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I got my copy of Apple’s newest Incarnation of Mac OS X yesterday, impressively shipped to me by Apple for free via FedEx Priority Overnight. I haven’t put it through a thorough workout quite yet, but first impressions are very important for any new OS, and Snow Leopard has so far impressed me.

The install was as simple as ever, essentially just clicking install and accepting the ToS. It took about 40 minutes to complete on my iMac, reboots itself when it’s done, and that’s all there is to it. The absolute first thing I noticed once it rebooted was a speed boost. Booting up, opening programs, the Finder, Spotlight search, and just about every other major aspect of the operating system is noticeably faster. I didn’t pay close attention to exactly how much disk space I had used before the install, but it freed up at least 5 gigs of space from Apple cutting some of the fat out of the OS. Just about all of the changes between Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) are under the hood, but very next thing I noticed was what is more or less the only visual tweak: Stacks. The the grid that the stacks on your dock appear in got a visual overhaul and, at least in my opinion, look a lot nicer. I am so far very impressed with what I’ve seen, even though most of the major changes are in the background and won’t necessarily be noticed by the casual user.

As with any major update to any major operating system ever, third party programs written for prior versions of the OS are bound to have issues. Snow Leopard is in no way immune to this. Apple has a handy short list of known issues for some major applications, but as I don’t use any of specific versions listed on that site, I didn’t run in to any of those known issues. Instead, I noticed immediately that my awesomely useful iStat Menus were gone, but iSlayer already has a compatable v2.0 in the works that they say will be available soon. I also immediately noticed that the non-standard buttons on my Microsoft Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 have stopped working. I’ve managed to get one of the buttons working again, but I’ll have to wait until Microsoft decides to release an update, which will supposedly be “on or before 10/2/2009“. Other than those two issues, I’ve yet to notice any other incompatibilities.

Unless you have a vital use for the programs that Apple lists as not working, I highly recommend upgrading to Snow Leopard. There are no major user interface changes, so the learning curve for users upgrading from Leopard is exactly zero and the speed boost is well worth the $29 to upgrade.

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard – $29
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) – $49
Mac Box Set (with Snow Leopard) – $169

I’ve gotta admit, I’m pretty excited about Apple’s forthcoming new incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard (10.6). It certainly isn’t going to be wowing anyone with visual changes and enhancements as prior releases have, but what Snow Leopard packs under the hood is enough to excite me. Pretty much everything about the operating system, even including the non-essential bundled applications, has been recoded to minimize the footprint, utilize 64-bit processing, and all around just move faster. They’ve slimmed it down so much that it will reportedly free up an additional 7GB of space on your hard drive. Needless to say, I’m excited to try it out and will post a review here once I’ve had the chance to put it through its paces. Best of all? Apple just announced the release date and it’s earlier than expected: August 28th!

Want it as soon as it’s available?
Pre-order your copy today from Amazon.com:
Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard – $29
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) – $49
Mac Box Set (with Snow Leopard) – $169

Growing up, I always had macs. From my first MacSE sporting the lightning-fast 8mhz 68000 processor to college when I had a Power Mac running a 200mhz PowerPC 603e processor, I was always a Mac person. Even after that last Power Mac died, when I was exclusively running PCs, I still considered myself a Mac addict while I secretly longed for the day that I would once again have a nice shiny new Mac. Well, several months ago I got a nice new iMac and I love it. Although not new to Mac OS X, I had never owned a computer that ran it, so its taken me a while to feel out what software I like and I have some recommendations. So, without further ado, here’s my top 5 list of freeware applications every Mac user should have:

1. Adium
   This is easily the absolute best chat client for Mac OS X. I’m way more fond of it than I was Trillian on my XP machines and I swore by Trillian. Adium supprts just about every chat platform ever right out of the “box”, with the exception of IRC and video chat (supposedly coming soon). I’m pretty sure some of the platforms it supports went extinct along with the dinosaurs, but it still would work with Adium. The dock notifications are awesome, it integrates extremely well with Growl, and the styling, sounds, icon, and just about anything else are extremely customizable, which is fun. Sure, Mac OS X comes with iChat, but this just embarrasses it.
2. ClamXav
   Sure, there aren’t many viruses out there for the Mac, but you can never be too safe. ClamAV is an open source anti-virus solution for *nix-based operating systems. ClamXav is the Mac OS X front end for it. Its easy to install, easy to configure, works well, and is well supported. What more can you ask for in virus protection?
3. VLC
   I was debating whether or not to list this, because it is available on just about any operating system, but its just too good pass up. It’s a video player that can be both extremely basic to use and extremely advanced to configure, depending on your needs. It plays just about anything and that’s what makes it great.
4. Transmission
   Hands-down the best torrent client for Mac OS X. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s easy to configure. If that’s not enough, it also has an extremely small footprint. I’ve tried at least a dozen different torrent clients over multiple platforms over the last few years and this is certainly my favorite thus far, no matter what the operating system.
5. MagiCal
   This innocent little application does two incredible things that should by all means just be built in to the next version of Mac OS X. It displays a small icon with the month and date next to the clock on the menu bar and when clicked, it displays a small calendar that even allows you to flip through the months. Why this is not just a part of the OS is beyond me, but thankfully MagiCal is available to help.

Honorable Mentions: Firefox, Thunderbird, Stuffit Expander, and Fetch.

At first it was all over the news that some company in Miami named “Psystar” is selling Mac clones. Compatible PC hardware hacked to run Mac OS X. The term Hackintosh made its way in to mainstream media for the first time since the mid-90s when Mac clones were actually licensed. The Mac community has been in an uproar wondering about legal actions, EULAs, and all sorts of other boring things. Then, looking past the initial buzz, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur dug a little deeper and discovers that the company itself may just be a fraud. No one seems to be talking, there’s no actual support or sales team, they aren’t responding to emails, they company never seemed to exist prior to last week (even though they domain name has been around since 2000), and best of all, the address that was supplied on their website up until a day or so ago showed a generic suburban house in Miami.

The only name that has ever even been given to the media is Robert. No last name given, just Robert. No one really knows who “Robert” is, but with the new information of how new and unestablished the company is, he’s probably the owner and only employee. Well, I’ve got a last name for you. It you dig a little bit on Archive.org, you’ll see that the snapshot of the site that was taken in September, 2001 shows a different domain name: razorfx.com. The site is currently just a placeholder (although it shares a favicon with psystar.com and is hosted on the same host). So visiting razorfx.com didn’t help in it’s current state, but what if you use the Wayback Machine again and see how razorfx.com looked in November, 2002. Now we’re getting somewhere! Razofx.com was the online portfolio of Robert Pedraza.

Wanna make a bet as to if that’s the same Robert running things at Psystar?

Windows decided to take a complete dump on me today and I ended up spending the last 6 hours fixing my computer. Thankfully, I was able to pop in a live cd of Ubuntu 7.10 that I had lying around which allowed me to back up everything of value on to my slave drive, but as is always the case with Windows, nothing went quite how it was supposed to. I had to reinstall it twice before I could get it fully working again and now I’m running through a seemingly endless series of Windows Updates. I suppose I should be thankful that my hard drive didn’t fail or anything like that, but it sure is a pain in the ass to have to deal with pile of crap that is Windows.

It’ll be nice when Jessie and I get new iMacs and I can work with an operating system that was actually written well. At least when something goes wrong with Mac OS X I’ll know it was something I did and not some random corrupted system file that just happens to prevent the computer from fully loading, sending it in to a spiraling descent of reboots and system errors.