Jason Crowther’s Blog

Made that realization as I was driving down to Carousel to wait an hour in line to buy a copy of the new Mac OSX, dubbed Leopard. I never thought I’d do something like that.

I was just gonna blow off the big kick off at 6, but I had a friend who was going was looking forward to having a chat whiling away the hour. When I made the scene about 5:10 there were already about 40 people in line. Hmm, guess the stake out was a good idea. After I made to the end of the line, an Apple Creative wheeled a cart with coffee (Starbucks, none-the-less) and bottled water, thanked me for coming out and offered me a beverage. These Apples guys are alright.

The balance of the hour was split between diehards waxing on their various macs and iPhones and the uninitiated asking again and again just what Apple was releasing this time around. Of course, just saying Leopard got some strange looks. The other semi-amusing part was folks who wanted to get in the closed Apple store (or right after the reopening) to do their non-os related shopping.

Soon enough, at 6:02, the gate on the storefront went up to a semi-enthusiastic cheer. Thankfully (probably from iPhone experience), they controlled access to the store with some ropes and a few security guards. About 10 minutes later, I stepped in a got my free t-shirt and headed back to the check out to grab my Leopard copy. In normal fashion the line was moving fairly quickly with other staff pulling out the credit card purchasers and ringing them out on their handheld terminals. A few minutes later I was heading back out with my Leopard family pack in hand.

Later in the evening, I ran a Super Duper backup (not that I was really worried) and started the Leopard installer. The install process was fairly uneventful and took about an hour including a media check on the DVD before the actual install began. Everything came up nicely on the final restart.

For the most part, things are working out fine. I’m enjoying a lot of the new visual tweaks like the update doc and system menus. I’m trying to whittle down my downloads directory so the cool stacks feature on the doc will show the fan from all the Leopard screen captures I’ve seen lately.

Like I said, most things are working fine. But there are a few sticky wickets. The official Last.fm player and Mozilla Songbird go down in flames when you try to start them up. I’m not too worried about them, I’m sure there’ll be updates for those soon enough. The other slightly strange item I noticed was that when I go to the Network in Finder, I don’t see any other computers in my (otherwise Windows) network. I’m guessing its more of a configuration item than a bug. Gotta look into that further.

I’ll try to file further Leopard briefs as I find more cool (or busted) stuff… stay tuned.

Recently, I was downloading an excel file in Firefox on Mac. In the download manager, I got this strange looking jack-in-the-box icon:

Strange, indeed. Never saw that for any other downloads.

At first I thought it was just because my Mac didn’t know what an XLS file is. But, then I remembered that I still have the Microsoft Office free trial installed. So, when I looked for the file on the desktop after the save, it looked fine:

Anybody else seen anything like that before?

Been a little busy with week with work and chores this week so I’ve been kinda quiet on the blogfront (well, except for that iPhone post.)

I finally pulled the trigger and bought an Apple; a nice shiny white MacBook from the refurbished department in the Apple online store. I was watching their offerings for a while and as the stock began to dwindle, and a few of my initial choices blipping off the screen, I was getting nervous that I might miss a good opportunity.

Other than some buyers remorse after seeing the store restocked with more options the day after I purchased mine, I think everything turned out just fine. I’m quite happy with what I got and I would have purchased more machine than I really needed if I would have went with one of the fancier models.

So, this my first extended trial with OSX. I’m collaterally familiar with it from tech support for my in-laws, but I’ve never had my own machine to dial in the way I like. First off, its quite refreshing just for the change of pace. After 5 years of Windows XP its just a little stale.

After completing the initial welcome to your computer walk through (including taking my account picture with the built in webcam), it found my wireless internet network setup but couldn’t connect. That’s a good thing actually, because I have it set up to give access only to certain MAC addresses (hadn’t added the MacBooks yet). After configuring my router, it was a pretty simple matter to type in the access key in network setup. It picked up the wired ethernet with no hassles though.

OSX is pretty slick. Sure, there’s a little trouble every now and again trying to figure out how to do some little task or where to configure something (though Spotlight search seems to help in both cases), but that’s to be expected.

Its amazing to see how much detail Apple puts into their operating system. Seemingly silly little graphical details make the user experience a lot nicer. A couple examples:

• When you’re using iChat and your dock is set to autohide mode, the iChat icon still bounces into view when a new message arrives. I like that a lot more than incessant blinking of my windows chat program in the task bar.
• This one is super silly and makes me giggle every time. After you take a picture in Photo Booth, the picture just doesn’t appear in the tray of recent shots, it slides in and drops to the bottom, just like it was sliding out of a real photo processing machine. Geez, I’m such a nerd.

I’m sure I’ll have more little gems like this to post about as I get to mess around more and get a little more comfortable.

So far, I haven’t really enjoyed the portability yet. The MacBook spends most of its time on the desk in my office. It has made a few short trips to the living room and my easy chair. I’m thinking about whiling a few hours in public at a Panera near me that offers free Wi-Fi while enjoying some of their fine baked goods.
That’s a enough rambling for now, I guess. I’m gonna get back to playing.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Apple (now just Apple, as opposed to Apple Computer) finally let the cat out of the bag out their new cellphone. 30 months in the making, the iPhone is amazing. Part cellphone, part iPod, part Mac.

The Macworld Keynote reveal of the phone was pretty cool. Steve Jobs did a pretty good job teasing his way the through the introduction. He then proceeded to demo many of its amazing features.

Like the iPod, the phone is all about having a smart interface. There is only 1 mechanical button on the front of the phone. The rest of the interface is driven totally from an advanced touch screen. Its not just pointing either; its a multi-touch interface where you can use multiple fingers to do operations like resizing pictures, and typing. Perhaps the most amazing example was scrolling through your contact list just like it was a rolodex.

Of course, any new, high tech phone has be internet ready. The iPhone is no exception; but, it takes web browsing to a whole new level. Forget minibrowsers and WAP, this thing has scaled down (or phone enhanced, depending how you look at it) version of the Safari web browser. You basically browse the web as normal and then zoom up the specific areas of the page you want to read. I haven’t seen any other phones that doing anything like that yet.

I’d love to have one eventually, but I’m in no particular rush to run out and get one (even though they don’t even go on sale until June.) I just re-upped another 2 years of Sprint service. By the time I’m ready to get my next phone, hopefully they’ll have all the bugs out of this one and maybe the price will be down a bit.

Via digg, I stumbled on something call macheist. The idea is that a bunch of mac software developers banded together form a bundle of all their offerings. 10 programs a more than $350 value for only $49. and wait, don’t order just yet… 25% of your $49 goes to a charity. Sweet.

The original plan was that the last two big ticket programs (Newsfire and Textmate) didn’t become part of the bundle until certain charity goals were met ($50k and $100k). I checked in yesterday and they’d broken the 50K line. Later in the day, they dropped the 100K line for Textmate (and said that they’d pay the difference to 100K line out of their own pockets if they didn’t make it). As of right now, I’m happy to see they already at $116K, with another day and half to go.

Even though I don’t have my mac yet, I thought the deal was just too good to pass up. So, I bought my own copy of the bundle and I’m burning it to cd (along with all the registration program details) so it’ll ready to roll when my mac makes the scene. With Textmate being second on the list of programs (after Parallels) to buy after I get my mac, getting all the other programs in the bundle for just $10 more (and seeing some of the funds go to charity) seemed like a great investment.

Might be too little too late, but this bundle would surely be appreciated by any mac enthusiasts on your christmas gift list.

Update (2006-12-18) At the end of the promo, charity donations exceeded $200K.  Good job!