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26th October, 2007: Apple finally releases Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5. Of course, how could any mac user not jump at the chance to get their hands on one of the first copies of a brand new operating system.

In preparation, a brand new hard drive in the MacBook Pro was in order. MacBook Pro owners will recognise that upgrading the hard drive in their machine is much easier said than done, but I won’t bore you with the details of that. Suffice to say that I did it, and my boot drive has now doubled in size to a much more reasonable 160gb

With an empty hard drive, I was sure not to encounter any of those strange problems that sometimes occur after an upgrade. At the time I had no idea that I was preventing Apple’s own Blue Screen of Death, but I’m always one to be cautious about upgrading of operating systems on any platform from Wintel boxes to IBM p-series.

First Impressions

The new release is initially impressive. The installation is the easiest (read: least configuration to do) yet for OS X. It was fast, too, having my first-generation MBP set up in under 40 minutes from booting the DVD. Once I had entered my details, I used the migration assistant to migrate my applications from a backup I had performed with (the very handy) Super Duper. Every application that I had migrated worked perfectly, aside from Parallels, which obviously struggled with the lack of the boot camp partition it was expecting.

The visual style is striking, and in my opinion, a welcome addition. For the first time in OS X history, all windows have a common style. Pinstripe Aqua and Brushed Metal are gone in favour of a slick silver, not entirely unlike the iTunes appearance since version 7. Most GUI elements are immediately familiar, but with a nice “new” finish to them.

The new visual style is complemented with a larger drop shadow around the active window, and a very noticeable light grey “washed out” effect on inactive windows. It certainly makes distinguishing the active window very easy with only a slight glance.

Another new visual change is the 3D style dock. It’s still the same old dock, but the icons now sit “on top” of a shiny tray that juts out from the bottom edge of the screen. This tray, while pretty, has a rather annoying reflectivity, and almost looks as if fingerprints would dirty it. It’s nice eye-candy, but if anything slightly less productive than the old dock. The new application indicator, formerly a little, dark triangle, has been replaced by a LED-style indicator lamp, complete with annoying reflection. It does mean that it is now harder to discern which applications are running, and after two weeks of use, I still haven’t grown accustomed to it.

Time machine – finally, a very functional and very good looking backup application built right into the operating system. It’s probably a little overkill with the OpenGL space theme when launched, but having incremental hourly, daily and weekly backups saved as you work to a USB disk. Admittedly, having a USB disk permanently attached to a notebook is not optimal, but simply plugging the disk in is enough for it to silently and quickly perform a backup while you work, and ejecting the disk temporarily suspends backups until you plug it in again. For a brand new release, it certainly does seem polished, and the point-in-time recovery is certainly much more useful than arbitrary system images.

All in all, it seems a well-polished and worthy release, with only two show-stopping bugs (I’ll go into the second at a later date) on release. Thumbs up from a happy customer.

Those who know me well know that I am obsessive-compulsive when it comes to organisation. Unless that organisation involves my finances. I’ll admit, I’m an impulse shopper, and a hopeless organiser of my own money.

That could be all set to change, thanks to a handy-dandy piece of open source software (and I’m a sucker for OSS). Please welcome my (possible) saviour,Buddi!

Buddi is a very simple personal finance manager. It may share the name of a purple gorilla infamous for spyware, but this little app seems much safer.

After setting a password to encrypt your personal file, you enter your accounts on one screen, and update the transactions as they occur. It’s a little time-consuming, but it gives you some nice graphs on your net worth. Hooray!

The other part of Buddi is the budget. It’s quite simple. You enter your incomings, your outgoings, put them into categories for a pretty display, and you end up with a hopefully positive figure for the end of the month, which is what is left over. This should be how much you can save.

Anyway, it’s written in Java, and runs flawlessly on my MacBook Pro, and is supposed to be just as easy on Windows and Linux. So if you’re completely hopeless like me, you might be able to stretch those dollars a little further each month. For screenshots, check out this page.