Look what 10.5.2 did!!, originally uploaded by leon.barrett.

I just upgraded leopard and look what its done.

If you can’t make it out it says “Leopard is better than Vista”

Even Apple can’t resist a digg!

CandyBar 3 is finally out. I’ve been really looking forward to the new features, and they include:

• Integrated CandyBar together with Pixadex with an entirely new interface
• Added large (512 x 512) icon support
• Leopard dock customization
• Additional system icons
• Quick Look integration
• More reliable system icon restoration, and much more

The program can be downloaded for a 15-day/250-icon limit trial here. The program is $29 for new users. Owners of either CandyBar 2 or Pixadex 2 can upgrade for $24. Owners of both Pixadex and CandyBar 2 can upgrade for $19. Any user who bought CandyBar 2 or Pixadex 2 after October 1, 2007 qualifies for a free upgrade.We can now finally customise that bloody dock!!

Rather than downloading FileXaminer I decided to modify the dates myself so all you now need to do is drop them into your stack and click arrange by date modified. It’s as simple as that!! enjoy.

To download the updated icons click here!

Here is a REALLY simple way to tidy up your stacks in Leopard. The basis for the idea was found over at XD’s blog. By default the stack will show the icon of the newest entry to the containing folder. The basic idea is to use a nice icon to always show in the stack, rather than the cluttered ‘mess‘ you see at present. We could simply add an icon and rename the icon to ‘aa’ and select sort by name for the stack. This isn’t exactly perfect as the whole idea of stacks is to show the most recent items of a folder for quick retreival. The original idea was to edit the files attributes via the terminal and change the modified date to one in the future. I found a tool that can basically do this and is a lot easier. Its called FileXaminer and is shareware (you get a 14day trial, which is more than enough time to change all of the dates of the icons).

Tip, select sort by date by right clicking on the icon in the dock rather than inside the folder.

To download the icons, click here. Ive also included a set of Adobe CS3 style icons!!

Thanks to XD for this!!

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 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!

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.

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.

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)!