I went down to the local apple store tonight and waited in line for the opening/launch of OSX Leopard. We got there about 6:15 and the line was already pretty long with people cheering and all amp’d up. It was a pretty cool experience and we got free tshirts :) 

So far in the past hour I am pretty pleased with all the improvements in Leopard. More to follow I am sure.

Other then the Leopard fun I spent all week in a Solaris 10 training/information class for work. It was pretty informational and I am pretty interested some of the technologies in Solaris 10 such as zones and zfs.

After much contemplation I decided to go out and upgrade my first generation MacBook Pro to the latest and greatest! And I am not disappointed at all. Lets get down to the nitty gritty and the juicy details shall we?I opted for the 15in model with a glossy screen, 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, 160GB storage and the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB graphics card.

LCD/Screen: I had some serious concerns with getting the glossy screen vs the matte screen because of the possible glare issue. Now with the glossy screen there is some glare especially when the screen has a dark background I noticed the worse on black, but seriously it’s nothing to be concerned over. The image quality and brightness compared to my first generation MBP is 100x improved I’ll chalk this up to the new LED lighting the 15in MBP is using. Some people have been reporting grainy looks to their LCD’s, I don’t seem to have this problem.

RAM/Storage: I opted to get the default 160gb 5400 RPM, sata hard drive. This was another point on contention for me, I really wanted the 7200RPM drive but the apple store did not carry those and it was configuration option online only, so they told me. The extra speed would have been nice but I am not going to loose sleep over it. I also opted to get the standard 2gb ram and upgrade it to 4gb myself for half the cost, I purchased the 2×2gb upgrade from crucial.com for $300 and let me tell you this laptop soars with 4gb ram. Bottom line if you can get the ram upgrade do it yourself for less its well worth it and its very easy to install.

Sound: Nothing much here, however I did notice when I have my apple ear phones in I often hear static or pops when switching from itunes to adium etc. Nothing to major, but its annoying sometimes.

Video Card: I enjoy playing World of Warcraft often and I am very pleased to say that the new Nvidia 8600M GT 256mb video card apple is using far surpasses the old ATI in the first generation MBP’s. I have yet to try any other games but my play in WOW is much smoother (no lag) and the quality is also very much improved. I don’t do any graphic or movie editing so I cannot comment in that area as far as improvements.

Heat Issues: Compared to the first generation MBP the heat is at least 60% less on the newer model even when running vmware fusion, wow, safari and mail.

Overall my experience with the latest and great MacBook Pro has been outstanding I have no complaints and I hope this laptop will last for some time, it was money well spent

Wow, I happen to find this when watching the WWDC at apple.com. http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ Safari 3 public beta and now on windows too!  So far my most favorite addition is the inline search, much like Firefox has. And not to mention the speed of Safari 3 is amazing! Some other things I noticed, the WYSIWYG editor now works in Wordpress and Gmail..

I’ve been on the look for a killer html/php/whatever type editor for OS X for awhile now I’ve tried most of them including textwrangler, bbedit, textmate, smultron and textedit to just name a few. My requirements were pretty simple, ftp/sftp support and syntax highlights, textwrangler filled that void until today.

I found an article on digg for a product called Coda from Panic the makers of the outstanding ftp application Transmit. While bbedit and textwrangler supported syntax highlighting and sftp/ftp support it lacked a terminal. Enter Coda, sporting a elegant interface, syntax highlighting, built in terminal, collaboration, css editor and more. I’m currently using the demo but I will probably end up purchasing it.

Well it looks like apple released a repackaged version of the new software 10.4.7 that was just released a few days ago. I hope this fixes the flickering external montior issue I was seeing.

You can find more information here..