My friend Seth was kind enough to pick me up a copy of Leopard at the Apple store in St. Louis this past weekend when he and his girl were up visiting there. Leopard is the code name for the just released latest Mac OS X operating system, version 10.5. After spending a day or two in preparation backing up all my documents, photos, music and such onto a secondary drive I performed a clean install Sunday evening and have been using it ever since. So far, everything has gone very smoothly and I’m really happy with the update. The performance is pretty snappy which is a testament to Apple’s continued tradition of releasing newer versions of OSes and software that are actually faster than their previous versions… something Microsoft is particularly bad at.
Apple’s website highlights many of the new features available in this version but by far my favorite has been Stacks. Now when you place folders in your dock, clicking them will make them “fan out” the contents for quick access rather than simply opening a new window of the folder’s contents. It’s kinda like Expose’ for the dock and it’s immediately intuitive. Time Machine, which is a fancy if completely autonomous backup system, is another big feature but there really isn’t much to say about it. I turned it on and as best I can tell it’s working but I guess I won’t know how useful it is until I need it. Another highly touted feature is called Spaces which is Apple’s take on having many virtual workspaces. I haven’t really got into the mode of using this yet but those who have said it’s an acquired taste that tastes great.
My only complaint about Leopard so far isn’t actually about the OS itself but a mistake I made whe installing it. While I was copying back my documents, I accidently trashed an entire folder full of old website designs I’d done (including the source files for the current Kevin and Kell website!) and now those files are lost forever. Had I been running Leopard and Time Machine already, I could have restored them as there is no simple way to undelete files on the Mac. It’s pretty frustrating but oh well. Those files weren’t that important. If anything, this experience does make me appreciate running Leopard with Time Machine even more now. Backups are good.
This weekend, I rented Portal by Valve Software and I can’t begin recommend it enough. It is one of three games released as a collection called the Orange Box available for the PC and Xbox 360. Early trailers for this game really intrigued me with its unique and innovative physics based puzzles but having now beat the game twice I can say what really won me over was the fantastic plot and setting.
In fact, about the only complaint I have for Portal is its length. A clever player can likely beat the game in just under three or four hours. However, the game oozes so much creativity, style, ambience, satisfaction and pure fun that one finds it hard to complain. Besides, the short length does well to serve to move the plot along. Also, the game does offer plenty of replay value in the form of time-trials and advanced versions of earlier test chambers which are much, much more difficult. Read on for my barely spoilerish overview of the game’s plot to find out why Portal is an experience not to be missed!
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Apple has just launched an official iPhone (and iPod Touch) web app directory on their website. I’m already finding some real gems I’ve not seen before. I hope their creating this will help to consolidate these apps all in one place rather than having them sparsely spread out across a dozen smaller user-run directories. Web apps I use on my iPhone regularly which I recommend include: PocketTweets for Twitter, JiveTalk for IM and Movies.app for movie times and locations.
Link: http://www.apple.com/webapps/
This is the most incredible comeback I’ve ever seen performed in a Street Fighter game. I found this YouTube video via a NeoGAF thread. It appears to have been recorded at a tournament in 2004. Even though the guy playing Ken had a completely empty life bar and was as good as dead, he performs a mind blowing series of blocks before coming back with an absolutely devastating combo. I’m not even a fan of fighting games myself but I can’t help but be in awe of this guy’s talent.
I realize I said in my very first post that I wasn’t going to be using a “fancy freeware PHP blogging package” to run this site but after some serious nudging from my friends and a little experimenting I’m now running Wordpress. I have to admit, my earlier reservations were misplaced. This software is fantastic. I was really surprised how easy it was to port everything including my custom template. Not only does Wordpress give me a bunch of additional features such as site search, inline commenting, better Twitter integration and more but it will also allow the site to safely grow over time.
