razmaspaz

Its no secret among my friends that I’m an Apple Fanboy. I can’t help it, life really is better on the other side of the digital divide. February has been an interesting month for me when it comes to my Mac. With all the new releases scheduled for this month, I’ve been on edge, checking update site, and wondering when Apple will be so kind as to grace my life with the presence of their newest shiny toy.

Yesterday saw the release of two things that got me excited. First was Leopard 10.5.2. You can read all about it here, so I won’t dwell on the features. The biggest gain for me was that it got rid of that stupid translucent menu bar. Another rumored (though unmentioned) fix is that Time Machine does indeed work with arbitrary network disks. This doesn’t matter too much for me, as I don’t use Time Machine yet, but it will make a big difference soon.

The second release yesterday was Busy Sync 2.0 beta. This is a sync tool that allows Google Calendar to sync with iCal. Thats 2 way sync, not subscription. Yes there were tools for this before, gCal Daemon was one, it was great, then Leopard came along, and it wasn’t great anymore. Also on the market was Spanning Sync, but I felt the almost $25/year was a little steep. Busy Sync is only $19.95 if you act fast. At the end of the month it jumps to $25.

In addition to yesterday, Apple dropped a bomb this morning. Aperture 2. I’m not upgrading just yet, I don’t take the plunge on things like this overnight, but I suspect that this will be a welcome improvement to a piece of software that is making my leap into digital photography pretty easy.

On top of all that there are still two more nuggets to come from Apple. Time Capsule, the network drive/wireless router/print server/backup utility from Apple. My wireless router is literally falling apart at the seams and goes on the fritz every couple weeks, so this is a compelling product for me. Also on the list is the iPhone SDK. I don’t own an iPhone, I won’t buy one until it has 3G and 32GB, but the SDK is highly anticipated by many. Here’s to hoping it will be a worthwhile development platform.

February has already been a good month for me and my digital sanity, lets hope that it ends with a bang and that Time Capsule and the SDK are as compelling as they were made out to be.