So, yes Melinda and I bought a Leopard family license on a whim for our 3 macs, and yes had we got to wait in line 2.5 hours for a couple of t-shirts and a DVD in a fancy looking case, but for us it was all worth the effort and money.

Upgrading

When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.

EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.

I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.

In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.

3rd Party Applications

Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).

All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.

A few unboxing photos

The people that follow my personal tech-blog might already know about Mailplane, but I thought it was time to spread the word about Mailplane to a more mature crowd. Mailplane is a Mac OS X application that has Google Mail (Gmail) meet the desktop. It combines the power of a conventional desktop application (like Mail.app) with the flexibility and quality of an online email client.

Explaining the origin of the idea is best let to Ruben Bakker, the creator of the application:

“I really love Gmail. It is superior to Outlook and MS Exchange I experience at work: The Outlook Webclient is a joke, I get more spam than normal messages and server space is so limited I constantly must delete messages” …. “But I missed quite a few features that Mail.app and other traditional mail clients offer. Gmail with its browser interface just didn’t reach my desktop. For example uploading an attachment involved too many steps: Exporting the image from iPhoto, somehow resizing the picture and then attaching it by using the ‘Choose file’ button.”

So what does Mailplane really offer? For me the features and advantages are simple:

1. Gmail in it’s own application, instead of hanging around in my Safari, in a tab that I never close.
2. Integration with iPhoto, making it possible to simply email a photo from iPhoto, just as you would do with Mail.app. No templates though, so no nice photo emails as you can send from Mail.app.
3. Drag and drop attachments. Just drag and drop any file from your desktop straight into Mailplane as an attachment. Way easier than the web browser method. No support for folders though (would be nice to have it auto-zip folders (especially .app folders).

Mailplane runs on Tiger (no Leopard support yet as I tested yesterday) and even already supports iPhoto ‘08. It currently comes in multiple languages, with a Dutch version being added soon. I took the honor of localizing this app to Dutch, making this my first localization project. I hope it’s not too bad as my Dutch has degraded since my move to the UK.

For now it is free, but there are plans to license the application. I am hoping this price will stay low as I don’t see many people want to pay for something that is normally free. The current version is at 1.51 and is clearly still in Beta, including some bugs and lots of features to be added. That said I expect that Ruben will make future revisions of this app more and more interesting for people who want to use Gmail as a desktop app.

If you want an invite for the Beta, than drop me an email with your details on cbetta[at]gmail.com.

Update: Ruben just announced version 1.51 which comes in 6 more languages, including Dutch.

Both Upcoming.org and MyOpenID.com recently changed their look. In the MyOpenID case it was a logical case of first design replacement. Their first design simply had no own branding and it made the site sometimes look a bit “shifty”.

The reasons for changing the looks of Upcoming where numerous. First of all Yahoo is slowly enforcing all the sites they bought to adopt their own login (for which you need yahoo email address, why would I ever need a yahoo email address?). They also did this recently with Flickr which caused much annoyance with the “Old Skool” user base who didn’t like this new login mostly because the Yahoo presence never added something to the value of Flickr.

Somehow this had an effect on Yahoo as they tried to accompany the Upcoming change with some goodies for the loyal users. A free t-shirt for all their USA and Canada users was offered to keep the crowd at ease, neglecting their big usebase in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands and China. I find this so strange as FON recently send me a free router as a thank you for being one of their first users back when they were still using plain old Linkys WRT routers.

Luckily Yahoo did try to add some value to Upcoming. The new look is much better in my opinion, and the new integration with Yahoo maps and Flickr is very cool. I don’t get though why they had to drop the .org URL (the site is now located at http://upcoming.yahoo.com) as I never think of a non-profit organization when I see a .org domain. In the end I wonder how long before I also need a Yahoo ID to login to del.icio.us.