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Today, I received my new 24" Apple iMac. I opted for the 2.8 GHz model, with 2 GiB of memory and a 500 GB hard drive. The full specs can be found here. Oh, and I chose the Bluetooth keyboard, because I already have the corded version. As usual, here’s a picture of the beauty:

Apple iMac

Right upon arrival, I replaced the memory (I already bought two strips of 2 GiB prior to ordering the iMac itself), so it now has a spacious 4 GiB available. After the first boot, I installed all available updates and my most used applications. I’m now in the process of making all the settings and customizations that were not synced through my MobileMe account, and Time Machine is making its initial backup. When that’s complete, I’ll proceed with installing all other apps that now run on my MacBook.

When all that is done, and I have my iMac pretty much as my MacBook is now, I’ll probably reformat the latter and give it a fresh OS X install. At which point it can finally be what it was meant to be from the start: a portable secondary computer.

Last Friday, I installed Leopard, the sixth major release of Apple’s Mac OS X.

After 2 days of playing around with it, all I can say is: Incredible! Not only is it notably faster than Tiger (Leopard’s predecessor), its new features are simply fantastic. Of course, I’ve used things like backup software (Time Machine) and virtual desktops (Spaces) before, but somehow, Apple always manages to implement things just a little more streamlined and polished than the rest.

I’m very happy, and Leopard once again remembers me why I love OS X so much.

I’ve been messing around a bit with Growl styles. Those are just some HTML, CSS and images in a package, so it isn’t all that difficult to make your own.

All this playing around resulted in an all new Growl style. It’s inspired by the semi-transparent toolboxes found in some OS X software (iLife for instance), therefore I named it ToolBox. And this is what it looks like:

ToolBox Growl style

So you want it too, eh? Well, you’re in luck, you can download it right here!
Download

Oh, and it works best with opacity set around 90%.

Those vague vertical lines in the screenshot are probably an artifact from OS X making the screenshot. They are not there in reality. The images used for the background are fully opaque (except for the corners) and are made transparent by using the “opacity” CSS property with a value spplied by Growl (and ultimately you through the preference pane).