Posts (page 2)

Two quick news stories before the first day of school.

• First off, Paramount is considering to drop the HD-DVD format. A clause in their exclusivity contract said that they could freely switch formats if the WB switched from HD-DVD, which they did last week. This would effectively kill off the format, because both current remaining studios (Paramount and Dreamworks Animation) have a close relationship, and Paramount actually publishes Dreamworks' movies. There's no telling when they'll drop HD-DVD, but I suggest they do it soon.
  

• Second story isn't much of a news story but a sad realization: PS3 versions of cross-platform games are apparently much inferior in quality to those seen in the Xbox 360. That doesn't make much sense at first glance, because the PS3's hardware is much more advanced than the Xbox 360's, yet The Orange Box struggles to keep a decent framerate, and now, Lost Planet for the PS3 is incredibly disappointing.
  
  Having played bits of Lost Planet on the 360 here and there, I can say that the graphics on the 360 version were gorgeous, and the PS3 version, while not hideous, is noticeably much worse. (That said, it's probably still worth picking up if you haven't played it on the 360 yet.)

Oh and for those who have yet to see it, the awesome Bill Gates parody of The Office has been made available on both MSN Soapbox and On10.net, Microsoft's much unheard of video podcast of sorts. Seeing as how just typing "on10.net" and pressing enter returns an error message, I suggest the version on Soapbox.

edit: Now time for a quick parcel of annoyance. What's with Vox adding those annoying popovers on each link highlight? I HATE it whenever a blog does that and I'm sure as hell not going to let my blog have those. If I don't find a way to turn them off without paying Vox a subscription fee (which I would expect from a SixApart product, hurr), I'm switching to another blog. >_>

PC World reports on Sony's unveiling of new features to come with selected titles on Blu-Ray Profile 2.0:

Sony today demonstrated the next level of disc copying. At the company's booth at CES, Sony demonstrated how you could put a Blu-ray Disc movie into a Playstation 3 and copy the film to a Playstation Portable or a Memory Stick. "This way, you can have a portable copy you can take with you," explains David Bishop, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

I'm assuming this is going to be plagued by DRM for some odd reason (corporate paranoia), but given how Sony's becoming relatively DRM-free nowadays, who knows? It seems a bit early for them to remove DRM from video seeing as how they've just done it for music by getting involved with Amazon's MP3 store.

HD-DVD appears to be pretty screwed at the moment, and I'd be somewhat surprised if a DVD war winner isn't going to be decided by the holiday season. HD-DVD has 2 major studios, Blu-Ray has 4. While HD-DVD has the lower price point, is it really worth it if you can't get a majority of the movies you're interested in?

It appears that consumers will have to decide by either choosing the right format or holding off until the winner is announced. (The real winner, however, is still HD-VMD.)

Last night's CES keynote was rather disappointing. Actually, it was also impressive, in a different way. You've probably heard most of the news through Twitter or someplace else already but here are a few of the big announcements:

• Zune is coming out in Canada this Spring. (see footnote 1)
• New movie studios and TV networks hitting US Video Marketplace.
• Media Center will be built into HP televisions in the future.
• DVR Anywhere, that lets you share DVR content to other Mediaroom devices on your network. (whatever the hell that means, see footnote 2)

News-wise, that's about it. But two things about it made me smile.

The first is Robbie Bach's diss at Apple TV when he was talking about Media Center.

When you look at all of this together: what we've done on Xbox and Xbox Live, what we're doing on Media Center, and what we're doing in Mediaroom, it's abundantly clear that building great, connected TV experiences is not a (fingerquotes) hobby for Microsoft. This is something we take quite seriously.

And sadly, they're right. If Apple was putting a bit more attention into Apple TV, it could be a killer product. Apple TV is a good product, but definitely not as good as many of the other offerings in that category of products. Give it the ability to download movies, either to your iTunes library or as a rental (see footnote 3), and allow users to do the same with TV shows would make a big difference. It's also missing a DVR, but it simply doesn't seem like it'd be in Apple's mindset. Remember that they're also trying to sell the same shows. :/

The second is a phenomenal and hilarious video put together by Microsoft as a parody of The Office, except instead of being about life on MS campus, it's about what Bill Gates' last day is going to be like. Microsoft's keynote videos usually have some humor and production value, which is not to say, it was the highlight of the night in every way. No matter how you look at it, most of it was PR spin on currently available products, and the yearly snorefest that is "The Digital Decade" vision.

If it hits YouTube or any other video outlet (I'm guessing MSN Soapbox, this is Microsoft), I highly recommend you check it out, it is simply hilarious.

---------------
Footnote 1: Much much much overdue. Now get two more generations of your product out there and maybe you can compete with the iPod!

Footnote 2: After some research (looking it up on Wikipedia), Mediaroom appears to be Microsoft's IPTV set-top box platform. They changed the name in mid-June, which is probably why anyone who doesn't care about Microsoft's multimedia efforts aside from Xbox never heard of it until the keynote. It's apparently been adopted by 17 partners, but does anyone actually HAVE a Mediaroom device? I doubt it. :S

Footnote 3: Movie rentals are practically confirmed to be announced next week at Macworld, and I'd be really surprised if the iTunes store wasn't getting a front-end on Apple TV alongside that.

Every January, there are two big events to look forward to. There's CES and there's Macworld. Tonight marks Bill Gates' last CES keynote before he steps down from his position as CEO of Microsoft. It's quite sad actually. I've decided to quote one of my favorite moments of last year's keynote and to dedicate this post to the wonderful innovations Mac OS X Leop--- I mean, Windows Vista brought to the computing world in the past year.

Demo Guy: I saved the wrong document. This is an invitation to something special we're planning tomorrow night at CES, and making a mistake like this before Windows Vista would be a problem. But thanks to a new feature called Shadow Copy in Windows Vista, I can restore previous versions of this document with just a couple clicks. So when I click Restore, you're gonna see this document on the right revert back to the original.

Demo Guy restores document.

Demo Guy: Just like that. Vista reverted back to the original and it got me out of a jam. It's *better* than going back in time.

Cue audience laughter.

While I'd love to tune in to the keynote tonight, I can't. Microsoft insists on users installing their Silverlight plugin to access any portion of the CES mini-site. While I'd love to do that, Silverlight doesn't run on PowerPC Macs. :/

I guess I'll be waiting for the MP3 of the keynote to go up later tonight.

edit: I GUESS I WON'T. Someone linked me to the direct URL, so I'll be able to watch live like all the cool Windows people. *coughcough*

edit2: I figure that while I'm waiting, I can echo what a few people seem to be saying. Apparently the Silverlight requirement is only needed for the wrapper that goes around the stream, the stream itself is Windows Media Video, which I can view through VLC if I want to see it (which is how I'm watching the minute-long "tune in at 6:30" video right now). People who are using it seem to be having performance issues, which is odd, but then again they might not be running Vista. Since Silverlight/WPF/E appears to be built into Vista, maybe those have better performance, I don't know. Haven't heard anything from Mac users watching it. Oh well.

I still think this Silverlight requirement is to boost download numbers and then go on about its tremendous success onstage during the keynote. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft.

Time for yet another metapost. Nothing long enough for a huge post yet, not enough not to blog about it. Let's go:

• Microsoft's stupidity reaches an all-time high. After realizing that their PlaysForSure DRM scheme only played for sure on certain devices, excluding the Zune, which is ironically their device, they decided to rename their DRM scheme to "Certified for Windows Vista". This makes no sense at all, as the content is playable on XP and 2000, and the Zune is "certified for Windows Vista" but can't play PlaysForSure songs. Good job, MSFT.
• The iPhone Dev Team has yet to unlock 1.1.2 firmware. While I don't necessarily blame them, what the hell does "Currently impossible with software only solutions. Probably possible when apple releases next firmware version (1.1.3)" mean? If 1.1.2 is hard to unlock, why would 1.1.3 be any easier? Rumor says 1.1.3 is coming this weekend, if that proves to be true, I'm hoping what they say is correct so anySIM lives on.
• In the "my mom would totally dig this if she was a huge geek" department, the KnitML project has gotten significant attention recently. KnitML, much like HTML, is a markup language standard that allows for easier trading of knitting patterns. I'm not personally into knitting, but the geekiness that's involved in this project is amazing. I love it.
• Google recently introduced Sync services between their mobile applications and the BlackBerry platform. BlackBerry users can now sync their BlackBerry calendar with CL2/Google Calendar from anywhere (with data services). Now we need a third-party app on iPhone/iTouch that allows iCal subscriptions to be updated from anywhere to get equivalent stuff. Sounds like something Spanning Sync could do?
• Facebook app spam is ANNOYING. For the past day, only three items on my front page news feed are actually relevant. The rest of it is app spam. Dear Facebook, let me turn off news feed items for stuff I never installed or don't care for. THANK YOU.
• TF2 Wiki mocks me. I want to play TF2. ;_; Oh well, I need a PC for school next year regardless. If I choose to build one, it's going to have the specs to play TF2, that's for sure. (And I registered to Steam just so no one takes my username, ha.)
• remix.nin.com is fun. Not only are many of the older remix albums up for free listen AND download on the site, but fan-made remixes and Saul Williams multitracks are looking pretty good to me. I might upload my rather lame mashup of God Given and My Violent Heart at some point in the future. I could do without the Flash overkill but I hear Flash is cool again. What is this, 1998? (get it)
• NBC Universal/News Corp's stupid streaming website, Hulu, pisses me off. I have an account there after getting an invite, but I can't actually use it because the service only works in the United States. What's my solution for watching TV from anywhere now? I have to resort to those sites that list shows (usually in multiple parts) up on various video streaming sites. That sucks. I want to use the central "legal" service, but I can't. Screw you then. (I have tried OpenHulu, but since that actually goes through NBC as well, no luck.)
  
• IRONICALLY: I also want the writer's strike to end because nothing is actually on television anymore and it's boring now. I also worry about what'll happen in the spring if no television shows actually have new episodes anymore. What am I going to do on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday nights now? (Maybe watch reruns of old reality shows on that new iGameTV channel we stumbled upon last night?)
• Finally, I'm getting really tired of the entire Internet generalizing Linux with Ubuntu. You could argue that it's the most consumer-friendly distro, yatta yatta, but why does every howto out there specifically have to mention Ubuntu or the fucking version number in its name? I was reading up on getting Steam to run on Wine. It's not like the instructions are any different on any other distro! I did the same exact steps on Debian. (Okay, so Ubuntu is Debian-based. BLAH BLAH.)

The end of the year is approaching and with it comes an onslaught of new video games. Most of the time, however, the amount of games released is not proportional to gamers' budgets, so it's nice to pinpoint what games are the ones to get. Most of the holiday season's big titles are out right now, so I think it's only logical for me to go through what I think are the games of the year.

DS: Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
Okay, you might think this is quite silly seeing as how I just got and I've already played three hours, but within the first hour and a half, I had a feeling this game was going to be one of the best games of the year on the DS. That's probably because this year was relatively quiet on the DS. Even if it hadn't, this game would be at the top.

Back in 2004, I got introduced to a game called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I loved it and it was one of the two GBA games I actually bothered to complete. It was a tactical RPG, much like its predecessor, Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSone. Revenant Wings is extremely similar to FFTA except for one major different: instead of being a tactical RPG, it's a real-time strategy game with RPG elements.

It reminds me a lot of LostMagic minus all of its negative points. The gesture system is gone, because that was way too hard to deal with when you're getting killed from every angle. The monster capture system is no longer a spell, but is something similar to technology trees in RTS games. Apart from that, it's FFTA. You have a map where you move on to get quests, you have the message board with sidequests, you have the same menus and whatnot for equipping items and magic. Is that bad? Of course not, FFTA was brilliantly designed. (Some might say it's not as well-designed as FFT on the PSone, but I didn't play that.)

The only missing aspect is online play, but after seeing how well that worked in LostMagic, I don't blame them for the omission.

PC: The Orange Box
What? A PC game? In my games of the year? Get out!

For the uninitiated, The Orange Box is a compilation of Valve's biggest releases of the year. This means you get Half-Life 2, HL2: One, HL2: Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. 5 games for what price? $59.99 CAD. FYI, that's the price of Portal and Team Fortress 2 separate.

And that's pretty much why it's the game of the year. Portal is a first-person puzzle game where you shoot two portals that teleport from one to the other. While this seems simple and boring, it quickly becomes obvious that it isn't. The game has 19 levels, but has the potential for more thanks to custom maps.

The other game I'm very excited about is Team Fortress 2. After god knows how long (but not as long as Duke Nukem Forever!), the game is finally out. It's a class-based first-person shooter, and teamwork is a huge part. For the team to win, you really need communication and a good player for each class. The art direction is also very reminiscent of The Incredibles, which is always good.

I don't really care about HL2 myself, because I played it a bit on the Xbox and never quite got into it, but that may be due to lack of playing HL1. However, it adds to the value, and lots of people love HL2. So uh. Whatever. Never mind that, The Orange Box is worth it for Portal and TF2 alone.

Wii: NO Game of the Year
I'm calling all of you Nintendo fans out. The Wii has been out for over a year now, and I've only seen it in stock once ever since then. (FYI, one unit was remaining during this one-time event.) Now that the holidays are back, the prices for Wiis on eBay are back to the same they were a year ago: $500-600 range for a Wii.

Now if the Wii's software library this year wasn't as bad as it was, I wouldn't be this confused as to why the Wii is selling insanely well, mainly because it's being way too reminiscent of the GameCube now. The good games are spread throughout the year by huge droughts and Nintendo's attempts to quench gamers' thirst for more games via the Virtual Console has, for the most part, failed.

Here's my perfect example. An ex-classmate of mine is holding a party or whatever at his house this weekend. (I have refused to even be invited, let alone accept the invitation.) The highlight of the party seems to be playing the Wii, more precisely, Wii Sports.

Now excuse me, but if you pay $270-ish for a console, you don't necessarily expect the big multiplayer party game to be Wii Sports, the pack-in game. If I cared enough to recommend a better party game, it'd have to be Bomberman '94, but as stated in the name, it dates back to 1994. That can't really win Game of the Year, can it?

Now, I know all of the Nintendo fanboys are going to be shoving Super Mario Galaxy in my face. I have no idea why the hell people are so obsessed and in love with this game aside from the fact that they haven't had a new Mario game since 2003. Every three-dimensional Mario game so far has been a mediocre overhyped crapshoot. And from what I've heard from actual people, and not the sellout reviewers out there, Galaxy *is not* worth the collective orgasm the gaming community has yet to recover from, but it's quite reflective of the majority of Nintendo's fanbase: blind and ignorant kids who want their fucking Mario game.

It also brings up the next thing: why are people buying the Wii in the first place? This year was really dry games-wise, and the comments I've been hearing from rather sane gamers is that it's an expensive gimmick platform. While I do admit having said the same thing about the DS in the past, it eventually got quality games that proved me otherwise. So Nintendo, why aren't you doing the same thing? Make enough games that prove me it's not just a gimmicky platform and maybe then I'll respect it.

But then again, you don't really have to cater to me, you already have twenty billion people willing to pay all of their life savings for your stupid console. Oh well, there goes the gaming industry.

360: Shadowrun
Most people are not going to believe what I just said. Why, exactly, am I saying Shadowrun is one of the best games this year, when reviewers fucking tore it to pieces all year long?

Because they're tearing it apart for the wrong reason. People were being hard on Shadowrun because of its pricetag, and not because of the quality of the game. From day one, Shadowrun was being marketed as being a multiplayer-only first-person shooter with magical powers. What were reviewers whining about? Lack of singleplayer and the fact that 60 dollars is too much for a multiplayer only game.

When you review a game, you don't normally take into account the pricetag, but rather the quality of the game, which was ignored in most reviews, because they were too busy whining about lack of singleplayer. In that case, why did no one care that BioShock was singleplayer-only? Why did that game not get constant 7s? I could turn the tables on the reviewers and be "well, $60 for a singleplayer-only first-person shooter is too expensive, and this game sucks because it doesn't have multiplayer" and everyone think I'm an idiot because they're too busy going on about how BioShock is game of the year, 10/10, must-have 360 game, blahblahblah.

Seeing as how I'm not a professional reviewer, I can do whatever I want, and that's why this game is up here. Shadowrun is a brilliant multiplayer-only first-person shooter, and it's one of those Games for Windows/Xbox Live hybrid games that let you play against both platforms. It's also one of the few Xbox 360 games that let you run a dedicated server on a PC. (Actually, I think it's the only one so far.)

It also has magic, and the magic itself are powers cheaters would like to have. While that sounds cheap and stupid, it balances the game out. Everyone has access to the magic/cheats, and so there are hardly any boundaries anymore. Only disadvantage to the game is that since multiplayer is paid on Xbox Live, you need to have a Gold membership. :/

PS3: Warhawk
Same mentality as above. It's a downloadable $40 PlayStation Network game, and it's a multiplayer-only shooter, with vehicles. If you buy it in a retail store, you can get it with a Bluetooth headset for $10 or so more. I don't have much to say about it.

And so that's it. Yeah, the PSP is missing, but I haven't really been following the PSP scene that closely anymore. Big deal. I hope you managed to survive this long post of whining about gaming, but whatever, you should be getting used to this by now.

A modified version of this rant was handed in as an editorial for my journalism class. Translated from the French version. (How ironic.)
_____

For a few years now, the Office québecois de la langue française has been whining and moaning about how there weren't any video games with French translations by the big three: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Earlier this year, Nintendo said they would translate their big games of the holiday season in French.

Now that two of these games are out and about, the OLQF isn't pleased. More precisely, they feel insulted, because characters in Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass use Quebecer slang. Characters use "moé", "toé", and "icitte" among other words.

Now, is it really that bad? If slang and non-standard English is so bad, why don't we hear the same whining and moaning from the United States, where finding games without slang is like finding a needle in a haystack. Their slang is as much a part of their culture as our slang is a part of ours, whether we like it or not.

Also, the OLQF got 15 000 complaints from consumers about the lack of French video games in the past few years. For 25 years, Mario games have been exclusively available in English in Canada, and now that there's finally a French one, you bitch about it?

French language partisans, would you kindly shut up? You, much like any other person, have probably read classics of Quebec literature. Classics that you adore and you'd recommend to coworkers and friends, classics in which Quebecer slang is used to give a certain personality to a character or to put the reader in a certain ambience. Michel Tremblay's body of work, for example. So why is it so different when a video game does it?

Let's talk about another video game company for a while now: Microsoft. The voice track for one of the biggest game hits of the year, Halo 3, were translated into French. But, unlike Nintendo, gamers can't choose which voice track they want to hear. They have to listen to the French voice track whether they like it or not.

This would be just fine if we lived in a world where everyone spoke uniquely French, but thankfully, we don't. SO why exactly does everybody who buys Halo 3 in Quebec have to play the game in French. Oh sure, you can select your language, but that selection only influences the menus. The voices that tell you what you have to do in the game stay in French, without any subtitle accompaniment.

How exactly are English speakers in Montreal supposed to enjoy Halo 3 now? The only way they can get the English version is to ship it from the US or elsewhere in Canada.

In the past, one could blame the lack of a translation on the fact that the media games were stored on didn't have enough space. But in this world of technology we live in where the discs games are held on have more capacity than the games really need, there is no excuse.

Finally, is the government forgetting that games entirely in English aren't necessarily bad? When games were only in English, those who wanted to play used their own initiative to figure out what the words meant. It might not be the best solution for improving one's English, but it's better than the mediocre English education the not-so-motivated kids in schools today are getting.

But of course, it's not like we could axe French translations. All that wouldd do is destroy Quebec's culture and exterminate the French language, according to them. The same culture they're trying to censor. Go figure.

Sony's been bashed a lot by people in the past year for the PlayStation 3. While I think it's definitely a powerful console with some interesting games right now and in the pipeline (Warhawk, SOCOM: Confrontation), Sony has been making fools of themselves on stage, and now in their own press release. Today (actually tomorrow, thanks timezones!), PlayStation 3 firmware 2.00 is coming out, and their press release has one of the most perplexing statements I have ever seen in a press release.

Version 2.00 features the ability to turn a PS3 system on and off remotely, using a PSP™ (PlayStation®Portable) system via the Remote Play1 function, allowing for a truly mobile partnership between the two systems.

Can someone please tell me what the hell that's supposed to mean? You added a power button to the PSP's Remote Play UI, and all of a sudden, that gives you a truly mobile partnership? I know Sony tends to overhype things, but they make this power button announcement seem like the best thing since sliced bread. If that wasn't enough, the two things people probably give a damn about (customization in the XMB and custom playlists) aren't even mentioned in the first paragraph of the press release.

Sony, if you simply inverted the order of the press release, maybe firmware 2.00 would sound less like a minor upgrade. Speaking of which, how exactly does this update warrant jumping to the big 2.0? If Sony had added features like, oh I don't know, cross-game invites, or hell, even support for Sony's own new Blu-Ray Profile, I could have understood, but allowing your users to set a wallpaper for the home screen isn't really worthy of 2.0.

(On a sidenote, I do applaud Sony on finally catching up to functionality the PSP has had for at least a year now. Now just let people access the PSN friends list and whatnot when in-game, because that's most likely when they want access to that info, and then maybe you can start regaining your reputation points.)

Every one or two seasons, I go through a major update of something. I tend to combine fall and winter, because due to school, they seem so much shorter. I have a series of things I'd like to do to my various projects, so I guess I'll post them here for future reference.

cherrypie

• Rock Band support is the big one. If I can get RB co-op supported, mission accomplished. I won't elaborate too much because I don't have enough info to decide critical things yet, but whenever I do, this'll be updated.
• No Guitar Hero 3 support. I've heard enough complaints from people about it, I won't even bother going that route.
• Mobile-ready version would be preferred once RB support is done. That'd be a killer app.
  

Blog

• Minor theme changes.

Computer

• Reinstall Tiger. 10.4's been borked for too long and 10.5 won't be usable on here. Sticking with 10.4.10 for a while.
• Cut down on useless apps.
• Get MySQL working once and for all. :/
• Figure out the definitive iPod smart playlists in time for New York City.

More will be added/removed/struckthrough in the following weeks.

Yeah, I know, I'm late to the party. Whatever.

Leopard came out last Friday and most Mac users gathered at their nearest Apple Store and partied like it was 1999 and Apple brought out the absolutely brilliant Mac OS 8.5. It's sorta like that, except instead of the oasis in an otherwise dry Classic era of the Mac, they got a less impressive upgrade that was long overdue.

As most readers have noticed tonight, I've been messing around with a test install on my dad's Mac mini. I believe it's a 1.2 GHz G4 model with a gig of RAM, so it should fare pretty well performance-wise. Except it didn't, because Spotlight was trying to index, which leads me to the first of Leopard's many issues: you still can't turn Spotlight off in the UI right away. Much like in Tiger, you can't get rid of the silly search icon on the menu bar and you don't have the bigass switch to turn it off like Time Machine does. I sure as hell wasn't going to wait an hour just to mess with Leopard, so I dealt with the performance issues.

First big change you notice when booting into Leopard is that the UI is drastically different. It looks from another era, which is probably why Apple was whoring the whole "Welcome to tomorrow" aspect in marketing materials or whatever. Much like Windows Vista, however, the beautiful eye candy requires pretty recent hardware. For those of us with machines that can't even do Core Image manipulations well, don't even dare to enter the realm of Core Animation. Luckily, OS X does a great job of detecting how crappy your computer is and reduces the amount of transitions and animations you see until it becomes usable. Kind of. There are minor UI changes that are greatly appreciated, like rounded menu corners, and what appears to be more violations of Apple's own UI guidelines throughout the entire OS. At least their entire new OS is consistently inconsistent with Apple's HIG.

Next up, you might notice that the Dock isn't really a dock anymore, but a freaking shelf. Sure, it's pretty and whatnot, but it seems to hog more space than the good old 2D dock. After turning the 3D glass shelf effect off via Terminal, I got what has to be the best implementation of the Dock since OS X Public Beta, a rounded corner bezel-like dock on the bottom of the screen. It's gorgeous, so first thing you need to do when getting Leopard is either turn the 3D shelf off or move your dock to the sides. Seriously, you'll love it.

You may have noticed that I brought up Terminal, which has grown up quite a bit since Tiger. It now has tabs (finally!), and it has savable color schemes, which is nice for those who color-coordinate their shells with certain tasks, I guess. I don't really care since I practically live by green on black. Now just make Visor work in Leopard, or build it into the next update of Terminal, and I'll love it.

Script Editor and Automator got a lot of under-the-hood developer-ish stuff, which is great for the AppleScript users among us, but I still don't see why Apple loves to spread out the AppleScript feature set across multiple apps. You have Script Editor for people who want a text editor that highlights syntax and exports launchable scripts, Automator for the uneducated lazy who can't use AppleScript, AppleScript Studio for those who want to create Carbon apps with an AppleScript backend, and probably some other app I'm forgetting. All of these are pretty meh on their own, so why not combine the more hardcore apps (Script Editor, AppleScript Studio) and make an Xcode-esque environment for AppleScript? Given the new abstraction layers AppleScript has access to, this would make perfect sense.

The new Finder is very reminiscent of what I remember of Path Finder, a third-party Finder replacement many people have waxed poetic about in the past year or so. It's also incredibly similar to iTunes, which isn't necessarily a bad idea, since the iTunes UI is so familiar to most people and it's pretty. Unlike iTunes, however, the Finder isn't whoring all of the CPU to itself and it's rather responsive, which is surprising. (This excludes Cover Flow, which is quite sluggish, but given the performance circumstances, whatever.)

Two new things I'm quite fond of in the Finder. First: the networking actually works right. It brings back vivid memories of when I was young and innocent and used Mac OS 8.5's Network Browser for the first time. Those were the days, networked machines were discovered almost instantly, and most of the time, it just worked. Much like how iTunes picks up shared music libraries, and through the magic of Multicast DNS/Rendezvous/Bonjour, accessing networked computers is much easier and faster. It also was the first time I've used Drop Box at home. You're automatically logged in as a guest when you click on a shared computer, and I wanted to upload something to my home directory. Instead of logging into my account via the network, I just dropped it in my drop box and kept working. Much faster, and if my computer was running Leopard and I had a Drop Box stack, I'd see it pop up instantly thanks to FSevents. This feels like networking on computers should be.

The other nifty Finder feature I like is in the View menu and no one really seems to care about it. View Menu -> Show Path Bar. I loved it when it was in Spotlight, and this should have been in the Finder since forever, but apparently it's taken this long to do it.

iCal and Mail.app are godly. They are the killer apps of Leopard here. Mail.app actually feels like a decent mail app, and iCal is Google Calendar minus the Web interface. Really, they are near identical, which is perfect. I could go on to describe each app in detail, but most of these are UI enhancements so you can see them for yourself. Cool things about Mail quickly:

• I use a service called Rmail to get RSS feeds delivered to my email inbox. Mail.app does RSS feeds now, which is nice. Not sure if I'd switch off Rmail, because with Gmail IMAP and Rmail, my feeds are in sync all over the place, and I don't have to go to two places to see my feeds no matter where I am.
• To dos, events, and all the MailTags functionality they stole is brilliant.
• Notes leads to Marker Felt which leads to anger.

Tons of stuff from the old days is still around, which makes me wonder when Apple will ever get rid of Grab and Image Capture. The annoying little bitch that was Help Viewer threw itself off a cliff in despair when it realized everyone hated it, and it came back to life in something that reminds me a lot of the Apple Guide in System 7, which is far more lightweight and useful. And unlike Help Viewer, it doesn't take half an hour to launch and doesn't hog all your CPU, so you can resume accidentally hitting the help button.

I didn't mess around too much in the /System folder, even though I was really hoping some juicy treats would be left there for me to uncover. Sadly, most of the stuff in there was in Tiger as well, except now with gorgeous new icons. Perfect example of this is Kerberos, which is incredibly nerdy and I can't quite describe what it is because I have no idea myself (it has something to do with authentication, but that's it). It has a gorgeous high-resolution icon, never mind the fact that you'll never actually see it unless you look for it. (Maybe you see it in Server, which wouldn't surprise me.)

If I were asked to describe Leopard, I'd describe it as Path Finder plus what iCal and Mail should have been from day one. There's a lot more potential waiting to be discovered, but the truth is, Leopard is a developer's dream OS. Tons of new APIs and frameworks are finally being made available, some stuff is being slowly axed, some stuff is slowly being phased in, and it's a transitional OS upgrade between the old OS X (Public Beta-Tiger) and the newer, more modern OS X (Leopard-???).

For now, hold off on the upgrade. I've been hearing horror stories from Leopard users recently, and many applications or third-party plugins for Apple apps have stopped working with Leopard. Wait for the developers to catch up and release patches or updates for their apps that make them work with Leopard, and then switch over. I'm not willing to install it on here, but that might be because of my mediocre 512 MB of RAM. Whatever.

If you want a sleek UI, a newer Finder, and PIM apps that don't suck: get Leopard. If you don't want those, don't get it, but do keep in mind that developers will start using Core Animation and other non-Tiger stuff, so they'll probably drop Tiger support really fast, just like many people did with Tiger.