I haven’t done much this evening but Tiger, I gotta say I love this thing. It’s sweet!

I think Tiger is a much more significant upgrade than Panther and worth every penny. I love Safari RSS, it doesn’t show the feeds in a folder like Firefox, it aggregates them into a separate page, it’s WAY better than Firefox’s implementation. I also like that there is a unread number count next to the shortcut in the bookmark menus.

Going hand in hand with Safari RSS is the RSS Screen saver, it’s wicked hard core! It takes the RSS feed of your choice and spins the articles around the screen showing you the RSS item and if you hit the corresponding number of the article, it will jump you right to the Article in Safari. Sweet!

Also cool is Dashboard. I am loving it. I have found quite a few useful Widgets. I love the way the Stickies Widget uses the Marker Felt font to make it look like you’re really writing on a Post-It. Mail is also much improved. I love that when pictures are in an email message, you can click on the “Slideshow” button and it starts a slideshow of the pics, you can also see all the pics in a “INDEX PAGE” view within the slideshow. The coolest part is that if you see a picture you want to save to iPhoto, click the iPhoto button and a way neat visual of the picture being SUCKED into iPhoto occurs. Sweet.

Perhaps the greatest improvement is Spotlight. It really makes it easy to find stuff. Press the Cmd (Apple) key and the spacebar and a blue box appears in the upper right hand corner, type what you’re looking for and it finds it. Want to start iChat, type iChat and you get a list of Applications and documents for iChat. The killer is I did an search for “update” and it found abt 700 emails, pdf documents, html documents, bookmarks and even a PHOTOSHOP file that had a Text layer that said “this update” so neat.

I am loving Tiger, Shawn even got excited and wondered aloud “Why would anyone want a PC when you could have this?”. Why indeed.

OK, it’s 12:22pm. Taking my lunch on my work at home day to install Tiger. It showed up at 11:45 by FedEx. It was hard but I put it aside to finish up some work I had to get done. It was hard but I did it. I just finished the cloning of my 10.3.9 system on the G5, and restarting to boot up off the install DVD. While we’re on that subject, it only came with a DVD, no install CDs. I bought the family pack for my Macs and my Mom’s iBook, which sadly is a G3 with NO Combo drive. I think if boot my PowerBook up in Firewire Mode (Cmd + T) that it will see the DVD drive and maybe I can option boot off it. I’ll have to see. I’ll keep u posted.

The box is nice, black with a platinum colored, raised X on the box. Inside is a trial DVD of iWork, a pamphlet for .mac and a guide. I immediately made a back up copy of the DVD (take no chances)!

I started the install at 12:41 PM, the Language selection screen is new, it looks like a login box only elongated. The next boxes are pretty much the same only with a nice platinum X on the left side of the dialogs. I choose to erase and reformat my hard drive, and choose Customize to choose what I want installed. Hmm this is different, the install no longer has items you can unchoose like iCal, iSync, iTunes, Stuff It Expander.

The choices are the base system, printer drivers, additional fonts, languages and X11. I think we’ll do Base and X11 only please, 2.0GB. It’s 1.9GB without X11. Okay now we’re checking the DVD, we can SKIP that thank you and at 12:43 we’re off and running.

It’s 12:51 (8 minutes and we’re at 83%, something called “Oxford Dictionaries” is being copied. Hmmm.

12:52 and the install is done rebooting my G5. 9 minutes that’s not bad. My last XP install took 45 minutes. Sweet.

I am being shown the Welcome video, it is in fact, the one that was leaked a few weeks ago, a Spotlight sliding across 3D translations of Welcome in lots of languages. How cool.

I took my time getting to the set up and registration questions and a voice came on and asked me if I needed the voice over service to set up my Mac! How cool! The screens were normal fare , account name, registration info and also do I wanna xfer data from an old mac, and 2 screens asking me to join .Mac. And we’re off. Wow the screen is much brighter and the colors more rich, or it could be I am looking at my PowerBook typing this and my 20 Cinema Display on my G5. First off i notice the Dashboard icon in my dock and the Apple in the Apple Menus is a very bright blue with a dark satin finish very different than the Aqua Apple of Panther.

I had to click on the Dashboard icon and the widgets flew into the screen like they were coming from behind my head, cool affect but I thought someone said they appeared like water rippling (note to self, check the prefs!). By default there is the Calculator, Calendar, Clock, and Weather (both set to Cupertino of course). Clicking the italicized i flips the widget around where I can make changes. There is also a PLUS sign in the lower left corner which brings up a bar with more widgets on it and a “More Widgets” button. Oooh a translator, drag that on to the desktop. There’s the ripple affect. When u place a widget on the desktop it’s like a leaf falling into a puddle, soft ripples emanate from the widget. Damn Windows has a lot of catching up to do!

We’ll come back to Dashboard later (damn I wish Shawn was here!). Next lets check out iChat, first of all the icon has changed, gone is the AIM Man now just a cartoon convo bubble and a video cam icon in it. The setup screen seems the same except it asks me if I want to use a Jabber account as well as my AIM or .Mac, neat. The prefs screen is different, you can have multiple accounts and just check them off or on. The Video tab has a “Set up Bluetooth Headset” button. Neat.

Okay I sadly have to get back to work. There is so much more I wanna say. I will post more 2nite.

See ya

I just checked my order on the Apple Store and the status of my OS X 10.4 Tiger order is SHIPPED! WHOO HOO. No email yet from Apple with a tracking number but we live in hope it’ll be here tomorrow!

Tonight was a good one. Quiet and enjoyable.

I got the rest of my blogs up on WordPress. This makes me happy, I also got the template finished. Now I just have to do the pages! Hopefully the photo pages won’t be too bad.

I am off to bed. I really feel like working longer but… don’t think that’s gonna happen

Nite.

P.S. I hope you feel better Vu!

Well I just headed over to blogger to make a quick post to my news blog (it’s still there for now), and Tomcat errors. I hate that site. That seals it. I just have to figure out how to get each of the blogs to work over here. Maybe I don’t need as many…

Is that even a word? Perhaps I should quote Blanche Deveraux, “I’m stunned. Just Stunned. Stunned can’t begin to express how…stunned I am.”

Today has been one HELL of a day. Started off bad, work made it worse, too much to do, not enough time to do it, now I live with that ever constant decision, work all day and all nite or have a life… sigh.

Even though that’s weighing heavy on my soul, it’s not what this post is about. It’s another, get ready for it Apple Rant. Now once again to my Windows friends out there, I don’t want emails and IM’s telling me all the reasons I’m wrong, I am sure they are some and that you might even be right, but get your own blog and start spouting about Microsoft, this is my blog and it’s all about me!

Howerver, if you do have something to say… feel free to in A COMMENT. That’s what it’s there for. Tell the world (or at least my readers) what you think.

Ok…

Now there has been more than a few Tiger vs. Longhorn articles recently. I’d like to say first of all, how is this even possible to compare a FULLY BAKED, RELEASED OS (Tiger) to a Pie In the Sky, barely beta ready OS (Longhorn). I don’t see how Microsoft can (and they are in many ways) claim that Apple has stolen functionality from Longhorn. Excuse me… your OS isn’t done. It doesn’t work. It’s not real. The technology in question is Spotlight. Apple not only has figured it out, but it’s out now. I don’t get it, ast time I checked Apple has Mac OS X 10.4 coming out on Friday, and Microsoft just released another DEVELOPER BETA of Longhorn.

On to that… This morning Ed sent along some screen shots of Longhorn. I was truly kind of excited, I mean yes, I am an Mac geek but I am still above all a technology whore. Well to that let me say…YAWN. How boring. It looks like XP. It doesn’t look like what they were pushing THIS TIME LAST YEAR! But they did over a year extend the date (late 2005 to late 2006) and strip out lots of features…I mean Bill touted WinFS as the core of Longhorn in 2003 and now it’s not coming out with Longhorn in late 2006, I mean what’s up with that? I also don’t understand how every little event causes Longhorn to be delayed! Patches, bug fixes, service packs? Isn’t this the world’s largest and most profitable software company?

It appears that I am not the ONLY one who feels this way. Paul Thurrott a Windows Guru and Advocate is actually quite disappointed with Longhorn, he actually said “Longhorn is in complete disarray and in danger of collapsing under its own weight.” He has nothing good to say and actually feels pretty much the same as I did, and he was there for the presentations! Presentations where they promised more polished features, but again it’s a year later and this beta looks worse, and feels like another Microsoft “polish the shinola” effort. Delays, stripped features and “hey you stole something we don’t even have yet” leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Microsoft is really starting to wear thin on me.

I think this might just sum it up. The other day, I was having a conversation with Fig about Tiger and Apple and how this releasing an OS upgrade approximately every 18 months is getting old. This is true. It really is, however, I buy them. Not cause I need to but cause I want them. Apple OSes bring new software, neat features, cool additions make it worth while. Not so with Microsoft. I routinely choose Windows 2000 Professional over XP. It’s cleaner, smaller and I can do all the same things as with XP. I realize that it’s a good thing Microsoft doesn’t update their software that fast, I just wouldn’t buy it.

I know I’m a Mac Geek but there are reasons I swear! For one, why does OS X come with tons of software apps and Windows comes with only a handful of useless ones? I mean Address Book in OS X is so much more than Windows Address book. iSync? iCal? iChat AV just to name a few. What does Micosoft give you? Solitaire.

There really is a better way people, it’s Macintosh. Seriously, go try it.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Boy did I underestimate how much work there is to do on the site…

I worked another whole evening on it. I am a man possessed. I am sure Shawn’s ready to get rid of me but I just wanted thank him for being supportive and interested in what I am doing. He’s been so good about my spending time in front of my PowerBook.

I got the blog totally done. Fixed in IE too. The layout is ready and the section code is working. I have a touch more clean up to do on that. I want to keep my front page the way it is and NOT put my blog out there. I think I could do it okay, but it’s not really what I want to do. I also realized I might have to recode all of the photo gallery pages. That’s a lot of pages and I might even have to recreate them from iPhoto. I accidentally deleted the albums from iPhoto and never recreated them.

I really hope I can get this done soon.

For now, i am going to bed. I am exhausted.

According to MacRumors.com today, Amazon is listing for sale new PowerMac G5s with DUAL 2.7GHz G5 chips.

Funny Apple hasn’t yet released them. Oy. Steve must be pissed between people getting Tiger from PCMall early and now this. He might stroke out.

I have not been this excited about anything in a long time. I am so happy I got the WordPress installed and working correctly. I am so glad I could blog again. I have given up on trying to recreate the “lost post” that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I am also really excited about the new design. I know you might be sayin…enuff talk what does it look like, well patience my friend, it’s almost done. Something that came up today though, my site is actually 3 different blogs, one for the homepage, one for the newsblog and one for my blog. I really could leave them on Blogger for now but I am feeling like that’s cheating. I figured out how to have multiple blogs with WordPress (in the same DB no less!), but I gotta figure out how to get the home page going. I don’t want to install WordPress at the root of my site so I guess that means a frames page? Also one nice thing about Blogger was that I could post nothing but a LINK, which is what the newsblog does. I guess that won’t be the case anymore, I don’t even know how many people find that valuable.

This brings me to another topic that drives me crazy, I have on occasion asked people for feedback on my blog and my site, and I always get a few responses, Fig, Nohea, Rob and Keith for example, but I know there are a lot more people out there who read this thing. I would really love it if lots of my readers maybe could leave me a comment (the new comment system is great!), you can even make it annonymous as to if you read the links in the newsblog or not.

As Bartles and Jaymes used to say…”and we thank you for your support”.

Okay….the Blogger exodus continues…

As you can see, I successfully got my entries imported from Blogger to Wordpress. I am really excited and this was an easy process. I know it’s not matching my site just yet but be patient. It should in a day or two…

I got the new layout of the site done and it’s finally freaking working in:

IE 6.0 (2000/XP)
Safari 1.3
Mozilla Firefox (Mac and PC)

This was tough. The layout of the new site is so neat and I got the drop shadows via CSS to work (thanks Ed!). Tonight was very frustrating tho… The code was working perfect in all browsers except IE 6.0. I ended up having to retype the code and suddenly it worked. I give up. LOL.

So the blog code/template is done, the comments look sweet. Next step is to put the finishing touches on the template and update all my exisiting pages. This shouldn’t be too hard, just some linking to do for the breadcrumbs and navigation. I really want this done ASAP. It’s on my mind 24/7 and I got work to do at work and Tiger comes on Friday.

Wish me luck. WordPress it is.