New Apple Ad... No Virus/Problems

Snow Leopard Friday August 28th

Apple today announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users for $29.

What will it do for you? This upgrade (10.6) will result in a better, faster operating system for the Mac user and will make the life of the Mac user easier then ever. It uses the next-generation technologies and is more accessible. It even supports Exchange. The upgrade will make your computer run faster, use less RAM and free up to 6GB of hardrive space. It is also 64bit (Leopard is 32bit) which means it is even harder for hackers to create a worm, virus or trojan in the Mac world.

Other features includes:

* Faster to wake up and shut down.
* A more advanced, more nimble Finder.
* New look, new features for Expose and Stacks.
* Quicker Time Machine backup.
* Faster, more reliable installation.
* Smaller Footprint.
* Another leap forward for QuickTime.
* Innovative Chinese character input.
* More reliable, higher-resolution iChat.
* Automatic updates for printer drivers.

Major features include:

- ActiveSync and Exchange 2007 support Following in the footsteps of the iPhone, Snow Leopard makes these Microsoft technologies native to the OS. That means Apple's e-mail, calendar, and contacts apps work just peachy with Exchange 2007 server, giving users the same capabilities as Microsoft Entourage but with the better-designed, less-memory-intensive apps -- Mail, iCal, and Address Book -- included in OS X.

- Exposé integration in the Dock The Mac OS X Dock makes it easy to access applications, open documents, and common folders, a concept Windows 7 is stealing in its retooled taskbar. Open documents are even more easily accessed in Snow Leopard, thanks to the integration of Exposé. Now when you click and hold an app icon in the Dock, you get preview windows for each of its open documents, allowing you to switch easily among them or to close them, all without having to clutter your screen with document windows.

- Automatic location detection When you travel, it's easy to get mixed up as to when your appointments are, since your computer is still in your "home" time zone, and you have to mentally calculate the current time when looking at the calendar or clock. Sure, you can change the time zone in the Date & Time system preference, but it's easy to forget. So Snow Leopard changes the time zone for you automatically (if you set that as the default behavior), using Wi-Fi mapping to figure out where you are -- you will need to be connected to a Wi-Fi access point or router. iCal can also be set to adjust the times to the current time zone automatically, so your calendar always reflects the current times.

- The new Preview is more like Adobe Reader I have nothing against Adobe Reader, but I love that Preview now can open multiple PDF documents, display their contents as contact sheets, and show thumbnails of pages in a sidebar for easy navigation. In other words, it works a lot like Adobe Reader. That's one fewer app to launch -- and since Preview loads much faster than Reader, I can get to my PDFs' contents much faster now.

- Movie and screencast recording Snow Leopard takes the formerly $35 QuickTime Pro and makes it a standard, free app in Mac OS X. That means you can record movies and -- great for many marketing, education, and Web professionals -- screencasts from your Mac with no additional software.

- Systemwide automatic text replacement Automatic text substitution as you type is nothing new; Microsoft Word has had it for more than a decade. But Snow Leopard lets you specify such substitutions via the Keyboard system preference, so you have a common set of substitutions available to all applications. Right now, only TextEdit, Mail, and various Apple apps use this common auto-text service, but if other software developers adopt it, you may finally get all your text-oriented apps to autocorrect the same way.

- Snow Leopard trackpads now support all gestures, no matter what Mac model you have. (Of course, your Mac has to have a gesture-capable trackpad, so models before 2006 aren't helped out by this update.)

Apple beats Microsoft to the punch again. Microsoft had moved their release date of Windows 7 up to "mid-October". Apple completed work on Snow Leopard two weeks ago and are releasing it on August 28th. That should blow the wind out of sales for Windows 7 and every critic will now compare to two upgraded operating systems and chastise Microsoft once again for trying to copy OS X.

Barbra, Leopard & The iTablet

Barbra's new album "Love Is The Answer: arrives next month. New songs include:

1. "Here's To Life"
2. "In The Wee Small Hours"
3. "Gentle Rain"
4. "If You Go Away"
5. "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most"
6. "Make Someone Happy"
7. "Where Do You Start?"
8. "A Time For Love"
9. "Here's That Rainy Day"
10. "Love Dance"
11. "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"
12. "Some Other Time"
13. Bonus Track - "You Must Believe In Spring"

Apple Releases Last Leopard Update Before Snow Leopard
Version 10.5.8 is expected to be the last update to Leopard before the September release of Snow Leopard. Open your Apple menu and hit the software update button to bring your OS X up to date.

Apple iTablet To Be 10" And Another Big Money Maker
And will use OS X Snow Leopard, cost about $600, have WiFi, BlueTooth and 3GS capability built-in. You will be able to use Apple's aluminum mini-keyboard and the Mighty Mouse via Bluetooth, add widgets just as you do on your Mac and download iTouch/iPhone apps. It will be another big Apple product.