I'm working on a project in which I need to talk with people who work with US Patents. Preferably a patent examiner. But anybody with involvement with the patent process would be beneficial. I would like to correspond via email to get some information to help with my research.

Please email me directly or pass on my email if you know somebody who may be able to help.

I really appreciate it.

Eternal Storms is the developer of a great iTunes addon, GimmeSomeTunes. Now they have made a utility, OpaqueMenuBar, to take the new transparent menu bar in Leopard and make it not be transparent - like Tiger used to show it.

While I do like much about the new Dock, I don't like the transparency of the Menu bar, so this is one that I'm jumping on.

After a few more days with Leopard, I've got a few other thoughts.

1. I really like how the Finder now has a 'Green bar' effect with colored stripes. I tend to show files/folders in my Finder in the list view with is wide, the new colored lines makes it much easier to follow left to right.
2. Spotlight. Oh, I'm so sad about this one that I may have to go get another glass of this fabulous Malbec that I'm drinking. If you click on the Spotlight icon and enter some text to do a search, the resulting window looks the same as it did in Tiger, but if you click the 'Show All' button things are quite different. In Tiger, the Show All was a bigger version of what the initial search displayed, it grouped/categorized the results, but now in Leopard it's a scatter listing much in the same way how Windows search results have been displayed since I can remember. Well, I'm no fan of the non-categorized list. It's really sad that a feature I used many times a day is now gone!
3. Spotlight. Hey wait a second, see that Plus button to the far right on the Show All screen??? You can select document type, date criteria and more. Don't misunderstand, for how I used Spotlight in Tiger - Tiger's Show All page was superior to the new page. However, these new features are good, just not as good as it was to me.
4. Many of the programs I use daily have already been updated by the developers, I have to think that within a few weeks most common apps will have been updated.
5. Time Machine, it's going crazy doing backups all the time - but it's pretty behind the scenes not much to really notice. I haven't tried to restore yet. Also not sure if I'll still use SuperDuper! along with Time Machine or what. The Time Machine backup drive is not bootable, MacOSXhints.com had a good tip on how to make that drive bootable, read more here.
6. I'm liking the new Dock even more, can't believe people are getting rid of the new "3D" dock.
7. Windows Explorer is ugly, but is very good at what it does. Leopard's finder is a nice improvement over Tiger's finder, admitedly it's not as good as Windows Explorer from what, 2001? But it's not bad, I don't get in a huff about it - I've learned to work with it very well. I am a bit amazed though that so many people are in agreement with me that Windows Explorer is still better. Well, that's not what amazes me, but rather than Apple - the king of Human Interface Design hasn't been able to best Windows Explorer after all these years.
8. Doh! My brother bought a new 24" iMac a couple of days ago from Amazon, and it didn't include an upgrade to Leopard - only computers bought from Apple or a subset of Apple resellers qualify for the upgrade. LAME.
9. I'm still having trouble connecting to shares on my WinXP machine on the LAN, and digging to the discussions on Apple's forums have shown that I'm not the only one having this problem. Note to self: next time wait a month after release to install the new Apple OS.
10. On Tiger, using Camino - I was always able to just enter a domain name and hit enter and it would go to it. For example, I could type in the word "ford", hit enter, and it would go to http://www.ford.com however, now if I hit ford, and enter, it doesn't go there. WTF? I do use OpenDNS, I'll have to turn that off and see if anything changes - but I used OpenDNS with Tiger. This sort of backwards functionality rubs me the wrong way.

It does sound like I'm down on Leopard doesn't it. Well I do like the new bits, but also feel like some of the functions and features that I was very fond of have been reduced - this isn't going over well with me.

1. Stacks (on the Dock) sounded really cool until I went to use them. I'd much prefer that clicking on it opened the folder in Finder, I don't like the springboard or grid options.
2. I see that there are already hacks to axe the Shelf and 3D look to the Dock - I rather like it.
3. Make sure you uninstall UNO before upgrading to Leopard, whoops - live and learn.
4. I used to be able to connect to a Windows machine on my LAN by using it's network name, now I can't do that - am forced to connect to it via it's IP. And I'm having some issue connecting to certain shared folders with full read/write privileges. Not sure wtf is going on here.
5. The expanded use of CoverFlow is really nice.
6. Quick Look is awesome.
7. I'm using Time Machine, but don't have any experience with it to report just yet.
8. Dockless, a great util to keep some Apps from showing up in the Doc no longer works, this saddens me - hopefully it will be updated for Leopard soon.
9. Gizmo Project is not working in Leopard, I'm sure an update is not far off.
10. Spaces is nice, and there are some good things about it. But honestly, I miss some of the features from Desktop Manager, like being able to show the virtual desktops in the Menu Bar, complete with outlines of open Apps. It was a one click affair to change virtual desktops via mouse with Desktop Manager, with Spaces you have to click the icon on the menu bar and then click the desktop you want. This may sound trivial, but it's far more effort if you do it frequently.
11. Partitions can now be re-sized without destructively losing data in Leopard, wow, that's fantastic.
12. I used to use VineOSX VNC server because Apple Remote Desktop wouldn't allow me to connect with low bandwidth settings, and it doesn't work with Leopard. And unfortunately, the new ARD in Leopard also only works if I connect in high bandwidth mode.
13. Preview, I felt this was one of the unsung hero's of Tiger - and it's far improved for Leopard.
14. I'd swear that I read somewhere that Time Machine would give you the option of backing up USER data only, or everything including all system files. I see no such option available, however.
15. The Red, Yellow, and Green buttons on the top bar of windows are higher contrast now and much easier to distinguish.
16. Installs have more graphics when completed, easier to see.
17. iChat now has a tabbed interface, I just wish it were interoperable with other services.
18. Terminal is something I rarely use, but I can see that it's really beefed up. Not only is it tabbed - you can grab a tab and tear it off, move it back to being tabbed. Neat stuff for you command line junkies.
19. Mail.Appetizer no longer works with Mail, guess I'll move to a growl notification for mail.
20. The Menu Bar is better contrast now and easier to see items on it. Also, the Spotlight is no longer a garish blue, but a simple black icon.
21. The new Folder Icons are far better than Tiger.
22. Damn, have you seen Apple's stock price!

I'm not trying to be critical, I like Leopard - a lot. The itemized list above is just some of the observations I had. The connecting to local machine and mounting volumes is my really only issue I'm having right now. There's a lot of great stuff, and more stuff that I haven't had time to explore. But this is a worthy upgrade to Tiger.

My fingers are crossed that it's stable and runs as well as Tiger did.

IMAP is great, it's one of the mail reasons I've been using one of AOL's free email services, AIM for several years - free IMAP support.

If you're not familiar with what IMAP is, it's a setup where you keep your email on the main server, you don't download and delete from the server like POP. Gmail was accessed via a web browser, which is stored on the server like IMAP. But with IMAP protocol you can use the email client of your choice, say Mail[.App] or the iPhone two name a couple...

Great stuff. The news is currently breaking everywhere, but this is big for a lot of people so I'm posting it here.

From EngadgetMobile:

It's absolutely no secret that Google has a few humble fans of their email service, whose prayers have finally been answered. G's giving its users free -- yes, free -- IMAP access to their inboxes; great for desktop users, sure, but the people most likely to benefit from this development are those on mobile email clients (especially those unable to use the Java Gmail app). Hell, Google knows it and even whipped up an iPhone setup page to help Apple users get the real Gmail experience (instead of that crap out of box implementation someone so wrongly thought we'd be satisfied with). How do you get IMAP enabled? Well, if you don't see it in your Gmail options, log out and back in again. Still don't see it? Wait. Wait, and check the blogs, friend.

While Apple's stock is reaching stratospheric levels and everything is firing on all cylinders. The new cat, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5, is about to be [officially] released at 6PM this Friday. However, sources have confirmed that the final version of Leopard can be found on both the usenet and torrent sites as of today.

Microsoft monitors the uploading of their software and contacts people's ISP's, Apple could be following suit. In any event, support our favorite computer and OS developer, do the right thing and purchase it.

By the way, if you are a student, or know one, in the USA college and university bookstores will be selling Leopard for the nice price of $69. If you don't qualify for the education deal you can order it for $99 plus reasonable shipping here.

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

I did my first Keynote presentation the other day, then came the fateful moment... How was I going to play this on the Windows based Dell at school.

It turns out that Keynote does a bang up job of exporting a Keynote presentation to a Quicktime movie. The cool thing is that it acts much like it would playing it back in Keynote, you advance and back through the slides, all the effects how and everything. It's really pretty awesome. The only real downfall is that the files are much larger because it's a movie, and you can't quickly back up or go forward multiple slides.

If you want to check it out, here's a link to the Keynote Presentation that I did, I exported it to a small 320x240 size to keep it small, 7 megs. open the file and it'll start in Quicktime (Mac or Windows) hit enter or click on the screen to start it, you can keep clicking or use the right arrow key to advance, left arrow key to reverse.

I was putting together a Keynote presentation this evening, it included a quote that contained the word "whilst". Keynote put the red squiggly line underneath it, indicating that it was either misspelled or that it wasn't in the dictionary. In order to double check the spelling, I opened the Mac OS X Dictionary and it had the word and definition, whilst.

I wonder why it is that the Mac OS X dictionary contains words that are not in the spelling function of programs from Apple? Don't they utilize the same dictionary?

I ran across an article today on the International Herald Tribune about Quiet Computing. It quickly caught my eye because I used to be in the PC Quiet Computing Camp, and I heavily relied on SilentPCReview.com which contributed to the article. In fact, when I switched from PC back to the Mac in February '06, I wrote an article for SilentPCReview.com to talk about, of the many benefits, how incredibly quiet the iMac is.

What is interesting to me is how much money people pay for a nice quiet PC, often up to $5,000! Wouldn't it just be cheaper, easier, and more elegant to get an iMac and run Windows on it if that's the OS of their choice? They'd save a ton of money in the process. If the purpose is for a living room type installation, then the iMac with it's integrated screen may not be a good fit, and it's questionable if the Mac Mini has what would be required.

Anyway, the one sure thing is the iMac is not only a great computer, but it's really quiet too. I certainly appreciate this reality.

Logitech sure makes great hardware, but their Mac driver support isn't as nice as it could be. If you run VMware's Fusion with a Logitech mouse you'll know what I mean.

Today Logitech released the new version of LCC, 2.31. There are two nice updates that I noticed straight away. First of all, you can have LCC automatically check for updates thank you very much. And secondly, when you use VMware you no longer get the message about Caps Lock showing up - very nice.

Well done boys. Grab the latest version here.

I'm a Rhapsody subscriber and I love it. For less than the price of a CD per month I can listen to virtually whatever I want, all the time, three concurrent feeds.

TiVo and Rhapsody just struck a deal which I think is a cool way for a lot of people to get their Rhapsody music to their AV system. Kudos. It's too bad that AppleTV would never support this. I do hope that at some point Apple offers a subscription service, it's so much nicer than 'owning' your music.

The following is from Engadget.com

TiVo picks up Rhapsody support, learns to love music
Posted Oct 9th 2007 12:01AM by Ryan BlockFiled under: Home Entertainment

Really though, who isn't supporting Rhapsody these days? Real's hardware integration list, which includes iRiver, Nokia, SanDisk, Sonos, etc., now gets another notch in the bedpost with TiVo's newfound Rhapsody playback support. While you can thumbs up and down your selection (thanks, TiVo peanut), it doesn't sound like you can do much more than stream tracks and Rhapsody radio from the cloud, so if you're expecting some crazy TiVo-centered device syncing or portable media integration, think again. Unfortunately, the Rhapsody update launch date wasn't provided, so unless TiVo is going to flip a bit and turn it on today you may wind up wait a short while to get this going. And while we're on the topic of TiVo updates, not that we want to look a service-supporting gift horse in the mouth or anything, but we're still waiting for TiVoToGo and TiVoToComeBack for our Series3s and HDs, y'hear TiVo?

Universal Binaries where terrific when the Intel Mac's where fresh on the scene, you know it would be optimized for either platform your Mac was running, but now they're just freaking big, bloated, and unnecessary.

STOP THE MADNESS

Intel Mac's now have almost as large an installed base as PPC Mac's, and by Christmas the Intel Mac's will be the dominate 'guts' of all Mac's out there in existence.

Universal Binaries are huge in comparison to platform specific builds. Please developers, start offering a PPC build, and an Intel build. Save yourself some bandwidth by delivering more svelte applications, and save millions of users the disk space of bloated Universal Binaries.

HandBrake 0.9.1: Released!
"Mistakes? We don't make mistakes."
We're chagrined to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.1. Why chagrined? Because 0.9.0 wasn't as stable as it should have been, something 0.9.1 rectifies.
Download it now.
This minor update squashes a number of glaring bugs. Most notably, HandBrake will no longer hang at the end of encoding MKV files with chapter markers. This means the Animation, Bedlam, Constant Quality Rate, Deux Six Quatre, Film, and Television presets are now usable.
Additional improvements:

• Impressive performance enhancements
• Significant interface prettification (Mac more than Win)
• Color subtitles now show up in color
• Changing dimensions in Picture Settings no longer causes a crash (Mac)
• Forced subtitle support
• More robust exception handling (Win)
• Closing the main window no longer causes HandBrake to crash (Mac)
• Using "Slow" deinterlacing no longer doubles the chapter count.
• MPEG Stream support is now case-insensitive (.VOB as well as .vob, etc) and more compatible
• No more error messages sent to standard out instead of standard error
• Bigger buffer for the activity log (Mac)
• Proper display of fading subtitles
• On-completion options to shutdown, suspend, etc (Win)
• "Same as source FPS" now works correctly when the end-credits of a progressive film are interlaced.
• Add-to-queue fixed (Win)
• Target size fixed for the umpteenth time (Mac)

...and assorted other changes.
As always, for the complete list of changes, see the Trac.