zerolight

I’m a big fan of Apple’s new OS X Leopard, even of the glass menus and the 3D dock. I do however quite like the smoke look that’s popular in Mac applications these days. So with the help of Fireworks I set about smokifying the 3D dock.

Apple launched the latest revision of it’s excellent OS X operating system last night. Does it live up to the hype? Yes. And No. The problem is that OS X Tiger was an almost perfect operating system, so much so that even Microsoft’s Windows Vista did little to close the gap. Whilst Leopard pushes further ahead of the Windows platform with some useful new features, and a lot of polished eye-candy, it still feels very much business as usual if you’re already using Tiger. Almost anticlimactically so.

Yet beneath all the familiarity, there’s still a lot of great new features. Time Machine is probably it’s crowning achievement, providing a fantastic piece of technology to ensure your data is safely backed up to an external HDD. Most of the new features concentrate on perfecting the user interface and improving your work flow. You can read up on them all here, and check out some screenshots in my flickr set.

I saw this movie back in the late 90’s and loved it. A really entertaining look at the history of Apple and Microsoft, with a dash of IBM. It’s now free to watch online – the full movie. Definitely worth a look if you’ve never seen it before. Click here.

Is it sad to get excited about a new OS? I can’t wait for the new version of OS X from Apple. Check out the preview here. I’m loving Time Machine, the new Desktop – especially Stacksl, and QuickLook and the new Finder look interesting.

I was fairly excited about this new firmware update for the PS3, but it turns out to be a bit of a let down. Sure, Blu-Ray playback now supports 720p saving me switching resolutions betweem games and movies. Sure, it upscales DVDs (my Xbox360 has been doing that since day one). But what of the media streaming?

DNLA? I’d never heard of that until yesterday. UPnP? Yep, you need that too… shame it clashes with my NAT settings for Xbox360 and PS3 online gaming. So I enabled UPnP on my PS3 and router, then installed and configured TwonkyMedia’s UPnP Media Server on the Mac, because you need some form of DNLA/UPnP Media Server on your PC or Mac to make it work. Finally, I tried to stream media from the Mac to the PS3 – simple stuff like photos, mp3s, the odd movie. Did it work? Nope, but as expected, UPnP fudged up my NAT settings on the Xbox360. And I’m pretty tech-savvy. This is for the masses?

Hopefully Nullriver will update Connect360, to work with the PS3. Should we really have to buy additional software to make these “connected” consoles connect? XBMC, a homebrew application for the old Xbox, is still the best option for streaming content from a PC or Mac to the TV. Is there really anything wrong with plain old Windows or Samba File Sharing?