ThinkSecret posted some commentary on the latest build of Leopard OS X 10.5 build 9A527, and many great screenshots, this is well worth a few minutes to read the text and few the gallery.

The MacBU has just sparked up a new site for Mac Office users, Art of Office. Art of Office is a place for people to submit artistic and/or useful content made using Office applications (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Whether it’s creating pixel art using Excel (a la our Post-it Notes) developing an animated short story in PowerPoint or artistic pieces in Word, this online community allows you to share, rate, remix and discuss user-submitted content with other Mac Office users around the world. It’s a fun way to show unique applications of our product and helps people think of Mac Office in ways they may not have thought of before.

We’re proud to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.0. Download it here.

This is a major release. The changes cannot really all be summed up, but here’s a try:

* User experience is improved through a re-envisioned Mac interface and a Windows interface that’s been rebuilt from the ground up.
* Picture quality is improved through better image scaling, better deinterlacing, new filters for denoising, deblocking, inverse telecine, and new presets devoted to high quality settings.
* Speed improvements due to updated copies of x264 and ffmpeg. This includes improved multi-threaded encoding for the iPod.
* Compatibility is improved through new presets for devices like the iPhone and PSP. As well, HandBrake now supports DTS as an audio source and has limited support for .VOB and .TS file containers as input. Most excitingly, HandBrake can now output to the Matroska (MKV) file container.
* Stability has been improved due to countless bug fixes. (Including audio drop and mp2 issues). Handbrake also has optional support for MP4 files larger than 4 gigabytes.

Uncle Walt [Mossberg] did a nice quick video review of Apple's newly updated iWork suite, now complete with a spreadsheet application.

He sums it up very nicely by saying that if you're a Mac user and you want a nice Office suite and you aren't primarily a power Office user, then iWork may well be a great option for you.

Apple Insider did a nice review of the new aluminum 24" iMac. I found that I was very much in agreement with their review on most every point they made, except their final rating.

Despite the fantastic package that the iMac is, it's new lower price point with a faster system, AppleInsider only rated the new iMac a 3.5 out of 5.0??? This seems quite odd to me, 4.5 would have seemed more in line with the review.

Sure I would prefer a matte screen, at least the option, but other than that I don't think there is much to complain about with this machine, in virtually everything you look at with this new iMac - it excels very well. It's an amazing machine at a very reasonable price.

Maybe they were secretly disappointed that Leopard did not come pre-installed?

I tried TED, which stands for Torrent Edition Downloader, several years ago and at the time I wasn't very impressed. However, it has been making progress and is now at a stage where it warrants a serious look. TED is a Java app and works on OS X and Windows, Linux should be working if not now, soon.

Legalities aside, torrent versions of your favorite broadcast shows are great because they're commercial free and are highly compressed - most are HDTV sourced, some are even 720P these days (HD). When you add a show to TED it will begin looking for that edition, and all future shows, in other words it's does the equivalent of TiVo's Season Pass. And to avoid getting themselves in trouble, TED only downloads the .torrent file, but you can have it work with your torrent client of choice to actually download the torrent show.

Here's what TED looks like in your menubar



Here is the main window of TED




Here is the ADD show screen

The other Edit show screens are equally well done. You can also create a custom show setting if the one you want isn't in the predefined list, which is constantly updated - you can set your preferences to automatically update the show list. You can also create custom filters to help filter which specific torrent you want.

Take a look it it interests you.

I read through the Engadget liveblog of today's Apple event like a junkie looking for a fix. And I certainly wasn't let down.

The highlights are (you can click on the images for that page at Apple.com)

An all new iMac [Pro looking computer.] Gone is the 17" from retail, 20" and 24" both in glossy screen formats, drat, I really prefer the Matte finish. The base 20" iMac is now $1,199 - wow, incredible computer for the money! Other goodies like an all new aluminum case, aluminum flat keyboard with MacBook type keys, FireWire 800, the 24" can even be ordered with a 1TB drive and a 2.8ghz Intel Extreme. I would rather they not focus so much on how thin the iMac is, I'd much rather see it be able to hold two internal harddrives.... As sweet as this baby is, I'll be sticking with my shiny white 20" Intel iMac for a while to come, it's not that outdated just yet.

The bastard step child Mac Mini finally gets Core 2 Duo's and faster speeds of 1.83ghz and 2.0ghz. Man would I love the new Mac Mini powering CenterStage for my home entertainment. If only CenterStage were prime time....

iLife '08 finally emerges with a complete new iMovie and very updated iPhoto. Count me in!

iWork '08 adds Numbers, a new spreadsheet program that can read and presumably write Excel files. Number's isn't aimed at the Excel power user, but the casual user, and it looks to have great flexibility in formatting and generating nice looking spreadsheets, something that Excel doesn't, well, doesn't excel at.

dot Mac gets a big improvement primarily in the area of sharing photos. Major integration with iPhoto '08, you can even send photos from your iPhone, and alloted space is increased from 1 to 10GB. I'll pass on this one at $99.95 per year - but glad to see improvements all the same.



Other news...

Steve said of the AppleTV" "..., we'll have some news for the Apple TV soon, but nothing to talk about today."

This is news that was most important to me, I seriously hope that the direct the AppleTV towards full HD and 5.1. It's almost laughable how the AppleTV requires a high end TV but yet doesn't officially support HD content and high definition 5.1 or 7.1 sound. Let's get the AppleTV HD party started!


Engadget has great coverage and details of all the Apple Event items today. Check it out here.

Back in February I panned the new Airport Extreme for only having 10/100 ethernet switch, it needed a gigabit switch, especially when all Mac's ship with a gigabit ethernet connection.

Well today Apple finally corrected the problem!

I hereby grant Extreme status to the Airport Extreme. Now if it only had a 5 port instead of 3 port integrated switch we could refer to it as the Airport Uber Extreme

One of the great features of Apple's iPhone is that it has Safari and can display any webpage. Nonetheless, optimized pages for the iPhone are a good thing and the newest update to RapidWeaver contains iPhone themes. I haven't had time to check it out myself yet, but it sounds interesting.

It's no secret what my opinion of Quicken for Mac is [pathetic]. Good news, I was able to get onto the beta for a Mac personal finance competitor - they have an all new version in the works, and I'm pleased to be on the team for it. I won't be able to discuss it as a part of the deal, but I'll tell what I can, when I can, cool?

I recently bought VMware's Fusion, it's currently 1/2 price, but will go to full price on Monday when it comes out of Beta.. You can purchase Fusion while it is still in Beta, before it goes retail, for half of it's regular $80 price. I went ahead and bought it today for $40. May as well take advantage and save a few dollars.

Wow, two referrals to Engadget in a row... Unusual.

Ross Rubin writes a very good column on Engadget, Switched On. He recently wrote an interesting article talking about Flash and how and why Apple may deploy (and not deploy) it. I've no idea if he's close to the target on this one, but it certainly made sense to me.

Snippet:

One could argue that, particularly with Apple's newcomer status to the world of the carrier-dependent, it wants to err on the side of safety in the case of the iPhone, but Apple TV doesn't have a similar defense. Because Apple TV and iTunes lack Flash, YouTube is transcoding its entire video library to H.264, Apple's preferred codec for QuickTime. A lack of support for Flash weakens Apple's argument that the iPhone does not provide, as its ads claim, "a watered-down version of the Internet."

Full article here.

I must say, this is pretty cool. I'm surprised it's taken this long for the next big iPod accessory after the Nike+iPod.

More details and unboxing on Engadget.

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