I haven’t updated in a while but I was excited enough about this quarters Macworld that I’m breaking the silence. An Airport Extreme base station with a hard drive inside!? TimeCapsule the newest product from Apple, announced today is described by Gizmondo as:
At Macworld 2008, Apple just announced Time Capsule, a full Airport Extreme base station with 802.11n wireless and four ethernet ports, plus server grade hard drives to back up all of the Leopard Macs in the house. We were hoping something like this would come around, and we’ll share details with you soon. In the meantime, let’s all celebrate the reasonable price: 500GB for $300; 1TB for $500.
This is the best thing ever. I was really unimpressed with TimeMachine when it debuted because I have a Macbook and I’m always moving around the house. I didn’t want my computer tied to my desk. Now I don’t have to worry about it because I can replace my base station with something that will act as a back-up server and my wap all at the same time!
So I upgraded to OSX Leopard this weekend (Apple OS10.5) and my first thoughts are for the most part positive.
Initial observations:
‘Spaces’ became a feature that I immediately was unable to live without. Far more useful than Expose ever was.
All of my old essential programs still work including Mozy, Quicksilver, Firefox, Transmit, The Adobe CS Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator) etc.
NodeBox and Processing (Proce55ing) still work.
Although I’m not using time machine, it’ll be essential to backing up my data and helping me to migrate to new machines in the future.
Coverflow in my Finder is amazingly useful.
The new ‘quickview’ option for files (just hit spacebar) also instantly became so used that it makes the old versions of OSX hard to use.
Runs way faster and seems to be more stable.
Initial Pet Peeves:
Hardly any new wallpapers although the Leopard space theme is cool.
The new screen savers are silly.
The new MAIL won’t let me make custom folders for storing documents.
The new dock, won’t let you do the ‘fan contents view’ if you have it on the left or right side of your screen.
Still no built in OS themes (you can toggle between two colors).
Doesn’t feel like an upgrade. The subtle upgrades are much needed and much appreciated but this could have easily been included in 10.4.9.
All in all I feel like considering the amount of time I waited for it to be released and considering all the hype, Leopard isn’t all it was cracked up to be. I was really expecting Apple to up the ante on this but much like Vista was to XP, Leopard to Tiger adds some useful features but really isn’t anything to write home about.
I’ve received quite a few requests to make my works available as prints and wallpapers. I decided to do so through DeviantArt. You can download all my work resized with correct wallpaper dimensions from my flickr page. Or download the first collection in it’s entirety by clicking this link.
