So I realized today that only one computing device in my house, my 10 year old stepdaughter’s 5 year old HP laptop, is running the operating system that it is supposed to. She’s running Windows XP, which is fine for her. My white MacBook is running the current build of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), which is in closed beta, and Windows 7 RC, also not released to retail. My iTouch is running iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5, and even my wife’s Compaq Presario laptop is running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.6). On top of all that, I’m running the Tech Preview of Microsoft Office 2010 under Windows 7, as well the iTunes 8.2 beta. lol One would imagine that with all this unproven software running, I’d have a super buggy systems with lots of crashes. One would also be wrong.
While I can’t speak much about Snow Leopard, I can say that under the current build, I’ve only hit two bugs: Spotlight freezes every so often, and batch importing more than a few photos at a time crashes Aperture (the Aperture bug was fixed by iLife updates that I missed). Other than that, it seems faster than Leopard, and definitely has a smaller footprint.
Windows 7 could be pressed and sent to retail right now and be off to a much better start than Vista had. Faster, smaller, and sleeker, it’s what Vista should have been 2 years ago. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been genuinely excited about a release of Windows (probably back to 98, or even 95), but I carved out a decent chunk of my hard drive just to run Windows 7. I have yet to hit any snags, freezes, or dreaded Blue Screens of Death with it, and I’ve been running it since early November. If you have even a passing interest in it, I highly recommend downloading the free Release Candidate; it’s even good until March 1st, 2010, which is well beyond when it will be released to retail. – Windows 7
iPhone OS 3.0 is awesome, there’s just no other way to call it. I didn’t think cut/paste would be a big deal, and I find I’m actually using it quite a bit. Being able to use my Bluetooth headphones (Motorola S9) is awesome, and being able to search the whole device is indispensable. I ran into a few glitches with Beta 4, but Beta 5 is almost completely smooth. The only issue I have is that newly installed apps have a blank icon until I turn it completely off and back on. It’s widely believed we’ll be seeing 3.0 in the wild very soon, along with a new iPhone. iPhone OS 3.0 requires iTunes 8.2, and the beta doesn’t have any new features besides the ability to sync Notes with Apple Mail on the desktop.
Office 2010 doesn’t bring many game-changing features to the table, but then again, Office is old enough to be mature. The ribbon UI has been tweaked and is finally used throughout the suite. Other than that, there’s a few changes to the way things look, a new print wizard, and few other small things. I’ve only started playing around with it.
Anyways, I apologize for the lack of posts these past few months. My wife and I found out that we will be expecting my second child (her fourth) in December, and the farm has kept us busy. Now that I’ve moved to WordPress, I have the ability to post from my iTouch in addition to my MacBook, so expect more posts. I’ll be posting some iPhone game and app reviews soon, so keep an eye out!
