Well it’s been about a day and a half with Leopard, and after reading a few reviews, I’m happy with it.

While it has it’s little quirks, and Apple unnecessarily removed certain functionality for some arguably ineffective functionality, it still is a significant improvement over Tiger, and it’s growing on me.

Overall there’s no real grand features, but lots of polish, which is still really great. Most of the advancements occurred “Under the hood” at the API and Programming Level, which means while Leopard isn’t SUPER fantastic right now, it will be soon as developers discover the great new technologies emerging.

I’ve compiled a list for things I hate and love about Leopard below.

Annoying things in Leopard:

• MDS still can’t be turned off (MDS = spotlight service), although spotlight is a lot fastetr
• iTunes has skipped twice in the past half hour. It never does that. I think it might be the single-coredness of my first install.
• Stacks are a bit pointless, but fairly useful.
• Spaces are ok, but are more like switching around too much. I think it will come in handy for when I’m not in full desktop mode with dual display, but I can see using it with FCE and stuff
• Maudio doesn’t work in any way (yet)
• The Menu Bar is a bit dark when there’s a dark background, but it’s less distracting, however there’s a “star” right where the application is right now and it’s driving me up the wall. For those of you dying for a hack for this, you can always just make 20 pixels along the top of your desktop background white (or black for a consistent silvery look) and you’re done. No special apps or defaults writing required.
• Time machine shows a status bar all the time when it’s backing up…maybe that’ll go away, but it’s ticking me off. Also, it didn’t exactly work the first few times, but I think it is now.
• Notes folder randomly takes time to “Load” (Spinny thing) even though there’s only one note, wtd? UPDATED: I hate Mail notes and Todos. I am not using them whatsoever.
• They did some weird thing with the bezel interface, making volume controls etc, harder to read. I’m pretty sure the drop shadow is gone.

Things I love in Leopard:

• Scrolling background windows
• The fact that when i’m done this note, I can just hit send. UPDATE: Not really, I went back to stickies.
• Time Machine is SOOOO awesome.
• Coverflow is neat, but not as useful as i thought it would be. We’ll see. Ars Technica goes into details about the UI changes in the Finder, but I find it pretty good.
• QuickLook is excellent. It even does SVG! 
• FrontRow is better….I guess. I wish I could use the same keyboard shortcuts, and also, I hate that it’s not the fwoosh it used to be. Also, it pauses iTunes when it launches. wtd is that? I don’t like it.
• Instalations made with Installer now do the iTunes “Complete” sound when they’re done. Also, an obnoxiously large green check mark shows up. Great.
• Mail.app is like Apple Outlook. I love it. Sort of.
• The new network preference pane are excellent.
• iCal, Mail, and pretty much everything is very quick. 
• Terminal updates are nice, but I still like iTerm
• My MacBook speakers actually have decent volume now UPDATE: Maybe not, I think iTunes was just preamped.
• AirPort finally shows secured/not secured in listing
• AirPort seemed to connect to networks really fast…
• Not only does “Scroll another window” work, but you can also right click a non active application, VERY useful for when say, you ahve a window on a second monitor, move your mouse over to the window, have something selected and right click to copy it. Amazingly, it works! AWESOME!!
• Cool feature: the checkbox in todo lists changes to an alert box when it is overdue
• Photo Booth effects are neat, the hacks are neater.

* Overall very solid.

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to flame UPS.

Tracking my iPod, I've watched as it's gotten delayed, then given an ETA (October 24th) and then watch as that ETA came and went, and it is now the 28th, with it not even budging.

The last status update was when it arrived somewhere in Ontario on the 19th. Even if you were DRIVING from there to Edmonton, it wouldn't take more than 2 days, 4 days tops. I could have driven to Ontario and driven back and I would have gotten it faster.

I am not impressed. FedEx delivered my last iPod and it was here within a few days of shipping. Apple estimated the delivery as late as the 30th, and if it doesn't come by then, UPS is getting a phone call.

So lately I've been reading way too much of "43Folders":http://43folders.com and becoming increasingly frustrated with my Axim X51v and my various syncronization methods.

I've noticed that I've been having the need to write things down. I'll be doing something, and I'll have an idea, or realization, and need to write it down right away. No problem, pull out the Axim X51v, hit the note button and away we go.

However there is a problem with this. The screen has been getting a bit scratched or maybe it's just a piece of junk, and the digitizer doesn't align with the screen anymore. Plus the usual problem of "don't let your hand touch the screen or it will blow up the pen stroke." So overall, writing notes is completely inefficient on a stylus touch screen.

But what about when you do get that note in there? Well it will site in my Notes folder or crowd my Documents folder with such descriptive names as "Note1.awd" and "Note2.awd." Of course the reasonable thing to do would be to simply properly name these notes, but isn't the whole point of making a handwritten note so that you don't have to use the ridiculous onscreen keyboard, or worse: the character recognizer?

So what I end up having is a dozen "NoteX"s that I never actually look at other than once a month, and the ideas die off and I usually can't recall what I meant by the note in the first place.

So it comes down to, what do I even use my Axim for? Sometimes I'll use it for checking mail or browsing the web when I don't have my MacBook on me (which is increasingly rare during the school year) or for keeping track of my calendar. The problem is, the calendar doesn't exactly work very well. Because I'm too cheap to buy OggSync Paid, I can't sync more than one calendar. As I get busier, I would like to seperate things like TV shows, School, Church, and Work into different calendars, as usually I end up with an overloaded Agenda that can't even be seen in it's entirety in the calendaring application.

So how do we solve this? We eliminate the Axim. With the soon to arrive iPod (Which is a blog topic in itself), I will have my entire calendar in it's seperated glory in full color. I'll be able to see my events in the future. As for Adding events, I keep a notepad on me at all times. (I happen to have a nice pleather Dell one, so I still feel like I'm carrying my Axim with me.) Every night I write down my agenda for the next day, and leave a space for new events that need to be added that pop up throughout the day.

I can also write down any thoughts I have, draw diagrams, doodle, and it's 100% crash proof. Now that's thinking like Merlin Mann.

Well, I'm waiting for Leopard to (re-)install and surprisingly (or not) couldn't think of anything to do while I'm waiting. So I decided to blog, here in IE6.

You're probably wondering why I'm REinstalling Leopard. I just finished installing Leopard, and was enjoying some of the greater unadvertised features or bug fixes, what ever you want to call them. First off I noticed right away that my MacBook speakers were back up to par with some of the other laptops. Many many people were crying on the forums about how the MacBook's dinky speakers delivered lame-o sound, and it looks like Leopard resolves this issue. Yay! No more distortion with iTunes pre-amping.

Photobooth background effects are also cool.

That's all I tried out until I started to realize that it wasn't really getting up to speed. Usually computers take a few Application launches and other time to load and cache stuff, but it definately wasn't doing this. In fact, it was freezing. Spotlight was MDS'ing it up in the corner, and was occupying all my CPU.

Now after reading all about how Leopard was much faster, thanks to it's more multithreaded processes etc, I was thinking, wasn't this the exact problem they were trying to fix? Process hanging on single core-ness?

So then I look down in Activity Monitor, and sure enough only one of my cores are doing any work. That's odd. Maybe just an activity monitor bug. Nope. In System Profiler, OS X is only reporting 1 core. Crap. So after being frusterated with the overburdened, slow, and lack-of-password-remembering Apple forums, there doesn't seem to be anybody reporting this issue. I'm doing an archive and install right now, and hopefully that resolves the issue. More on that later…but next up, my new organizational system

Meet my new fish, his name is beta (the betta)

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Wacking a fire stick on the ground to make some embers. Pretty good landscape shot in the bg too…(SS)

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Kicking some coals around (SS)

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My dad signs his initials with his fire wand.

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Our second attempt at Higher ISO. A bit noisy though…

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My Dad waves a stick of fire around for a good half minute

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