The Review:

Well, undoubtedly, it’s an improvement. I’m not sure whether it’s an improvement that makes 6-8 months of waiting worth it…but nevertheless, at least it’s not gone down the tube.

The positives:

1. Design & UI have been vastly improved. It’s much easier on the eye, feels famiiar pretty fast & navigation seems to make sense.

2. ‘Recent Bookmarks’ which allows you to literally view the last bookmarks saved in the last minute and the number that have been…that could be very counter productive :/

3. Nice navigation change, simple.

4. Top 10 tags for yourself & other users.

5. Viewing lists of bookmarks has never been easier on the eye.

6. Only four different shades of color now - in regards to how many bookmarks a link has recieved.

7. I can’t put money on this, but it did feel like it loaded faster when submitting a bookmark. And either way, felt great to look at a much cleaner submission page - although to be fair, it wasn’t awful in the last version.

8. Look up a Url - finally, it makes the ability of looking up a specific url address simple.

Negatives

1. I still don’t understand why we aren’t able to view bookmarks in exact order of popularity….

2. Del.icio.us - is gone. It’s just delicious now…Sad, but i’ll get over it.

Just to warn you, you may need to squint to read the text…apologies.

I know this blog might be turning into a bit of a productivity blog - but believe me, its not intentional & we will be focusing more on design, development & online marketing side of things.

Anyhow, back to this post which i’ve been meaning to write for a fair while now. Tab groups, exactly what it says on the tin, groups of tabs…has almost immediately become my favorite firefox extension.

I am certain that the majority of you reading this have at least 30 tabs open on average - now just imagine them organised.

I have a tab groups called; Office, Project Hub, Zee, Read, Blog & then individual tab groups for each project i am involved with…and frankly it works magnicently, and even though it hasn’t been updated since 1993 - it works with FF3 although you do have configure about:config to use any extension .

Well there we go, Tab Groups - the first extension i install & frankly the last I give up.

ps. A digg, tweet, plurk, dance or general enthusiasm is always appreciated!

The benefits of this, for me at least, are plain to see…Dock space, quick access and genuinely cool. As i mentioned, it works with any site. All you need to do is follow the instructions in Todd’s video which takes literally 2 minutes and you’re done.

My favorite sites for this to work with are:

Google Reader:

Pownce:

FriendFeed:

Twitter

Plurk:

A sweet little library filled with loads of free, simple but useful java-scripts. I am truly amazed by the performance of the scripts. For example - the JavaScript Image Loupe. An eye candy! Plus it works perfectly smooth. A great source for developers - “nice looking simple downloadable dhtml and ajax code”. Miniajax.com

So here we are, 26th October that is… We’ve waited for this for a long, long time. Unless you’ve been locked up, everyone should know what I’m talking about. Before I do, let me make it clear that i’m using a white macbook. I say this because it has been pointed out to me that there some substantial differences between using Leopard on a macbook compared to say, an imac. BIG is generally better people. Ok, let’s make a start.

The Box

I received the package this afternoon with freshly brewed Mac OS X Leopard. Fresh and hot Leo blew a breeze of innovation and progress towards my nostrils. The box itself is a small, cd album sized package. It contains 1 dvd, a manual (more a “show-off booklet”) and of course 2 Apple stickers. Nothing impressive? Take a closer look at the box. It has this holographic effect mirrored around the huge familiar “X”. Amazing effect.

Desktop

Installation (well I upgraded my Tiger) took about 40 minutes and boom - a reboot. Login screen looks the same as in Tiger (aww, I was counting on something new from the beginning, even just a small touch would have been nice…), after a short while system loaded up correctly and finally I could try Leopard on my own!

It’s easy to see, the desktop has been designed to match all the new Apple products (the ilife & iwork suite.)

Menu

Can you see what i’m getting at here? I’ve no doubt it was a hard decision for Apple to make the menu semi-transparent. I can see it has changed from the early beta shots as it’s now more solid. Works really nice with darker pictures, getting worse with light or highly saturated images. Anyway I do love it! Although i’m sure some people out there would have wanted Apple to simply give them the option of transparent or not. But hey, the reason I switched to Macs not so long time ago was the fact that I hated everything about Windows’ design and colors. It was really distracting and full of contrast, nasty colors etc.

The new system has probably every kind of window, menu or dialog toned to one shade of matte grey which is fantastic. It’s even less distracting than Tiger and lets you focus on your work easily, although on non-native mac apps such as firefox & flock the difference is styles is pretty noticeable…but i’m sure these will be updated in no time.

The drop-down boxes in the menus have rounded corners at the bottom which just give it a nicer look and not much else - but it’s the details people, it’s the details.

The other thing which was fortunately added to the menu look is the ‘engraved’ effect. Now each application has that Garageband window look which means the title looks like it’s been literally engraved into the aluminum window. The text gains sharpness, it’s easier to read it and it looks sweet, voila.

Dock

Let the battle begin! I can see the fights between Tiger Dock Lovers and Leopard Dock Lovers already… This is a really hard point to write about. The dock itself looks slick, classy and it’s more or less cover flow added to the dock. The 3D look gives it more ‘gadgety’ feeling and ok the mirror effect does it as well. I guess this is the only aspect of the Leopard UI that could distract the user. The small arrows indicating is the application running have been replaced with these bright spotlights. Not the best thing to have done… Say what you like but I’m more than sure that the mirror effect is using a good chunk of memory and it’s another process for your cpu to think about. But yeah… Apple likes to improve the design for the cost of performance. It’s not their first time they’ve this. Second thing are the strange shadows behind the icons in dock. Is there 2 of them?

Ok I assume its to give the user a stage light experience? If you want to get rid of the stage, then take a look at this. It works great!Icon one! Finder! Number one file managing application, bravo! Works great, design wise…boring & far too itunes like. The folder icons Apple have added to Leopard are dull blue - boring hospital blue. It looks like Candy Bar are going to be profiting from this over the next few years, once they update it!!The stacks? They’re definitely useful and they do look good…well, almost. Could you also please tell me what that blasted light line is doing there to the bottom of the dock?

Coverflow

Ok, Apple really can be proud of this. I was amazed at how quickly Coverflow works in Finder. What’s more important - How beautiful it is! Icons in Leopard are extended to 512×512 pixels and all of OSX’s native icons are upgraded to that size too. They are sharp, crisp and oh so yummy. Browsing through them is pure pleasure. It works smoothly even on my MacBook, the files are pre-cached in fraction of a second. Great functionality…

Front Row

Heavily disappointed. The zoom out effect which was present in Tiger when starting Front Row is gone. Now it just fades out to black. Bottom-line it’s basically Apple TV layout and design.

Other Worthwhile Mentions:

• You’ll notice the top window, i.e. the window you’re currently using, is slightly darker a matte grey than the other lower windows. You’ll also notice a more prominent shadow over the windows underneath…Worth a mention.

The official response was:

“Hey everyone - thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We’re pretty passionate about to- do lists here as well, and we’ve got something in the works. Of course, we’re working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to- do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don’t have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.

Please be patient - we’ll have more to talk about soon.”

I’m not sure why this gets me so excited, but I have the strangest urge to start dancing because frankly i’ve been waiting for a google task feature for the last two years. I practically base my entire working life & personal life around lists & tasks and I have no doubt that google will strive to impress with this one. There’s been enough talk about it.

Here’s to it arriving before the end of the year.

To give you an example of the ideal time you could use the app…Say you & a bunch of your friends attended a wedding. Actually, let’s take it a step further - its’ YOUR wedding and you want every single photo from the beautiful day. A week or so after the big day, your friends upload their photos - you login to photobook & in a matter of minutes you’ve got all their photos sitting in your iphoto. The only downside…they’re not high-res but that’s hardly PhotoBook’s problem.

Oh, and one final point before I show you a couple of screenshots - it costs nothing, nada, zilch (at the moment) and you can download it here.

Created in flash, the UI is very well executed & the ability to add events had been implemented superbly. You simply add an event title, date (& time if you wish), an image (if you wish) and also a link to any external site (which could be a set of flickr photos relevant to that particular event…). You can then embed the timeline anywhere which accepts html.

People have been comparing the app to flickr, yet I really don’t see the similarities. I see them working side by side allowing you easily create a time line of events & link the events to your flickr photos.

So if you have a few minutes to spare…it’s fantastic little app. And for you lovebirds out there, would really recommend making one for your other half - a personal timeline can really show them you know them insideout! ; )

Below is an example of timeline created with CircaVie.

Try it out here. Of course you can browse the source immediately here or download it with your Subversion client from here.

Additionally Joyent has released their desktop deployment tool for Ruby on Rails applications - Slingshot. Basically it allows you to convert your Ruby on Rails application to run as a desktop application. Similar to Adobe AIR but you don’t actually need to change your code at all (in most cases). Give it a shot!