Musicalmidget’s Blog

This evening I paid another visit to the Apple shop in Meadowhall. There were three items on the shopping list. Firstly, my brother wanted a MacBook for his schoolwork and was ready to buy it. Also, I wanted to get my hands on some new software for my own iMac. I wanted iWork ‘08 since I was impressed by the trial and OS X 10.5 Leopard.

My brothers new MacBook was a breeze to setup and he’s now getting himself used to it. Once the OS X installation wizard finished I was a little surprised to see Tiger load up when we were told Leopard was in the box. It turned out the Leopard DVD was hidden under some papers. Whilst the new MacBook was updating to Leopard, I opened up my own copy of the update and began to update my own machine. We left the systems to it and went to watch an episode or two of Stargate Atlantis. We returned a little later to see two new installations of Leopard ready to launch.

I’m not going to say too much about Leopard yet until I’ve had a chance to play with it for a while, but my first impressions are quite positive. In the meantime, I thought I’d attach a few screen captures of Leopard running on my own iMac. If you’ve seen any of the publicity images for Leopard then you’ll probably not be seeing anything new here.

Firstly, the brand new desktop complete with 3D reflective dock.

Along with the new desktop comes a brand new Finder. I’m especially fond of how generic file icons have been replaced with thumbnails of each file. This makes it very easy to find exactly the file you’re looking for.

In addition to the existing Icon, List and Column views in the Finder, Leopard introduces Cover Flow view, similar to Cover Flow in iTunes. Again, this is a great way to quickly find exactly the file you’re looking for in a folder.

Quick Look is a new feature which allows you to quickly preview a file directly from the finder without the need to open it up in an application. Just click the spacebar or select the “Quick Look” option to preview the file. It’s also possible to quickly sample documents, presentations, music and video files directly from within Cover Flow.

The new dock isn’t just about looking great, it has a new feature called Stacks, which are essentially folders on the dock which open out to provide more shortcuts. For instance, I have an applications stack on the dock which quickly displays shortcuts to everything in my Applications folder when clicked. Similarly, the new downloads stack displays the files I’ve recently downloaded so as I can access them easily without needing to clutter the desktop. Stacks are displayed either as a fan or a grid depending on the number of files in the stack, or any custom option you may have already set.

I’m thrilled to finally be able to use the new Spaces feature in Leopard. Spaces aren’t a new concept, they’ve been around for a while in other operating systems including numerous Linux distributions, but I’m not really a Linux user. Spaces are essentially just additional desktops that you can easily flick between to keep your applications separate. For example, you could assign a space for general internet related applications such as a browser and email application, whilst loading a document in another. Whilst writing the document in space two, you can quickly switch to space one to look something up on the internet. It’s also easy to drag windows from one space to another and drag spaces around to change their order. I’m already finding the Spaces feature handy for keeping my different running applications grouped and clutter free.

Finally, front row has also changed slightly in Leopard. In fact, it looks rather similar to Apple TV.

I haven’t yet setup Time Machine, but I’m hoping to do so soon once I get a suitable external hard drive. There are no shortage of images of Time Machine dotted around the internet however and the online demonstration is definitely worth a look if you’re not sure what Time Machine is.

So there’s a peek at Leopard. I’m sure there’ll be some more Leopard related postings from me over the coming weeks too.

Summer wouldn’t be summer without a spending spree, and oh boy have I been on one of those this year.

I’ve been hoping to get my hands on a mac machine for some time now. Earlier this year, I decided I’d finally buy one rather than just drooling over them on the internet. I did some thinking and decided to go out and buy a mac mini, but I’d wait until my second year exams were over first. Eventually, I finished my exams and once again visited the apple site for education to see what I might be able to afford. What I found was that the price of a mac mini with the addition of a new keyboard, mouse and monitor, wasn’t all that much cheaper than the 17 inch iMac. I’d seen the iMac in the Apple shop at Meadowhall and they we’re pretty nice.

To cut a long and quite boring story short, I wasn’t able to buy the iMac before going off to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. It was a shame because I was itching to get my hands on one, but in the long run I’d say the wait paid off. One day whilst I was in Edinburgh, I logged onto CNet when I had a few minutes to spare, just to see what kind of news had been cropping up whilst I was gone. What did I see at the front of the news section? A brand new iMac range! They looked incredible and the specifications were even more impressive. I may have been foaming at the mouth.

For the same price as the 17 inch 2GHz model I nearly bought before going away, I managed to get a whopping 20 inch 2GHz model. Thank goodness I waited or else I’d have been fuming that I missed out on a brand new range.

Despite the fact that this shiny new iMac is easily the most eye catching thing at my desk, there’s a genuine reason for wanting one so badly. Macs are fantastic for musical folk like myself. The included GarageBand application is quite nice, but professional applications such as Sibelius and Cubase are compatible with macs. In fact, many of the top dogs in the industry use macs for musical production/recording/editing and so on. This machine is therefore going to be my development machine. By development, I mean both musical and internet developing.

On the musical side, my new piano connects nicely into the mac with a USB cable. Sibelius then picks up the piano as a MIDI device, allowing me to play music directly into the software. Additionally, Sibelius can use the piano to playback scores on the computer.

As for internet development, I’m finally a TextMate user. What a fantastic application! The only thing it doesn’t seem to have (unless I haven’t managed to find it yet) is an FTP browser similar to the FTP extension I’ve been using in PHPEdit on Windows. Aside from that however, it’s hard to find a fault with the application. I’d previously tried “E Text Editor”, which was a TextMate clone for Windows, but it was still a beta program and it just wasn’t the same. I’ve also found a nifty FTP program for Mac OS X called Cyberduck. Perhaps a strange name for an FTP client, and the duck icon in my dock tends to make people wonder what it’s for. Don’t be fooled though, it’s a very nice program. I love how most pieces of software written for mac have such nice to use interfaces. This is no exception.

Mac OS X has an Apache server included and I’m in the process of setting that up at the moment, as well as PHP and MySQL. Within a few days, I’m hoping the process of moving all development related stuff from my Windows PC onto the Mac will be completed. I haven’t yet found an IRC client for mac that I’m happy with, but I can live with mIRC on the PC for the moment.

As well as the lovely new iMac, I’ve got yet another new toy. Since I got my own sax, I’ve been playing a rather basic Yamaha YTS275. It’s a nice sax, but it’s only a student model. I thought perhaps it was about time to update that in time for my final year at university. I managed to pick up “the deal of my life” on a brand new Yamaha 62. The 62 is a professional level saxophone and it’s really great to play. I’m looking forward to getting back to university so as I can play it more often. For the moment however, the new “Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band Play-Along” book is doing just fine.

Anyone that knows me personally will no doubt know that I’m hardly the sporty type. I don’t play much sport, and there’s very little sports I follow. Tennis however is the exception, and as such I’m really loving being able to watch Wimbledon this year.

Britains new rising star in tennis is of course Andy Murray who has been playing some superb tennis recently. This evening though was probably his best achievement so far, winning against Andy Roddick in three straight sets. Wow! It’s great to see a new player with excellent talent, but it’s even better that he’s British. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of him in the years to come.

On the womens side of things, could there be a final without one of the Williams sisters in it? Yes, I think there might! There’s a pleasant suprise. I’m looking forward to both the final matches in about a weeks time.

On a non-tennis note, I’ve been playing with a new piece of software today. It’s called FastStone Capture and it’s very nice indeed. It’s just a handful of screenshot taking tools which are a little better than constantly pressing the “print screen” key and pasting into Paint everytime I need to take a screenshot. Plus, it has the nice ability of taking scrolling screenshots.

Perhaps you’re wondering what kind of screenshots I might be taking that would require such a tool? If you keep an eye on this space, you may just find out in a day or two…

Regular users of Messenger Plus! will no doubt know that Messenger Plus! Live, the first release of a new generation of Messenger Plus!, was released last night.

Windows Live Messenger went public a few days ago, but I intentionally didn’t upgrade immediately. The reason of course being that I wanted to wait for the release of Messenger Plus! Live. There aren’t really any new features in Windows Live Messenger that I’ve been significantly impressed by yet, apart from the nickname feature however, which of course was previously available in Messenger Plus! 3. The new features of Messenger Plus! Live however are indeed impressive.

I’ll probably post in more detail about Messenger Plus! Live once I’ve had a little more time to play with it. In the meantime, I strongly suggest that any users of Windows Live Messenger who haven’t already tried Messenger Plus! Live, download it from here and give it a go.