No way to dodge it - The Leopard review

So here it is, the worlds most advanced OS, Apples OS X 10.5 Leopard. By now it has already been written a bunch of reviews into the crooks and crannies of Leo, so this will not be a feature tour of the entire OS, click the link at the top to experience that. Instead I'll take a brief look at what's important to me in this release, and why I plunged straight into it and upgraded both my Macs to run OS X 10.5.

My main excitement in this release was in the new Mail application.. yeah, geeky right? But the ability to take notes, create todos, and have everything beautifully organized and synced with a simple IMAP account was a very appealing idea to me. And boy do I use it, I love the new Mail application, not so much the stationaries perhaps, but everything else comes of as much more efficient and polished compared to earlier releases. So I did expect Mail to be great one might say, but I did not expect CoverFlow to be as handy as it turns out to be. This is the ability to see your documents and files as content previews ordered in a sort of shuffle stack mode. Incredibly handy when browsing media files! And it's all powered by QuickLook, the new brilliant way of presenting the content of any file, anywhere. You no longer get an icon for a document type, you get an actual preview of what's inside of the document instead, and further more.. a touch of the space bar and voila, full screen preview of any file without opening a single program.

Any bad stuff then? Of course there is, Apple makes mistakes like any other company developing a piece of software spanning millions of lines of code. However, not many mistakes in this release. Some people are arguing that the dock and the menu bar has a weird graphical appearance.. well, the thing is, people always fear change, and this is one such case in my opinion. There is nothing wrong with the new desktop, it's just different.

If you need one reason besides those already mentioned to upgrade; Spotlight! It's blazingly fast and you can search any shared computer.

A more in depth review of Leopard can be found at Ars Technica.

Review: Pixelmator

The brand spanking new Pixelmator from the Dailide brothers adds a new member to Delicious generation software pool. So, this is an image editor app for OS X, utilizing Apples core image processing routines. It's not a Photoshop replacement, yet. But it has the potential of becoming one.

I'm a vigorous Photoshop user, so naturally I'm accustomed to the tools provided to me in that app. Containing in that mode, Pixelmator was a no brainer, the menus and tools where almost exactly where I expected them to be located. There is one huge difference in the UI though.. Pixelmator is far better than Photoshop, not only does it look prettier, it's also more logical, cleaner and does make for a sleeker experience. You won't get scared when being presented with the Pixelmator interface, you'll go "vow, way cool man!". Where when opening Photoshop for the first time you'll go "ehm, do I really need this".

However.. this is the first release of Pixelmator, and it is slow.. sometimes too slow, even on my iMac Core2Duo. Photoshop is much faster..and that matters. But as a whole I do believe that Pixelmator will become a Photoshop competitor..in time. Check it out at www.pixelmator.com!

Windows better on Macs? Is Apple getting greedy? And leave Steve Jobs alone!

An intriguing blog post by Steven Frank co creator of Panic software, discussing if Windows runs better on a Mac. He also shares some insight into why OS X is in fact a better OS compared to Windows.

Also, veteran Will Shipley from DeliciousMonster thinks Apple is getting greedy, is he right? Lot's of good stuff in his post.

But of course, our all time favorite Apple fan Justine, just wants us to leave Steve Jobs alone.

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