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.

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Finally! As most of you probably already know, Apple’s new version of their operating system Mac OS X ships on October 26th. For me it’s exciting news as a developer who uses Ruby on Rails, as Leopard is bundled with all needed tools for Rails development - Ruby on Rails, Capistrano and Mongrel. What is more, Ruby itself becomes a first-class citizen of scripting languages that you can use to write Cocoa applications for Mac OS X.

Xcode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0 are coming too! I guess it’s high time to learn Cocoa and start developing native applications for Mac OS.

If you still don’t know what’s new in Leopard, here’s a list of 300 new features implemented. Give it a try, worth reading.

Just a quick post to mention a Mac app I have personally been using & recommending over the last couple of weeks. It’s called photobook and essentially it allows you to easily browse & import your friends photo albums from facebook into your iphoto.
The app is called PhotoBook, made by Caffeinated Cocoa , and although they promote key features such as slideshows and as-you-type search…the best feature is the ability to import entire albums into iphoto with just the click of a button, ok two buttons - select all & ‘add to iphoto’.

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.