• The grey Apple logo now remains on screen during the entire boot sequence and also got a subtle emboss to it. Also, no more blue while booting.
• It usually takes my iMac a few seconds after I hit Cmd+Opt+Eject to fall asleep. That hasn’t changed, but what has changed is that it now immediately turns off the display. The extra visual feedback it provides is nice.
• The grey top area of windows now has a very subtle grainy texture to it.
• The bottom corners of windows are now rounded.
• Quick Look now also works on stacks in the Dock. Simply hover over any item and hit space.
• Speaking of Quick Look, it now uses a light grey window instead of the HUD display. Also, click and hold or right-click the Open with [Application] button to open the file with a different application.
• Right-click a file → Open with → App Store... to search the App Store for compatible applications.
• The huge 512×512 pixels icons introduced in OS X Leopard are apparently still not huge enough. Some apps, including Launchpad and App Store, now have icons measuring 1024×1024 pixels.
• Almost everything is now 64 bits, including the kernel and even iTunes.
• The Special Characters applet got a face lift.
• The dictionary popup also received a face lift.
• DigitalColor Meter no longer displays hexadecimal values, which kinda sucks.
• No more Front Row.
• Safari’s content area can be resized horizontally even in full screen mode.
• Safari now has WebGL support and a “Do Not Track” feature, but they’re apparently still in beta. Both options are located in the Develop menu and off by default.

There’s probably much, much more I haven’t discovered yet. Apple seems to have touched everything in this release.

So here is the big question: Why, for crying out loud, is it even being considered to investigate Apple in these cases? As I recall from economics class in school, antitrust legislation was originally introduced to prevent monopolists from abusing their market dominance.

In what market does Apple have a monopoly? Surely not in smartphones, if anyone comes close it would be Nokia. Not in ads either, I would say Google has a lot more market share there. So what is it? All that’s left then is the iPhone OS platform itself, but I don’t think that constitutes a market on its own. If any, Apple might have a monopoly on the MP3 player market, but you don’t hear anyone complaining that an iPod nano doesn’t run Flash.

So, Apple has no monopoly on anything related to the iPhone. And yet, these antitrust investigations (or at least pre-investigations) are apparently already underway. Am I the only one who thinks that’s a teeny bit smelly? Am I the only one that thinks Adobe is behind all this?

Frankly, I think Adobe should tuck its tail between its legs and take a hike. For one, Apple is right, Flash downright sucks, especially on non-Windows platforms. Secondly, when Apple needed Adobe the most in the mid 1990′s, Adobe just dropped Apple like a rock and said: “We’ll be focussing primarily on Windows instead of Mac OS from now on”.

Now, some 15 years later, Apple is in the position to bite back with a vengeance. I can’t really say I blame them. In fact, if Apple manages to kill off Flash altogether, you won’t hear me complaining. Adobe had its chance, they couldn’t come up with a (non-crippled) version of Flash that would decently run on a smartphone, so why should Apple be punished for saying: “Sorry, we don’t want that crap on our platform”?

Oh, one more thing: Isn’t it Adobe that won’t hesitate to tell us all that almost every video on the web requires their Flash platform to play? They’re not in any position to be complaining about monopolies.

Just my two cents.

So, I’ve reverted most of these “enhancements” so my Safari looks like it used to again. The one thing I left intact is Cover Flow. Being able to visually identify pages from the history is actually a very handy feature. Also worth noting is the fact that it will not store thumbnails for secure (https:) web sites. Nor will it allow you to add such sites to the Top Pages screen. So they did actually think about what they were doing. Nice to know that they haven’t lost that touch.

The thing I am very impressed about, though, is the new version of WebKit, Safari’s rendering engine. That thing is awesome. It will now actually let you animate any HTML element in a page using only CSS. No JavaScript or Flash required. I’m not talking about animated transitions from one state to the other, which Safari 3 could already do. I’m talking about true keyframe animations here.

Aside from the animations, it can also do pure CSS gradients, anywhere an image could otherwise be used. It also supports alpha masks, reflections, rounded corners, text and box shadows, transformations (scale, rotate, skew, translate) and more fancy stuff. It’s a shame a lot of these features don’t work in more browsers, because with some creativity, they would allow the most fantastic things to be created. Another nice feature is that it also allows SVG images to be actually used as images in CSS as well as <img> tags.

The new Web Inspector and JavaScript debugger/profiler are also very sweet. It’s a pity that it doesn’t seem to dynamically update its DOM tree view as it changes. That means I’ll probably keep using Firebug for web debugging. Its Resources view is very useful though. It uses colors to differentiate between file types, and it also shows latency in addition to the actual file transfer times.

To sum up, now that I’ve tamed it down somewhat, I’m pretty pleased with Safari 4. Can’t wait to see what the final version will be like.

Anyway, I have more or less wanted an iPhone since the 3G was announced, it — the financial support that is — just never came up before. I got the white 16 GB model. It would be ridiculous to go for the 8 GB version, because my iPod touch is filled with almost 7 GiB of music already. As for the color, well, I just think white looks better. Don’t know why.

Speaking of that iPod touch, I haven’t got a clue as to its fate. It seems pretty superfluous now. It’s backside is way too scratched to sell it to anyone. So I think I’ll just keep it around, maybe jailbreak it and turn it into a glorified touch pad for my iMac.

I didn’t bother to post a picture this time. I can’t imagine anyone surfing the web and never having seen a picture of an iPhone before.

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.

iPod touch

So, Ive been playing with this gem for a week now, and it’s incredible! The multi-touch interface really is as amazing as Apple claims it is. The sound is of the quality I’d expect from an iPod, and video just looks gorgeous. It’s a shame that it only supportys H.264 encoding for video, but then again, having to recode a movie specifically for it does have its advantages. I can optimize the result for the iPod’s screen resolution, which brings an hour of video down to less than 450 MiB while keeping good quality. Not too bad.

I have jailbroken the device, but that caused it to be so unstable that I’ve restored it within an hour. I’ll just wait for the App Store that Apple says will open up in June. And it is of course still mainly a portable media player, and when it comes to that, it performs like a champ.

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.

For those who don’t already know what it looks like, this is it:

Aluminum Apple Keyboard

Back in late 2004, when I bought my previous iPod, my music collection was about 3.5 GiB, so that left me with the choice of going for an iPod mini with 4 GB, or 3.81 GiB, which would barely hold all my music, or to go for the 20 GB iPod. I decided on the latter.

Now, my collection has grown by a little more than 2 GiB, totaling 5.85 GiB. So now I didn’t have to go for a bulky large iPod with a screen that’s far too big (I have my Palm T|X to watch movies on the go). The black iPod nano comes with 8 GB, or 7.45 GiB.

That leaves me with almost 2 GiB of growing space. Looking at the expansion of my collection the past 3 years, that means another year or 2. After that, we’ll see what happens. Oh, and it’s definitely worth the name “nano”. Boy is it small.

The new white earbuds are still of inferior quality. They don’t even come close to actually utilizing the full potential of an iPods capabilities. But that’s easily remedied with some quality earbuds from Sennheiser, the MXL51 Street.