It’s been about ten days now since I’ve installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on the MacBook and, aside from a bizarre installation bug where the target installation media takes 20 minutes to appear on the installation path screen, it’s been fairly painless. The new features far outweigh the cost and I’ve noticed that things are much faster to render on screen, especially when multi-tasking. Spaces, the new virtual desktop manager application, is fantastic too. It’s easy to navigate and keep things organized. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Microsoft any time soon.
PS~ I heard Corinne’s MacBook charger caught on fire yesterday! YIKES!!! Mine doesn’t seem to have a problem dissipating heat but I guess I might have to check and see if there has been a recall. I leave this thing plugged in all the time and that would suck to have my house burn down because of it.
If you find yourself constantly typing the same segments of code or snippets of text on a daily basis, Text Expander 2 by SmileOnMyMac.com is an excellent productivity tool that can shave time off your busy day. Recently upgraded and released, Text Expander 2 has been featured on 43Folders (Merlin Mann) and MacBreak.com.
To get started, simply create triggers inside the administrative preference pane, and then whenever the system recognizes that a trigger has been typed, it is immediately replaced by the content in the trigger. Formatted text and even images can be inserted in this way.
One of the really nice features is the ability to alter the placement of the cursor inside the replaced text. For instance, if I type:
"ahref"
a trigger is activated for the following snippet of code:
<a href="_?phpMyAdmin=829c481222f7t332f3e5">Insert Text</a>
and the cursor is placed where the underscore “_” is located in the example above, ready for me to type in a URL. What a timesaver!
Text Expander is a great piece of shareware and I highly recommend it to increase your productivity on the mac!
On October 26th at 6pm local time, Apple will be releasing their 6th installment of Mac OS X, named Leopard, into the wild. Most of you know me as an Apple Fanboy, but truth be told in the not so distant past I really hated Apple and their products.
It wasn’t until around 3 years ago that Apple started laying the groundwork for what has become one of the biggest come-from-behind success stories of our generation. If you were to invest 50k in 2003 with Apple Computer Corp (APPL), you would be a multi-millionaire today! Their stock has soared in recent months, with much help from the most anticipated product of the decade, the Apple iPhone. Their full line of intel-equipped notebooks, workstations, and servers, have also really set a new standard.
People always like to point fingers at the “cultest” nature of Apple users but can you really blame me for liking their products? After only a few minutes playing on my Apple MacBook or Apple iPhone, my friends and acquaintances are left in astonishment at how elegant and user-friendly Apple products are. They pay attention to the details. Excellent engineering, beautifully crafted devices, a solid unix-based architecture, and a development community that shares the passion in developing quality apps for the Apple hardware. I have worked as a Microsoft Windows security engineer for nearly 6 years now and I’m not terribly opposed to using Windows, but I really don’t enjoy it nearly as much as sitting at home on the Mac. Vista was a total flop in my eyes and until Microsoft makes some drastic changes, they won’t be receiving any more of my money.
7 days and counting…go to Apple.com and check out the new features coming soon!!!
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything pertaining to software reviews but the latest version of Acquisition (v.2.0) is incredible. Utilizing both GNUtella and BitTorrent, Mac users have unfettered access to billions of files in a streamlined, easy to use interface. From start to finish the program has been designed to seamlessly integrate with iTunes and can preview/play media directly from within the client.
Acquisition is shareware and at $24.00 USD it’s well worth the nominal fee. My only gripe was that I recently purchased version 1.1 a few months back and was not given a path to upgrade for free.
Check out XTorrent 1.1 from the same software developer. They are rock solid!
Yesterday was a first for me… I’ve never waited in line for any great extent of time before, but when I drove by my local AT&T store on my way to work in the morning, I figured I might as well join the already growing line (already 3 people in line at 9am). I went to work and requested the day off, then joined the ranks outside the AT&T off Farrington Highway in Waipahu. The day went by suprisingly fast despite the scorching sun in the latter half of the day. After nearly 9.5 hours of waiting, I was 4th in line into the store and purchased the 8gb Apple iPhone. I had a great time with the guys in the line and even learned a little about restaurant franchising. 
It all seems great, right? WRONG. I got home just to find out that AT&T dropped the ball big-time and the activation servers were backlogged for HOURS. Needless to say, I fell asleep last night with a completely unusable $600 brick. I left my computer on all night and heard a chime around 3am — my activation had finally gone through after a mere 8 hours of processing. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and began syncing up all my media. I went back to bed until 5:30am and then I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been playing with the damn thing all day. It’s quite simply incredible.
There’s only a few small things I’ve noticed that I don’t like.
- The keyboard is EXCELLENT when typing sentences but for things like passwords and odd-named hawaiian words, it is heavily lacking.
- No Stereo Bluetooth support yet
- No Cut/Paste
- Currently no custom ringtone support
- YouTube isn’t “stateful”
- Gmail downloads EVERYTHING and the mail program ignores filters
For the most part, the device is simply incredible and I am happy to have gotten my hands on one. The word on the street is that most of the 1800 AT&T stores have sold out of the device, but that nearly all of the Apple Stores still have them in their inventory. I definitely am happy I made the jump from Verizon to AT&T.
