Those of you who don’t have a Mac and/or use Instant Messengers can safely ignore this post…

So, I personally think that the instant messengers available for OS X are superior to the ones available on Windows, and believe you me, I’ve used most of them! Let’s review:

MSN Messenger (Windows) - 0 of 10
WHAT A JOKE!

MSN Messenger (OS X) - 1 of 10
Only slightly less annoying than the Windows version.

AOL Instant Messenger (Windows) - 1 of 10
Yeah well, it MIGHT be better than MSN messenger, but I’m not sure.

AOL Instant Messenger (OS X) - negative 2 of 10
What an insanely stupid IM client!

Miranda IM (Windows) - 0 of 10

Trillian (Windows) - 4 of 10
Yeah, it actually is better than any listed so far, and I would use it if I had no other choice, but this application is way to hard to use and set up. It’s overly complicated, doesn’t look all that great. It’s slow, buggy, and the free version doesn’t work with Jabber, therefore it doesn’t work with Google talk.

Pidgin, formerly GAIM (Windows) - 6 of 10
This may be the second best IM client available for the Windows platform. But if you need audio and/or video chat, then it’s no good. But it does support multiple protocols, and it is free, and the interface isn’t half bad for a Windows program. I definitely prefer it to Trillian because it is so much easier to use.

Google Talk (Windows) - 7 of 10
Now this isn’t a bad client at all really. There are a few things I don’t particularly like, such as having to see as many contacts as can fit in the window, even if they are offline. But all in all, not bad. And really, it’s the simple interface that makes it such a nice IM client. Everything is clean and straightforward. Of course it only works with Google Talk… which is a problem if you are an AIM user too.

AdiumX (OS X) - 8 1/2 of 10
This is a pretty decent IM client, and in fact was my main IM client for several months. It can connect to every major chat medium, it uses one buddy list (man how I wish iChat did this natively) and has something called “meta contacts.” Meta contacts are really cool for those of us who use more than one chat medium (AIM, Google Talk etc). What this means is, when you specify more than one instant messenger account for a contact, it only displays one person in the buddy list. When you double click the person in the buddy list, the IM chat window has a drop down at the top to let you change which IM account you are messaging to. I can’t tell you how much I love this feature. Also tabbed chatting, which is very cool. Who wants 8 chat windows scattered all over the desktop?!? I want one window with tabs for each chat, and Adium has it.

However, Adium’s support for incoming fonts and colors is POOR POOR POOR. In fact, it rarely ever works. And it’s support for sending fonts and colors is just as poor! And none of the chat window skins available are as nice and attractive as iChat’s. There’s a couple of supposed look alikes, but they aren’t that good.

And, like it’s cousin Pidgin, Adium does not do audio or video chats.

iChat (OS X) - 9 of 10
I really like iChat… especially iChat 4 (Leopard’s iChat). iChat 4 introduced tabbed chatting finally, but they did it right. It’s very slick. Not to mention, screen sharing, and iChat theatre are great. And iChat supports audio and video chatting.

iChat is also sort of multi protocol… meaning it supports two chat mediums, AOL and Jabber (including Google Talk). Since I don’t have many friends on Yahoo or MSN that’s fine with me.

iChat also integrates well with the OS X Address Book. You can associate a contact with an Address Book entry, and then it will store the account ID of that contact in the address book as well as using the assigned nick name in the buddy list.

iChat is very simple and easy to use, straight forward, and fairly powerful.

What I don’t like about iChat: No sound sets, Adium allows you to save Sound sets, you can easily switch between entire sound schemes or silence it altogether very quickly and easily. Not so with iChat, each event can be assigned a sound, but that’s it. So every event has to be changed individually if you take a notion to change the sound set. And there is no easy way to silence iChat.

Natively iChat does not allow you to have only one buddy list for both protocols. AIM gets it’s own buddy list, and Jabber gets it’s own buddy list. This is a major annoyance! Fortunately, there is a fix for this problem now. The excellent plugin for iChat called Chax located here. Now, the current release does not have a fix for the multiple buddy lists problem, but the most recent beta does. It does not do away with the individual lists, but creates an entirely new window with all your contacts, regardless of which chat medium they belong to. Unfortunately it doesn’t yet support meta contacts like Adium and Pidgin. But since I like iChat so much, I can live with this for now, and hopefully a future release of chax will support meta contacts.

You will notice that I did not give any IM client a 10 out of 10… that’s because I’m still waiting for that client. If iChat didn’t need a plugin to get the option to have one contact list, and if it supported meta contacts, and if it supported sound sets, then it might almost get a 10 of 10 from me

Until the most recent beta of Chax came out, I was using iChat with only Google Talk (yes I hate having multiple buddy lists that much). I even told some of the folks I have on my AIM list that I was only going to be using Google Talk and they’d have to get with the program if they wanted to IM me…

There are a few contacts I have that only use AIM though… so thank you chax for combining my buddy lists.

So that’s it, that’s my geeky post that I had to get out…

Yes, this is a post about Apple’s newest OS for their Macintosh computer, and that OS is code named Leopard.

Leopard, or OS 10.5 is the 6th installment of Mac OS X, and yes I am running that Operating system on my MacBook Pro right now. You see, I decided to be safe and sensible this time around, having bought the last upgrade, Tiger, the day it came out… and getting a little burned by it, I decided to wait a little while and let all the developers get their apps up to snuff and even for Apple to get an update or two out there… HA!

So…

I made it to a whole six days before my Apple fanboy geekness won me back over to reason and I rushed to the Apple store to drink my cool-aid pick up my copy of Leopard.

While the upgrade to Tiger was a very bumpy ride in terms of compatibility with existing apps and drivers of which most were broken, I must say this seems to be a much smoother upgrade. Only two apps have been broken so far, and both developers have promised upgrades within the month.

So on to the wonderfulness that is Leopard!

Right out of the box and into the installation screen, you can tell OS X is feeling much more refined these days. It’s just a feeling of… grown-upness. I don’t quite know how to put my finger on it. The installation options were a bit more streamlined and intuitive, and the graphics were great, even on just the OS installer.

So after having made a disk image clone of my Tiger installation so that in case of emergency I could re-image my hard drive right back to it’s previous working state, I inserted the Leopard DVD and booted into the installer.

I opted for a wipe and clean install, there’s just something about starting completely fresh… so at 3:10 in the afternoon the installer started doing it’s thing.

At 3:28 it automatically rebooted.

At 3:33 I was looking at my brand new shiny desktop. I was amazed as this seemed much faster than a Tiger install. Very Impressive!

Now let me ramble randomly about this OS.

So, I LOVE stacks! What a brilliant idea! It makes my life that much easier.

Having To Dos and Notes Integrated into Mail is also awesome, now if only I could sync those properly with my iPhone (uhh, hello Apple, are you reading???)

Spaces is such a beautiful thing. I had never seen Virtual Desktops done right until now. It is intuitive and easy to use, and WELL INTEGRATED!!! The level of integration is what makes it work so well IMO.

All the nice new little visual enhancements are nice, subtle little things like new animations in iChat when accepting a chat invitation, the nice and completely smooth, no jitter, spaces transitions, all these little things just feel so refined. This is definitely the most refined version of OS X yet.

But let me tell you one of the features I have been looking forward to most. That is TIME MACHINE! What a life saver. I backed up manually for a long time, then I tried using DeJaVu for a while, but I was less than impressed. So clunky and un-reliable. I moved on to try many different various automated means of backup but was never satisfied with any of them. But Time Machine, ahhhhh, what a beauty. It saves whole system, and incremental backups all at once, keeps tabs on everything, doesn’t slow down the system at all, is very easy to use and set up, and best of all it just WORKS! Time Machine alone was worth the money.

Spotlight is FAST! Blazing fast. It worked fine before in Tiger, but it’s plain snappy now in Leopard. It’s very nice. For that matter (and I’m not making this up) my Laptop is noticeably faster all around with Leopard. I’m going to attribute that to the fully 64 bit architecture.

As to peoples complaints about the visual changes in Leopard, what a bunch of whiners. The barely translucent menu bar is beautiful in my opinion, and I LOVE the 3d dock. I certainly didn’t have a complaint about the dock even to start with, but using Tiger on the computers at work, then coming back to my Laptop, Leopard is just so much more visually appealing.

Well, I can’t think of anything else to say about Leopard right now so I guess I’ll quit boring the pants off of all 2 of my readers…

For those of you living under a rock, Apple yesterday announced that (among other things) the iPhone would now be only $399.00 for the 8 gig model and they would no longer sell the 4 gig model.

Since yesterday, the entire iPhone user community has been in an uproar. Words and phrases like, “I’ve been cheated” “ripped off” “price gouging” etc. have been floating around. Some who have been Apple faithfuls and buy all the new products are vowing to never be an Apple customer again.

Now, I don’t know how much of this is actually just the media and press picking up on only the negative (since when has a company lowering a product price point been a negative?), but the fact remains that there are a LOT of people whining like little babies because they feel ripped off. But the fact of the matter is, no one has been cheated, no one has been ripped off. This is technology folks. You would think in the year 2007 we would be used to this. Does no one else remember the RAZR? over $300.00 for a stinking flip phone that has (IMO) no really usable features save the actual phone. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was HIGH. And it came down quickly too!

Here are the facts. Apple announced the pricing of the iPhone models well in advance of release. People were forced to think about it. There wasn’t any impulse buying, people went to the store knowing what they were going to pay because they had known for months in advance. IMO, the iPhone is the best phone on the market and Apple had a right to charge whatever they wanted (and still does have the right if they wanted to IMO). The customer had the right to either buy one or not. The customer agreed to pay the price Apple asked for the iPhone. End of story! There is no ripping off or cheating going on here. It’s Apple’s product and those of us who were early adopters felt that being on the bleeding edge of technology by paying $599.00 for an 8 gig iPhone was worth the money. Obviously we felt this way or we would not have purchased the iPhone.

So to the whining iPhone users:

Apple says, for $600 you can have our new iPhone, Customer pays price, end of story. Because it’s not bleeding edge anymore, and they drop the price you feel cheated? That’s just wrong. You’ve had an iPhone longer than the folks who are running to get one now that they are cheaper. You paid to do that, as did I.

I’m perfectly happy with my iPhone, even at $600. Apple doesn’t owe anyone anything, they were quite justified in charging the price that they did, because obviously folks wanted to be on the bleeding edge at that price.

So whimpering iPhone users… GET A LIFE!

Yes the rumors are true, I purchased a brand new MacBook Pro in all it’s back-lit LED Glory. Speaking of the technology driving the screen let me tell you, it is GLORIOUS. I have yet to see a laptop that can compare in either brightness or quality. And on top of that, battery life is still great! Better than my Powerbook was new.

I got the top of the line 15.4” model, 2.4 GHz Dual Core, 2gb RAM. Let me tell you it is fast. In fact, it’s faster than the Dual 2.5GHz G5 I normally use at work, though if I need a lot of RAM the Dual 2.5 now has the advantage since we just upgraded it to 4.5gb.

But to give you a real life example of the speed, a video export that took 50 minutes on my 2.33GHz G4 Powerbook, and about 15 minutes on the Dual 2.5 took only 8 minutes on my MacBook Pro. Talk about a big boost to productivity!

And yes, I do have Windows installed via BootCamp, and the beauty is that Parallels Desktop recognizes BootCamp partitions so I am able to run Windows inside OS X when I’m designing Websites and need to test in Internet Explorer since that is what 90% of the world uses (it’s a horrible browser, do yourself a favor and download Safari if you are forced to use Windows), and it is fairly fast in Parallels. And, as weird as it seems, Windows boots right up and runs all by itself if I ask it to…

I did have to upgrade some of my software that I had been holding out on. PowerPC only versions of system level utilities just don’t play nicely on Intel Macs, but I knew that when I purchased the computer. I also knew that the Universal Binary upgrades were available for all my necessary utilities so I just had to bite the bullet and purchase the upgrades.

I got about 3 years out of my Powerbook, let’s see if I can get that much out of this MacBook Pro.

Or as Dr. Grant said on his blog, “iPhone, iWant.”

Check it out!

All I can say is, I’m switching to Cingular, or as they are trying to re-brand as AT&T, I guess I’m switching to AT&T.

Firefox 2.0 was released yesterday and may be downloaded here.

I have installed this version on my Mac Laptop, my G5 edit station at work, and my stupid Windows PC at home and on all 3 computers, it seems faster, snappier and in general is an even better browsing experience than it already was. There are some nice new features too, like putting tab closing buttons on the individual tabs like Apple’s Safari has had for years, and better built in RSS and feed reading support. Since I use Google reader for my RSS and feed reading, Firefox’s new integration with Google reader is nice. You can set it up in preferences to use Google reader to subscribe to a feed when you click the little RSS icon. AWESOME!

Let’s see, what else… O yes, the big one, and one of the reasons I loved Apple’s Safari, Firefox now has inline spell checking. Which makes it nicer to post on this blog for instance, because it will underline misspelled words in red just like a word processor.

Firefox 2.0 also feels much more refined. So far, I highly recommend the upgrade.