October 16, 2007
This is just a link for two great plugins for Growl that notify you when there is a change in either Thunderbird or Firefox.
In Thunderbird, Growl displays a notification when new mail is recieved, and in Firefox displays when downloads are complete (clicking on the notification, opens up the download manager).
Growl Plugins for: Thunderbird and Firefox
Hope you enjoy!
I’ve got mine, have you?
by Leon on October 16, 2007
I purchased my spanking new copy of Leopard today.I say purchased its more of a pre-order, and i’ll get it when i get it. This is pretty clever by Apple, build lots of hype, get everybody to pre-order and then leave them gagging for it. As if thats not bad enough the postal strike in the U.K could see me waiting well into November to install Leopard. I checked out a few American sites (including Amazon) and they all seem to think Leopard is out on the 31st, while the officicial Apple site is saying the 26th. Either way I can’t wait. My Windows machine is also no more as of Thursday as I am about to install the new Ubuntu Release. Finally Windows is out of my life (well almost, I still have to put up with it at work). Forget browsing the web for porn, sorry art, and instead head over here. I have had many hours of ‘joy’ reading up about Leopard. My appetite is well and truly wet soaked now! Just for info these are the minimum requirements for Leopard:
- Intel, G5, or 867MHz+ G4 processor
- 512MB of RAM
- DVD drive
- 9GB of free disk space
In addition some features have further requirements:
- Time Machine requires a hard drive in addition to your boot disk (external or internal is fine)
- Photo Booth requires a camera and a processor better than a G4.
- Screensharing requires a speeding net connection (300 Kbps is Apple’s recommendation)
- DVD player requires a 1.6GHz or better for de-interlacing
Probably the best feature is that I don’t need any fancy graphics card updates, extra RAM or anything to run Leopard on my machine (cough cough Vista)!
Coda – the new Dreamweaver?
by Leon on October 15, 2007
I have started using a new tool when coding my sites – Coda. This tool in my opinion beats Dreamweaver on a number of points, amongst which the simple but useful tool bar that features:
- A proper preview – Unlike Dreamweaver, Coda uses your favourite browser to render a preview of your page (if you use Dreamweaver you will understand what I mean, a site never looks the same in the ‘Designer’ tab. Its easy to switch to preview as you don’t even need to leave the application.
- A good file browser – That allows you to view remote and local files and offers syncronisation between them. A nice feature is that if you are within a sub-folder on the local site you can publish directly to its equivalent on the root with one click.
- Editor – does exactly what it says. Colour coded for various types of code.
- CSS editor – allows you to easily edit your css files
- Terminal – Allows an SSH connection so you can remotely edit your server
- Books – features full books for quick reference to web related topics.
- Cover flow – A graphical representation of all your sites. Simply click the preview to launch the site.
Coda isn’t free, its about £40 for a single license. Try it out and give it a go, i’m sure you will agree its a bit easier than Dreamweaver to use. Head over to the Coda site for a better review.
Probably the best open source list – ever
by Leon on October 15, 2007
While trawling the web I came across a brilliant site, which lists what is probably the best open source collection for the Mac. Distribute the link and let as many people know about some of the great alternative open source apps.
