Get A Mac Commercial: Santa Claus.

CandyBar 3 Upgraded For Mac OSX Leopard.

Although I am every bit as in love with Mac OSX Leopard as I was with its predecessor, Tiger, I am a little annoyed by how long it is taking some of the developers of third party applications that I used frequently and happily on Tiger to upgrade their products to Leopard compatibility. Luckily, some of the aforementioned developers are back on their grind. Like Panic who a few days ago updated Candybar, which allowed mac users to change all the icons, system and application, on their computers. Sounds simple and a bit insignificant, I know, but it’s really not.

Most people, whether they’re using a mac or are stuck on pcs, like to personalize and customize their computers, myself included. CandyBar makes that easy as 1-2-3. There are a ton of great features in CandyBar 3, you can customize icons, the dock, it has Quick Look integration, a gorgeous new interface and now has pixadex integrated so you can store icons in it as well. Now more clicking and dragging icons from pixadex into CandyBar for use. Dope.

You can download a free trial or purchase it outright for $29. Discounts to those who purchased Pixadex and/or CandyBar 2.

Candybar 3.

Mary J. Blige iPod Ad.

Hows this for a segue… I got to watch a lot of television over the Thanksgiving Holiday break, which is something I don’t often get to do. One thing I noticed is there are tons of apple ads on T.V. nowadays. That’s probably part of the reason their stock is over $171 a share now as opposed to the $98 it was about a year ago. My favorite of the current slew of apple spots is this one with MJB. It features a track from her new jammie which drops in two weeks. What a fly ass commercial.

5 Great Applications For Mac OS X Leopard.

Okay, so you’ve got the new hotness from apple up and running on your mac. Now all you need are a few applications that are equally as hot as your new operating system. Well, your boy, Allen has a few suggestions for you. Naturally. Some are great for increasing productivity, some are just flat out fun, all are extremely cool and good looking. So in no particular order:

Skitch: Image capture goes from ho-hum to badass with skitch by plasq, the fine people behind another favorite app., Comic Life. With Skitch you can capture j-pegs from the web, do screen captures of your desktop and save images to your hard drive with drag and drop ease or with a mere click, host them online in a “My Skitch” Account for access where ever you go and for easy sharing. You can email an image directly in Skitch. Rotate, do some rudimentary photo editing, rotate, crop, doodle, add text… all that good stuff. Also, the window is customizable, which I love; of course being a mac user, I’m into aesthetics. If you try Skitch, I know you’re going to love it. You can get it now in beta for free, it will almost certainly cost you later on.

Sapiens: Leopard is a true 21st century operating system, what you need to pair with it is a 21st century application launcher. Admittedly, app launchers have been done to death. What is different about Sapiens is it utilizes the mouse as opposed to the keyboard, like say, the ultra-popular Quicksilver. Quicksilver is cool and all but sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in the 80s with it. A quick spin motion of the mouse springs Sapiens to life. It will intuitively learn the applications that you use most often and store those in its UI for you to click on it to open the application when needed. Or, for those of you who must type, type the first few letters in the name of the application ala Quicksilver, toggle the app to the center of the UI with the arrow keys and hit return. The extra step makes it, obviously, a few seconds slower than quicksilver but the cool factor more than makes up for it. Sapiens costs $19.95 (peanuts) and is produced by Donelleschi Software who also brought the world Sticky Windows (which I can’t live without).

istat menus 1.2: islayer.com just updated istat menus for Leopard, which made me very happy because now I can list it here. I don’t think there’s a better way to keep an eye on what’s going on under your mac’s hood than with istat. Again, this is a crowded area of development in the mac universe and there are plenty of nice apps that will do the trick for you. But istat menus is customizable (big plus) and it’s up there in that dead zone known as the menu bar not taking up screen or dock real estate. And it’s free. Top that.

Dress Assistant: Okay now, I’m cheating. Software De Arte’s Dress Assistant has been out for a minute and has not been updated for Leopard but it still works exactly as it always did with Tiger. Besides, how can you have a music and fashion blog and not talk about the only mac application for fashion obsessed people? There are apps for cataloging your video games, books, manga, DVDs, CDs, etc… etc. Dress assistant is an app for cataloging your wardrobe. Will do nothing for your productivity. Absolutely not. But Damn, if this is not cool. You can even match up stuff to check out different looks. Store clothing by seasons and by type (blazer, pants, skirt, dress, and so on). It costs 19.95 and there is a full functional demo mode available that is limited to 20 pieces of clothing. Need to keep track of your Bape gear? Got a major league shoe fetish? This is a fun way to keep it together. Hey, for $20 bucks this is totally doable. Dress Assistant is a very, very beautiful thing.

iWork ‘08: Personally, I feel iWork ‘08 beats the pants off of Microsoft Office. Flat out. With the addition of the spreadsheet application, numbers, the much needed improvements to pages ( Keynote was always great), and full compatibility with office, the office suite war is over and apple is king. All three applications have the usual ease of usage that we come to expect from apple and at $79, it is a fraction of the cost of Microsoft Office and, of course, on mac Os X Leopard it runs like a dream.

Review: Apple OS X Leopard.

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Well, after spending the entire day (it arrived via FedEX around 9:30AM), first loading and then poking around apple’s highly anticipated new operating system, OS X Leopard, I am finally sure of what I want to say about it. No surprise the new hotness from apple is sleek, clean and drop dead gorgeous.What I like about the system overall is that it seems a bit faster and runs easier, and by that I mean it seems like some apps don’t require as much ram, as its predecessor, Tiger.

All the features have been well doumented on every tech blog, newspaper & media outlet, and, of course, the apple website… so there’s little reason for me to go there.All of the additions are great for the OS, however, quite a few are not what I would call “new” ideas.

Everyone’s been backing up their files for years, We’ve used FTPs to share files and Apple Remote Desktop and the like to remotely access other computers we owned. Cover flow has been around for awhile before apple bought it as likewise, multiple desktops is somewhat old hat. We’ve even had boot camp for, what, a year now.

What makes those and all the other features Leopard offers so dope, is how smooth and well integrated they are in the OS. All of those stand alone apps were such ram hogs, for me, they sometimes seemed unwieldy. Especially back in the day when I was working with a mac mini. On my 2 GHz / 2GB iMac, leopard’s got all my apps humming along. That is, the ones that still work.

All my main apps, which include stattoo, skitch, flock, think, sidenote & yojimbo are still doing their thing. However, I’m anxiously awaiting updates to some of my favorite haxies, like candybar, windowshade X, clear dock and shapeshifter because the current versions are kaput with Leopard. Like everybody else, I am so all about customization, so those can’t come soon enough. Some applications like last.FM and tinkertool are just behaving badly. But that aside, Leopard is damn hot. Stacks is very cool, I already deleted overflow. Time Machine is sick.

Spaces makes it so easy to organize and separate your work from play without the heavy ram burden of past applications. Adding cover Flow to finder was a masterstroke. The improvements to iCal mean I will probably be saying good bye to iGTD. I’m in love with the quick look feature in Finder. Ditto being able to access other macs on the home network through finder. The highly touted new data detection feature in Mail, where it automatically recognizes data like addresses and phone numbers didn’t always work. But that’s okay.

I haven’t tried iChat yet, but the new features look impressive enough for me to actually use it for the first time. Being able to collaborate on a project with another person through iChat’s new tools is awesome. One of the coolest things that has somewhat flown under the radar is the Back To My Mac feature added to .mac in system preferences. If you have multiple macs, you’ll love that when you’re traveling.With 300 new features I could go on a lot more than I care to.

Bottom line, Apple OS X Leopard thoroughly, completely and unequivocally lives up to its hype. Another home run in a year filled with long balls for a company that’s just annihilating their competition. It’s such a lopsided affair, you almost want to run in there and pull apple off of them. Seriously, it’s looking like a school yard fight between a first grader and a sixth grader.

It’s freakin’ borderline child abuse.

apple.

Waiting For Leopard.

Like every other Apple fan boy in the universe, I am anxiously awaiting the release of the new Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard. Unlike most of my brethren here in North Georgia, I opted to pre-order my copy rather then joining the masses at the recently opened Apple store in the Mall of Georgia. Why drive to the mall (where I’ll only spend more money) and wait around until 6pm, in a line no less (I don’t wait in lines), when I can stay at home and have leopard come to me before 6pm?

Maybe even as early as 12 noon. When I’ve purchased other stuff from Apple and Bluefly and B&N using Fedex in the past, the guy usually drove up between 12 & 1pm. I went as far as to burn a vacation day (I only have 3 left for the remainder of ‘07) so I can get it up and running, snoop around and then blog about it tomorrow evening. I’ve been waiting all year for this. Thank God, only one day to go…

The New iPods.

  Man… I was already pissed off with apple. First, they release new iMacs just 13 weeks after I got my iMac, now the video iPod that I just got in February as a birthday present to myself (what? doesn’t everybody do that?) lost a major dose of its cool with the introduction of the new ipod family yesterday afternoon.
I love you apple, I’ve been a loyal apple consumer since 1994, but you are killing me. Thank God I didn’t buy that MacBook Pro like I wanted to. I decided to wait on that until the new OS dropped. The only thing that stopped me from doling out the bucks for that was the Shibuya apple store staffer who tipped me that the OS might be delayed. It was originally supposed to roll out last March not October.
Whatever… enough of my damn bitching. Needless to say, the new iPods are off the chain. They are so damn beautiful and so cool. In the good news department, apple lopped off $100 from the iPhone. Good news because that’s what I’m getting for christmas. I’ve been very good this year.
Anyhoo, now I’ve got to get rid of this dinosaur (my video ipod) along with the other out-of-style monstrosity (my newly vintage iMac) sitting on my desktop.

Apple