As everyone who has not been unconscious for the last few days knows, Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard will be available October 26th at 6pm. [Update: A 380MB 30 minute Guided Tour is now available]

I plan on getting a copy just about when it comes out at the Valley Fair Apple store in San Jose that evening. I'll probably have my camera there to record the insanity as well.

I have a new firewire drive on its way that is destined to replace a now too small drive that I use for daily SuperDuper back ups. That older drive will become free and available as a play pen for my new cat friend. I plan on getting familiar with the beast for quite a while before I am sure that everything I need will run OK.

I'm expecting new RAW processing abilities to appear, either with Leopard or shortly after, but don't expect to see another version of Aperture for a while.

Tags: Mac OS X, Leopard, Apple Store

I spent a brief ten minutes playing with an iPhone in an Apple store this week -- and remembered that it was a phone only after I had left the store.

In conversations since with people who have only seen the marketing and not the real thing what struck me was their disbelief that it really is as easy to use and as responsive as it is made out to be. Apple still has a credibility gap, but with the iPhone that will be narrowed considerably more than has been achieved with the iPod. There are a ton of non-iPod people out there who are phone buyers and those people, even if they only drop by an Apple store to kick the tires (or just know someone who has), will have that gap closed considerably.

So just what is iPhone?

It's a new word, created for the world to absorb and enjoy.

That's all it is: a new word. iPhone is less a thing, or even a family of things, than it is a word to symbolize an experience. Apple did this already with the Mac. It's Welcome To Macintosh, not Welcome To The Macintosh. And with the iPod. Always iPod, never the iPod. It's the press and you and me that gets this wrong.

Here's a diagram I published in March 2006 in a posting entitled Possession, Function, Access, and Emotion.:

It was about the iPod at the time, but look how well it fits the iPhone. iPhone is all of these elements, as is the Mac. This is why Apple is so hard to beat in the marketplace. iPhone (the object of possession) will change. iPhone (the functionality) will change. iPhone (the emotional connection) will change. iPhone (the access it offers) will change. But iPhone as a whole will not because it is all of these expressed as one. iPhone is not just a glimpse of the future, it's a glimpse of the now.

Tags: iPhone, Fun, Apple Store, Possession, Function, Access, Emotion

There have been 900 downloads of the audio recording I made of the Cocoaheads meeting at the San Francisco Apple store during WWDC 2007. That's a lot of interest! Ten days after posting, there are still about five downloads made each day.

Tags: CocoaHeads, Apple Store, WWDC

Wil Shipley, Brent Simmons, Gus Mueller, and Daniel Jalkut (left to right) answer questions about "going indie" at Cocoaheads held at the Apple store in San Francisco to coincide with WWDC 2007. It was packed. There were at least 200 people there. The speakers were great. Photo credits go to lukhnos.

I recorded the audio for the entire event and hope to have someone clean it up for me next week. I'll then be able to post an MP3 or AAC file for download.

[Update: The audio is available here.]

Tags: WWDC, CocoaHeads, Apple Store, Photography

I was in the Mall Of America (Minnesota) the other day and Aperture was not loaded onto any of the machines in the store, a fact confirmed by the staff. I know that all the machines I checked had had it removed, because I could still find the supporting files (plists etc.) present. There is some discussion of this on the Apple Aperture Discussion board.

Tags: Aperture, Apple Store, Interesting Stuff