John Gruber from the Daring Fireball:

…seven years of hardware keyboard use have warped his perspective. He’s got it backwards: for 90 percent of people, it doesn’t make a difference whether the keyboard is hardware or software.

I tend to agree with this statement. I never used a smartphone with a hardware keyboard before the iPhone and within about 5 minutes of picking one up I was typing just fine. Trying to use someone’s BlackBerry has proven to me that I just can’t type on a hardware keyboard. Maybe it’s that my fingers are lazy and don’t want to push the hardware buttons, or maybe it just feels out of the ordinary needing to find those tiny keys. To contrast, the iPhone does an amazing job figuring out what I meant to push even when I’m not pressing exactly where I need to be.

I am going to make the boldest statement of the year only being 13 days in to it by saying:
Juno is the best movie of the year CENTURY

Cory and I were looking for something to do last night (Saturday) and I asked if he had seen I am Legend yet and he said “You know what I DO want to see is Juno”.

We proceeded to grab a bite of Thai food at Malai Thai Restaurant (Yelp! - Review), then a brownie ice cream sundae (with malted vanilla ice cream) from our favourite Bi-Rite Creamery employee, Dylan (Yelp! - Review).

We ran home for a few minutes and then caught the 22 Muni bus up to the Kabuki Theatre. A short aside, the Kabuki Theatre is a “completely green building.” The only thing I noticed (and was pleased with) was the little cups they gave me with my SUGAR filled Coke (not that high fructose corn syrup crap) was a compost-able cup made of corn. Bad news bears though - they don’t have any compost bins on site!

Anyway, onto the movie - Juno. It stars Ellen Page, Michael Cera (of Arrested Development and Clark and Michael), Jason Batemen (Arrested Development, Dodgeball, etc), and Jennifer Garner (don’t care what else she was in cause she was psychotic in this movie). The movie was entertaining, humourous, and ground-breaking. Also, the soundtrack is GREAT!

Back to your regular scheduled program: CK.

<3 Jason, Guest blogger.

As you can see from the screenshot of my google reader account (taken today), I’ve been in a reading slump for the past week. Today was one of the first times I’ve touched my MacBook for the past 7 or so days. Those little blips from 1, 2 and 3 days ago are reads from my iPhone.

I’ve been almost 100% iPhone mobile the whole time I’ve been home in Pennsylvania. It’s been nice not having to unpack the MacBook. Instead I would pull out the iPhone and use EDGE to check email, read a few feeds, surf the web, and check the weather (it’s cold here brr).

This little device truly is evolving the way I (and everyone else) interacts with the world.

Before installing Leopard I used SuperDuper! to backup all of my user files to an external drive. I performed a clean install, without printer drivers or extra languages in about 25 minutes. Once I was up and running I used the Migration Assistant to pull all of my applications and files from the backup. It went flawlessly, all of my applications and data are back in place. From start to finish this was the easiest clean install that I have ever done.

Spotlight: Could this be the end of Quicksilver for me? It very well might be. Spotlight has been vastly improved: it’s super quick and search results are actually instantaneous on my Core 2 Duo 2GHz 2GB RAM MacBook. If you have an older PowerPC PowerBook you may notice some lag as you try to type. I really think Leopard is the first step towards PowerPC’s death.

Safari 3: It’s fast. I’ve been using the public beta of Safari 3 and nightly builds of WebKit for the past few months, so the inclusion of Safari 3 with Leopard breathes some new life into the OS. The nightly WebKit builds often took quite a few bounces in the dock before it would launch, Safari 3 launches in 1 to 2 bounces.

Address Book & iCal: I’ve been using these two little apps a lot more often now that I’ve moved 2,500 miles away from home and have started “real life.” They feel lightweight, window borders are almost nonexistent in areas where they were wasting space before. iCal has some notable improvements that will be welcome in the workplace.

AirPort Menu: On Intel based Macs it now opens instantaneously, like it should.

Finder: Coverflow is a feature that I don’t see myself using. This isn’t saying that others wont find it useful as I’m sure someone will.

Stacks: I’m the type that doesn’t like Icons on the desktop unless they pertain to exactly what I’m doing at a certain time. The addition of Stacks in the Dock is a nice touch, now all of my downloads go there instead of all over my workspace.

Overall UI: Resizing application windows, especially FireFox seems smoother.. or is this just me?

The Bad

I’ve already ran into a few bugs. The Dock got all jumbled up at some point last night. The Finder icon was hovering behind the Firefox icon in the Dock. Files are not showing up on my desktop when they should be. I’m able to see them in Finder though. Spotlight somehow navigated itself off my screen after using Expose to show all windows. I could still perform searches and launch applications, I just couldn’t see what I was doing.

What happened to Notes synchronization with iPhone?

Conclusion

Overall I’m very happy with the upgrade. Although for novice users, I would recommend waiting until 10.5.1, I wouldn’t condemn anyone for rushing out and buying the upgrade right now. You’ll be very happy with what you get.

Picture this: You are a ninja typist on the iPhone, you’re showing your friends how mobile Safari works, so you type in a website address. Somehow you mistyped that precious address and end up receiving a not so nice “server not found” message. Next you go back to the URL, find your mistake and correct the error, off you go.

A better case scenario: You are using OpenDNS and you simply tap the website that OpenDNS suggests, which is probably the one you meant to type-in in the first place. Less fumbling around, less time letting your friends know that the iPhone keyboard isn’t a mythical magic creature after all.

Note: This will only work when connected to a WiFi network you already have OpenDNS setup on.

Maybe next year will bring more awareness, and maybe more people will become involved.

More Information: LightsOutSF.org; Flickr: My Photos, Others

According to the Penn State Computer Store:

“Due to Apple canceling the student licensing program, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will only be available for personal purchase to Penn State students, faculty, and staff as this boxed version.”

Despite the lack of Apple products at the satellite campus I attended, Penn State has always had excellent relations with Apple. I was able to obtain new versions of Mac OS X for cheap while there, but now it seems as though prices have sky-rocketed with the release of Leopard. Panther cost $5 -total- shipped to my dorm, Tiger $20 shipped, but Leopard weighs in at a hefty $69, plus shipping through the PSU Computer Store. I totally understand the supply and demand principle, but is Apple digging into the wrong people’s pockets?

I wonder what Wozniak thinks of this.

This just proves that you cannot hide from the google.

• System Wide Grammer Check
• TextEdit’s ability to read and write OpenDocument and Word 2007 files
• Time Machine (duh!)
• One OS supports both 32 and 64-bit applications natively and seamlessly
• Automator now allows you to record actions
• Boot Camp is built-in, with WHCL-certified drivers
• Stacks
• Overall iCal improvements: iCal moves closer to being truly useful in an office environment
• New AirPort Menu
• Screen Sharing

One feature that I thought I wouldn’t be able to live without is Spaces. I have since seen the real light-of-day: I can only do so much at once. I played with VirtueDesktops and found that having multiple desktops actually made me less productive. But I guess we will find out how Spaces compares at the end of the month.