With NetNewsWire I can keep track of all my news feeds.

I’ve been following the ‘Is it Christmas?‘ news feed with interest. Unfortunately the answer is still NO.

Having used every Mac OS X operating system since 10.1 (Puma) ordering Leopard from the Apple Store was inevitable.

Looks

Finally a consistent look again. No more of the blue/brushed steel/shaded grey look that plagued Tiger, everything is the same including the non-Apple applications.

The dock-on-the-shelf looks a little strange, especially with the blue dots under the glass indicating if an application is running. There is a terminal hack to switch it back to plain grey but I’ll just see how it goes.

The faded menu bar could take a little getting used to also.

Spaces

The main thing that I bought it for. You can have 16 virtual desktops set-up and switch between each one of them. I usually keep opening and closing application windows as I’m checking email and news feeds as well as editing code and selecting songs in iTunes. Now I can just have email and news in one space, iTunes in another and edit in a different one. It all works well in a similar way to exposé (remember when that was the hot new thing?).

New Stuff

I finally have a chance to look at Front Row, which didn’t come with my G5 iMac. I doubt that it’ll get much use but it’s nice to know what I’ve missed. Photo Booth is also included but is pretty useless if you don’t have an iSight camera. I’ll have to try it with my Canon Powershot to see if that’ll work.

Time Machine, the external drive manufacturers favourite application, is another piece of software that won’t get used. I already use SuperDuper! for backups and at least that will create a bootable copy. Not that I’ve tried it yet. Thankfully Time Machine isn’t switched on by default.

Not Working

My Cocoa Gestures, that I’ve relied upon in Safari for ages, don’t work and neither does the full gesture suite.

Photoshop Elements 2 doesn’t work and crashes when it tries to load. The excuse from Adobe is that they had to wait for someone to go down to the nearest Apple Store and purchase a copy of Leopard before they could work on a fix. Pathetic excuse. Unfortunately I don’t think that they’ll be patching the version 2 for the Mac as it’s really old. Version 6 is out for the PeeCee but not for the Apple platform until early next year. That leaves me a little stuck as I use Elements with my scanner to process negatives. So I might have to purchase a more recent copy of Elements to get it all working again.

To Do

I haven’t installed the latest Xcode yet.

I also haven’t looked at the virtual hosts that I had set-up in Apache. They always go AWOL after an update but thankfully this time I took a copy of the configuration folders.

That’s before I start looking at the Ruby, the Rails set-up and download any missing gems.

No doubt I shall have to look at the Leopard guided tour video again to see if there are any features that I’ve missed.

Niggy Tardust

I bought the last Saul Williams CD after hearing ‘List Of Demands’ on The Radio 1 Rock Show.

Now that Trent has taken more of a producer/collaborator role on the next Saul Williams album, cunningly called ‘The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!‘, it has to be worth a listen.

With Trent’s troubles with record labels of late it comes as no surprise that the next thing to bear the Reznor name has no corporate involvement. The Williams album is available for direct download from a web-site. Similar to the way that Radiohead have done with their latest release. This time you have a choice of either supporting the artists involved or to just grab the music and run. For the sum of $5, that’s only about £2.50, you can purchase the music with a clear conscience and also select the quality of the audio you require.

Trent says that it’s the most involved he has been in any project since ‘Antichrist Superstar’, Manson’s finest hour.

All I have to do now is wait for the download link in an email on November 1st to see how it sounds.

iPhone Queue

Contrary to recent rumours there is no iPhone queue outside the Apple Store on Regent Street, London.

My colleague and I walked, in the drizzle, from The Magic Circle to the Apple Store to see if the rumour was true. It isn’t. I was hoping that the Apple faithful were out in force but they weren’t.

A little disappointed not to be the 10 millionth customer but we were just glad to be out of the crowds and the rain. The 10 million customers statistic can’t be all that accurate as I’m sure 8.25 million are tourists who just go in to check their emails. Even my colleague was quite shocked to see so many people at Macs just checking email… so he decided to check his own on a Mac Book.

The Magic Circle

Yes, I have stood on the stage of The Magic Circle in London.

Something that I didn’t know is that you can hire The Magic Circle for corporate functions and conferences. The company whose software we use at work held a conference to demonstrate the new functionality available in the next release. Certainly reason enough to attend as we currently use the oldest version of their program compiler and user interface. Yes, you would think that all information technology companies were on the very cutting edge of their profession. We are so far away from the cutting edge that we are practically Amish.

The fun started before lunch with James “The Man of Steal” Freedman beginning his performance by saying that banks, because of security concerns, have to be sure that you are who you are. He asked members of the audience various questions, name of a school, how much change they have and the name of a bank. This he wrote on a piece of paper. Then I was picked to go up onto the stage and he asked if I smoked. I don’t so he handed me a cigarette lighter. He asked me to light it and touched the note to the flame and it flared up and disappeared. James then took out his wallet. Unzipped a compartment and pulled out a piece of paper which he asked me to read. It was a letter from a bank which mentioned all the items of information that the people in the audience had chosen at random.

James performed a few more tricks before introducing Martyn Rowland who did some more. During lunch both of them mingled around doing card tricks and we were all really amazed. I’d seen the same kinds of tricks on TV before but never live and never that close up.

The first floor of the building had display cabinets containing magic props, Tommy Cooper’s fez and his Martini bottles, and also a few items that belonged to David Nixon, if you’re old enough to remember him. The auditorium was on the second floor and could seat about a hundred people. Each of the seats had the members name on it. The only name that I recognised was behind me and was for Geoffrey Durham.

After lunch we had a quick tour of the museum in the basement. Two of the doors in the corridor were labelled ‘Members Only’. One was an extensive library and the other a prop room.

The Magic Circle really is a great and unique venue for corporate events.