Big weekend planned

Posted in Mac Stuff,Tech — by Don on 11/03/07

Well, not really. Just chores and whatnot.

Oh yea, plus upgrading to Leopard.

I’ve decided to do an archive and install instead of upgrading in place. A hold over from Windows to be sure, but it’s a great chance to clear everything out and start fresh once again without all the extra crap that I have installed and don’t use.

So, SuperDuper is warmed up and ready to go. Just waiting for a new external drive that will be on my desk this afternoon. I already have a 250gb firewire WesternDigital drive, but it’s almost full and it’s the wrong format. Everything from this drive will be moved to a 500GB firewire drive (or maybe a 320GB, depending on what I can find) and it will be formatted for Mac and become my primary backup drive.

I also have iLife ’08 already installed so I could play with iPhoto a bit. HUGE improvement like everyone has said. Events work. It’s faster. Less crashy (my library has close to 4K pictures) and the interface, while different, is much improved. Alone worth the price of admission.

Something I’m also going to try with Leopard is iWork instead of Office. I have the install disks for both (conveniently, iWork is included with iLife, how thoughtful). So, if after 30 days I don’t miss Office, then that’s what I’ll do.

Things I am looking forward to in Leopard.

Preview and coverflow in Finder. 2 of the niftiest features of windows since Win98.
Improved audio quality (plus recording) in iChat
Stacks. Anything that will help keep my desktop more organized will be welcome
iCal. I don’t use it now because I think it sucks. Maybe it won’t and I can actually have a calendar on my computer instead of having to go online everytime.
Mail. I’ve tried using it but I think it is also horrible. Especially with gMail IMAP (more on that later). Thunderbird is much better. Hopefully the new version will really wow me.
Spaces. One of my favorite features of Ubuntu (and most ‘Nix distro’s) is the ability to have more than 1 desktop going at a time. I can’t wait for this, especially if I can display 1 desktop on the MacBook and 1 on the external display.

Full report once upgrade is complete. Should be fun!