MacBook Air

Enjoyed the SteveNote immensely.

The new MacBook Air is beautiful...not something I really need...but very very beautiful. Great for people who might be traveling a lot (wink wink, Lee).

SteveNote 2008: the excitement builds

Tomorrow is the most exciting day on the Apple fanboy calendar -- the real christmas. Yes, as we speak, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is making his list and checking it twice before tomorrows big keynote presentation.

The strongest rumor is that Steve will be announcing a new sub-laptop -- a macbook that's light weight, tiny, and probably works off a flash based hard drive. And perhaps there'll also be an announcement of a new 3g iPhone -- such a device would be perfect for the Australian market.

But there's always the chance that something completely unexpected will be announced as well. Steve has a talent for nice surprises.

So tomorrow i'll be waking up and downloading the video of the keynote straight away. Macrumours.com has a nice email service to let you know when the video is ready, if you'd like to sign up too.

Macnytt has also provided us with this great SteveNote bingo game to play.

Software review: Mac OS 10.5 Leopard

The latest edition of the Macintosh operating system -- Leopard -- has been out for a month or so now, and i've been using it for a couple of weeks. My oppinion? It seems pretty good, although certainly not a revolution in computing. It seems to introduce mainly small changes.

Best features (IMHO):

- Screen sharing. VNC style remote control of another Mac on your internal network, or even over the net (although i've not tried that). This feature works beautifully. It has saved me switching my monitor back and forward between my two computers every 5 seconds.

- PDF annotations in Preview. Circle, underline, highlight, and comment on any piece of a pdf file. I wish I had these features while I was doing my honours research this past year.

Over-rated:

- Spaces. Multiple virtual desktops. Nifty, but I can't find any useful way to use it. I can never remember which virtual desktop I was working in. Ended up turning it off.

- Stacks. Pop-up display of folder items from the dock. Looks cool, but I've not found it overly helpful. Maybe I'm just stuck in my ways.

So, I'm glad I upgraded, but Leopard doesn't seem to be anything spectacular. Although, I think we'll see Leopard come into its own when software developers begin to take advantage of the improvements to CoreImage , and the other hidden bits and pieces.