razmaspaz

I’m a holdout. A skeptic. A newer isn’t always better subscriber. Despite the wild praise for Leopard, I’m waiting. I don’t like upgrading to a new OS right after it hits the shelf. Too much opportunity for turmoil. Not to mention that until recently, it would have meant giving up Java 6. Not a good way to get to my happy place.

Yesterday I discovered two good reasons to upgrade. One is Bento. The other is Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. Bento is Leopard only, which I think is Apple’s way of sticking it to me without sticking it to me. (In case you didn’t know, Apple owns Filemaker, the creator of Bento). PSE6 is not announced to be Leopard only, but I suspect it will be. Either way, I guess its time to see what this whole Leopard thing is all about.

Bento seems cool. Its a personal database tool. Its sort of like Access for the Mac. Except that it looks like it doesn’t suck, and it won’t be polluted with VB. It integrates with iTunes, iCal, Address Book, all of it, its like iLife+. I’m excited to get Leopard so I can try it out.

PSE6 falls under the “its about friggin’ time” category. Adobe has been sitting on Elements 4 for several years, totally skipped 5, and delivered 6 late. They did have to recompile it forIntel, and they didn’t have an x86 version lying around or anything, so I’m sure that was hard. Anyway, one of the things that always made me sad was that one day I was going to have to shell out $700 to get a native copy of Photoshop on the Mac. This makes it $89.