Well, I just spent the last two hours watching Steve, first with Quicktime 5 but after he demoed Quicktime 6, I downloaded it and the stream was much faster, had both the iMac and iBook on and the difference was obvious. Jaguar will be really cool, lots of features, my favorite is the multithreaded finder which will be much faster. Now, it is rather slow. And of course spring loaded folders have been added, making the finder much easier. August 24 is the date. Course, isn't the only news, iTunes 3 is giving me much wanted features like smart playlists, really smart playlists, even keeps track of songs you haven't listened to, set up with rules just like email. Not only is it cool but it syncs with the iPod, now with additional features, like listing by album and composer, calendar, addresses, and the game is easier to find, and a new, thinner 20gb iPod is added to the mix. Prices on the 5 and 10gb versions have been dropped too. Cool new accessories, case, remote, cover for firewire port, ok little detail but very nice. And biggest news which my kid will love iPod for Windows, syncs with Musicmatch. There's iCal, an innovative calendar and iSync coming out. You get to sync your Mac with all your other computers at home, at work, your iPod, your Palm, your phone. This my kid will love as her phone died and she had to replace it and manually add all her friends. One button adding in seconds is all she would need to update with iSync. Of course there is .mac, iTools revamped, spiffed up and yes it will cost for the nifty features but considering how easy things are on the Mac compared to the PC, I think it will outdo .net easily. And last but definitely not least, and eagerly anticipated, a 17in flat panel iMac, not just any 17in but a cinema display 17in with a GForce 4 video chip, totally awesome. The price premium $100 over the old price of the 15in superdrive iMac, I say old as that price was dropped $100. So when David Coursey of ZDNet wrote that he wouldn't pay more than $300 for the feature, well he can save $200. I can say I am glad I waited on that new iMac purchase as I can now get one with a cinema display and Jaguar.

The web is an interesting place. Just about anyone can put up a website and spout their opinion. Blogging has made it even easier. Now I have had a site for five years now. I have an opinion. Mind you my site isn't a major site and heard of by very few. And I am not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. That said, I don't see why it is such a big deal if someone (possibly Apple) doesn't want to issue press passes to MacWorld Expo to some of the lesser known (and allegedly rumormongering) sites. Yes, it saves them a whopping $15 to be considered press. Yes, it irritates the heck out of them. But I can see why Apple might want some control over what is leaked. I can see why they might even be concerned that if stuff got leaked, someone might copy their stuff before they introduced it. After all, they have been copied before. And it has to irk them that the company that copied from them, albiet not terribly successfully, has some 95% market share. And considering that the desktop market overall is in a slump, they need all the advantage they can get. Whether irritating a few little sites will make an overall dent in their image remains to be seen. What matters to me is that I have a computer that works as intended and isn't a pain in the ass to maintain. Apple fills the bill nicely and now that it has OSX, it has the advantages of Unix. And gee, a lot of fuss over a few press passes is nothing to complain about in comparison to certain accounting scandals that are rocking the stock market.

Update on my clumsiness, I am back to work. Well, not today, have the day off. I have noticed something of interest to me. I can play on the PC, using ULead Photo Impact, and have to reboot like six times a day cause it eats system resources. IncrediMail does that too. Now that I have this new program on the iBook which is equally graphics intensive, Adobe Photoshop 7, I can more fairly compare. I still do NOT have to reboot the iBook. It keeps going and going. OSX is wonderful. And I can still keep 8-10 programs and multiple documents open and have no problems with Photoshop.

Now read this bout Microsoft. Interesting, and no I don't want Microsoft having admin privileges on my computer. I don't have that problem either with the iBook cause OSX only lets the admin (me) install stuff. Course, the article failed to mention that AOL has been doing it for years, it automatically updates AOL without any OK from me. And I never know just what they did when updating either. Just one more reason to stay away from the both of them.