ADC: 10.5.7 Build 9J27 Seed Ready

Apple’s been busy presumably wrapping up the loose ends on Leopard and making way for Snow Leopard. Head on over to the Apple Developer Connection for your latest seeds.

Leopard’s Alex – Next American Idol? (VIDEO)

Hey, it could happen… (heheh)

Leopard 10.5.2 Seed on ADC (9C7)

For those out there with ADC accounts… 10.5.2 is now posted for evaluation.

It’s tagged Seed# 9C7. Read the Seed note as there is some importanté stuff in there about the combo installer.

Be careful out there.

Leopard Install… Upgrade? Fresh + Migrate?

MBPro has been running Leopard for many moons as my main development machine. It was bought stock with 10.4.x and promptly wiped in favor of 9a### revs of Leopard until launch.

Not so with the PowerBook. It still has 10.4.11 and I’m contemplating the move to Leopard this week. I’ve heard some people had problems “upgrading”. Wonder what the groupthink is on this one…

Upgrade over Tiger? -or-

Fresh install and migrate stuff over?

Leopard And When To Buy…

Great comment a moment ago… When should I buy my MacBook? Before of after Leopard?

From my own point of view I’d buy when I needed to. If I needed that MacBook RFN… I’d go out and get the best, baddest I could immediately. From a practical point of view if you can wait there will be some bennies:

• Who knows when or if Apple will have a grace period for those who purchase Macs leading up to/after Leopard’s launch? They’ve done this in the past. Reasonable to think they’d do it again. Otherwise, you might risk buying gear now only to turn around and find yourself upgrading OS within a month at your own cost;
• The local CompUSA had a mess on their hands the night Tiger launched (this was before we had an Apple Store in Tulsa). The poor guy was imaging and installing like a mad man. It created a big headache for all involved. So, I’d say, wait until you KNOW Leopard is factory installed on the gear you’re buying;
• Finally, Leopard’s awesome if the seeds are any indicator. I’d rather not run Tiger and then have to migrate from 10.4 to 10.5. I did that once just to see what pain was involved. I’d rather start fresh and build on top of that.

My $.02

ZFS = HELL YES!

Oh, mama!

I really like what Apple’s put at our fingertips with the ZFS 1.1 seed. Right now it’s all tucked into Terminal and diskutil. But, holy smokes! When this makes it to DiskUtility.app I can see lots of people doing lots of very cool things with highly expandable storage pools. It’s so stupifyingly simple.

I was talking with Kevin Mooney at TulsaConnect (one of my data hosting facilities) and he was talking about how they have some very clever methods of growing and allocating storage across their facility. Absolutely blew my mind.

Storage is a beast I’ve always thought of as, “Need more? Go get a drive. Format it. Mount it. Fill it. Rinse. Repeat.” That is, until the XServe RAIDS. Then I added a little smarts (not much, just some). But, now…! I’m thinking some of what Kevin was talking about is at hand (ie, consumer level). MY hand no less! Cool.

Leopard 9A559 Software Update

FYI, Leopard 9A559 received an update last night via Software Updater (apparently also applies to 9A557).

I’ve just jotted off a bug report to Apple on some “things”. Not show stoppers and probably easily addressed with 10.5.1 update should it come to that. Sure would be nice to have some of the finer bits of eye candy tight and right and showing off as best it can though.

Hoping Apple will announce an actual release date soon. Wonder what Amazon’s pre-order ship date is indicating these days? Hmm…

Leopard Decided My Printer

The recent announcement HP printers might just have a helluva time with Leopard clenched my decision for my printer purchase. Needed one now and want to be sure there won’t be any issues with the next major release of OS X.

So, what’d I go with? Picked up a nice little Canon Pixma MX310 all-in-one at the Tulsa Apple Store. Liking it VERY much. Haven’t tried the fax capabilities. But, if the printer and scanner are any indication…

Now, I’m VERY spoiled with all the recent Apple UI upgrades. Coverflow, multi-touch… I’m NOT liking these text heavy interfaces on things like printers and digital cameras. Wonder how long it’ll be before these little interfaces will start benefitting from advanced human computer interfaces?

ListenUp –>>

Back and podcasting to boot. Yep, that’s right. The “first corporate podcast” kid is back in the ring to take another swing. 

It’s not polished. It’s done with stock kit. It’s not edited. It’s done in one take.

It’s as much as I can fit in THREE minutes. I’ll try to do this daily with the hope of getting better and more focused. But, if I don’t have anything to say… I’m not going to waste your time and mine with more rambling stupidity than I’m already known for.

Robert… This is your doing man! Well, you, Adam and Jeff. The whole idea of a personal, do it yourself media space… Yeah, you guys are the reason this high-quality production stuff is being driven down to the desktop. And, for that, thanks!

Colophon

The production of the gWH!Z podcast is done with a MacBookPro, QuickTime Pro, the old school iSight (GREAT audio recorder when handheld), Box.net, files saved as .mov and converted to 22.050 MHz MP3s via iTunes, and last and certainly not least… Leopard for the OS.

Installing Leopard 9A559

Wouldn’t it be fun for Apple to snooker us all and launch Leopard this Monday, October 1?

Hell, might as well fan the flames of desire here a bit. C’mon, dontcha think?!

They’re calculating like that. Take for instance, the iPhone. They deliberately launched it late 2Q2007. All just to get a pop for the quarter on ye olde stock ticker (AAPL) and punch up the Q2 results.

I can see them trying to milk Q4 for everything it’s got in it with an October 1 release. Yeah, I know, it’s all blue sky speculation and tin-foil-hat tom-foolery. But, still, they’re sly like a fox that way and I could totally see them kitting up the DVDs for the past two weeks while they feed us three or four week old images throwing us off and onto a cold trail. Why would dear old Apple do that pray tell? ‘Cause they can Timmy. Cause they can.

This release has been given the back seat while iPhone an AppleTV took center stage for the first half of 2007. As of 9A559 Leopard’s tight. REAL tight (especially Server). I’ve been using the latest greatest as my production machine for two solid weeks. So, it wouldn’t shock me in the least if Apple came out swinging for a full Fourth Quarter performance. Get this right and get it tight as a drum before the holiday season, gin up word of mouth and I see AAPL posting some mighty fine numbers on unit sales all the way around. Leopard has the teeth in it to drive some killer innovation across their product lineup (iPod, iTunes, iPhone and of course Macs).