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Hey everyone, PLEASE read this as it is by far the most important blog I have ever written. I don’t wish to come across as a fanatic, but for this particular issue, I am one. I hope you will be as well after you hear what I have to say. This is about doing your part to Save the Internet.

I sincerely believe that the Internet is humanity’s single biggest resource. It is bigger than human beings, bigger than corporations, bigger than even countries. The Internet binds the entire world together in a way never before seen.

It is not the right of any individual, corporation, government, or entity of any kind to stifle the freedom of the Internet.

Big phone and cable companies are trying to get rid of Network Neutrality, the fundamental principle that prevents them from discriminating against your favorite Web sites and services.

Unless we speak out to our members of Congress they could move to allow large telephone and cable companies to control what you do, where you go and what you watch online.

Ultimately, because of the power of the Internet, those who are allowed to control the Internet will have the power to shape the future of humanity. Think about it. Culture, commercial enterprise, freedom of speech, religion, politics. All of these things can be controlled with the Internet. Those who seek control do so according to their own desires and lusts, NOT what is in humanity’s best interests.

This is not a difficult issue. Nor is it to be taken lightly. Please, help protect the Internet, which has transcended national borders and pushed humanity to its golden age.

Visit this website, sign their petition, and send a letter to congress (they make it real easy with a simple form). The world needs your help to keep the Internet free.

Visit www.savetheinternet.com to learn what’s at stake and send a loud message directly to the Congress.

Apple’s brilliant new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard has done in 5 days what Mac-lovers everywhere could only have hoped would happen over the next five to ten years. Well, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but numbers don’t lie.

Japan, arguably the technology capitol of the world, has one of the most stunning stories. Apple accounted for 53.9% of all OS sales in the month of October, meaning more new Macs were sold to Japan than Windows or *nix-based PCs. This is of course, due to Leopard, which was only around for 5 days in October.

Of course, for this to happen, someone else’s numbers had to fall. Microsoft took a massive hit this time, with OS market share dropping practically overnight from 75.3% to 28.7%!

If this is what 5 days of Leopard did to an entire month’s OS market share, I can’t wait to see November’s numbers. The world is changing for the better, and it’s doing it even faster than anyone could have hoped! This is the start of a wondrous thing, folks. This is the beginning of the new computer world.

One of my favorite features in Leopard escaped me when I was writing my first post-Leopard blog, but this post is here to set it right. Apple’s default email reader, Mail.app, has received significant upgrades. Apple seems fairly proud of their new “stationary”, which allows Mail.app users to send messages with HTML formatting (borders, framed pictures, etc). Personally I just see that as absurd — I am not looking forward to a generation where email takes 5 minutes to open because it’s so bogged down with images and useless formatting.

That said, Mail.app does have several great improvements. It now allows you to write yourself notes, and store them with IMAP, meaning you can transfer them to your iPhone or laptop, or some other device, fairly easily. Next is to-do lists, which work in much the same way. Both these features are very simple, but they add a lot to the program. No more iCal running in the background. iCal is great, but I can only afford room for one program.

The last great thing about Mail.app is quite timely for me. I’ve only recently started keeping up with world news, the economy, and things of that nature, as much as I should. Mail.app is going to make this even easier for me with its new built-in RSS reader. Safari simply doesn’t cut it as an RSS reader, because, let’s face it, Safari just isn’t built for that sort of thing. Mail.app is. Again, this is a very simple implementation of RSS, and I’m sure hardcore RSS freaks won’t be too thrilled. But for people like me, who can’t justify dedicating one app to RSS and RSS only, Mail.app’s new RSS capabilities are a very welcome addition.

I should also touch on QuickLook, because it is insanely cool. I don’t claim to understand how it works, but from my perspective this is a technological marvel. I can click a PDF document, touch my spacebar, and BOOM! In a matter of less than a second I have the full PDF in front of me. I have tested this on massive, graphically intensive PDFs that would have taken Tiger take 10-20 seconds to fully load up. Everything is instantaneous.

One last thing I’ll mention is the new voice, Alex. He is intended for the visually impaired, and reads words that are on screen. This has existed before, but the voices available were very robotic. Alex is a breakthrough, he sounds incredibly human-like (for a robot). I’m sure that Alex will have a huge impact.

Summarily, at least figuratively speaking, I’m currently screaming like a schoolgirl over Leopard.

And I’m still amused at this:

That’s right, folks, Leopard is here! I had it yesterday! Matter of fact, I was the first person in Utah to walk out of the Apple Store with box in hand! Everything about it is incredible…from the very packaging, to the beautiful new (but familiar) User Interface. It makes my computer SCREAM, presumably from the jump to 64-bit and an even tighter coding standard.

Excusing a few third-party applications that haven’t updated their apps to the “Leopard-look”, everything is very beautifully integrated. The shadows are subtler than before, and yet they do their job of showing you which window is active even better. The Finder bar’s transparency isn’t distracting, as I was slightly worried it might. The Dock is just simply amazing.

Spaces is even more incredible than I thought from the demos. It so so perfectly smooth. Even when my computer is under load, I am able to switch Spaces quickly and elegantly, with no to very little lag. One of my favorite things about Spaces is that it allows me to organize my screens in a way that there are only 2 or 3 open windows in any given Space. That means I get to see my desktop wallpaper a lot more frequently now, which is always a welcome sight. Before, it was rarely seen.

Time Machine is also incredible. The interface is so sleek and beautiful. It makes backing up your computer easy and automatic. The only gripe I have with Time Machine is that it has caused my hard drives to near-constantly emit that incessant clicking noise that means they’re moving files around. That said, I believe the main cause for this is that I have been installing apps and moving files to their new homes all night yesterday, so files were changing more drastically hour-to-hour than during normal use. The problem shouldn’t occur very much when I’m done settling in.

Safari 3 is so much better now. It’s faster, it’s more stable, it fixes all the bugs and gripes I had with Safari 3 Beta. It’s a beautiful, efficient browser, and among your choices: Firefox, Camino, Opera, Safari, at least for me, Safari is by far the best.

But I saved my absolute favorite thing about Leopard for last. I haven’t seen much buzz about this anywhere, which quite surprises me as I find it to be a very useful feature. You see, when your Mac recognizes a Windows server on your network, it shows you in the Finder sidebar. And if you get info on that, you will find that the default icon for a Windows computer on the network is a beige monitor showing the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

So can we expect Vista Service Pack 1 to show Macs on the network as Spinning Beachballs of Doom? But hey, I’d take a psychedelic spinning cursor over an ugly blue screen any day. That’s just me.

Video of the launch, unboxing, and install will come. Peace out.

Leopard is nearly here. So exciting!

I hate Microsoft.

At long last! See the countdown timer at Apple.com! It will arrive on the 26th as the rumors suggested, at 6:00 PM. You can bet I’ll be getting off early that day (if I work at all) to head down and camp the Apple store until the reopen the doors at 6:00. Leopard! It’s here!

Back in the 1970s, IBM was the biggest computer manufacturer and essentially the monolith that Microsoft is now. In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs was a software designer and the business side to Apple. They were doing quite well into the early 1980s with their Apple II, which was quickly revolutionizing the world into one of personal computers. With Apple doing well and growing quickly, it was time to expand with partnerships and new staff.

Steve Jobs brough in two new characters that would ruin Apple for decades to come. First was a partnership with small software developer Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft. The other was a new CEO: John Sculley, then CEO of Pepsi Cola.

Bill Gates would soon leave Apple to develop his own company, now privy to top-secret Apple-eyes-only information, such as the GUI that was being developed, which would revolutionize the world yet again, and the newfangled “mouse” that went with it. Bill Gates used this information to catapult Microsoft into the Windows era. But more on that later.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was locked in a power struggle with now-CEO John Sculley. Jobs had developed software which would run on the Apple II and turn it into a business machine. Sculley insisted that this so-called “business machine” would canabilize sales of the Apple II. Jobs noted that the business and personal markets were entirely seperate, and that leaving the business market open was not a good idea. He said to Sculley, “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” However, reason does not always prevail, and Sculley won the struggle. Jobs left Apple.

Over the next decade or so, Sculley would transform Apple from what should and could easily have been the world’s supplier of computers and developer of the mainstream Operating System into a small niche company which made its sales only to graphic designers, and less and less of even that as Sculley’s reign continued.

Of course, Microsoft had no such idiot in power to hinder them. They had Bill Gates, who, when it comes to marketing at least, is pure genious. Microsoft grew while Apple shrank, and when they ran out of ideas, they just stole Apple’s already existing ideas. With Apple getting smaller and smaller, people began to think Microsoft actually had come up with many of these ideas, and we approach the early 2000s era where Microsoft is practically undisputed.

In 1996, however, Jobs had quietly returned to Apple, and was beginning to lay the foundations of an entirely new era, one which we have yet to see. In 2001, the iPod revolutionized the world and brough its attention back to Apple. Over the last 5 years, Apple has improved upon their products in ways that give Microsoft nausea.

Recently we have seen changes begin to take place that will lead to a day when Apple finally gets the audience it deserved from day 1. EA has announced simultaneous release for all major titles on Mac and PC. Bungie has announced an end to their exclusive partnership with Microsoft. Apple has an estimated 46% of the high-end personal notebook market share. These are just a few of the things that are happening that will ultimately lead to Apple’s return to world technology authority.

Until that day, I will continue to fight for the cause! Long live Apple, and death to Microsoft!!!

UPDATE: TUAW has done well the past couple of days. Some decent, worthwhile articles. TUAW seems to be shaping back up. Good job, guys!

This post shall serve as my ultimatum to The Unofficial Apple Weblog. TUAW was once a place to read about the latest from Apple, along with great insight from the staff of TUAW, who is by and large a sensible and interesting group of individuals.

Then came the iPhone. It was everywhere. enGadget readers complained about too many iPhone stories. Personally, I didn’t mind. It was the world’s latest gadget, and it was very hyped. Of course one of the web’s most popular gadget news sources would cover it thoroughly! And of course, of COURSE The Unofficial Apple Weblog would be very loud about it. All of this was fine with me, and I liked reading about it up until the day it was loosed on the public, and even for a while after that.

But soon - VERY soon - there were hackers. Of course there were hackers. There’s nothing wrong with hackers, and they’re to be expected when any new device comes out, especially one as popular and, frankly, as COOL as the iPhone! People wanted to tinker with it, people wanted to do more with it! Not a problem.

Not a problem, that is, until Erica Sadun, one of the most prominent iPhone hackers and a writer for TUAW, decided to make iPhone hacking TUAW’s first and only priority. Every day, as many as five or ten posts by Erica, each more pointless than the next, and with no relief of other, more useful posts. Daily, she complains about how Apple is treating hackers sooo poorly. Daily, she posts pointless updates on her most recent discovery about the inner workings of the iPhone, which make sense to virtually no one.

I wish to address TUAW directly, here. Please understand that your target audience is NOT that of hackers and technological gurus. Although there are surely many of those mixed in, the majority of your audience are people who like Apple products. We don’t know about the security of a certain line of code within Jailbreak, we don’t WANT to know about it! We just want to know what’s going on with Apple!

I don’t suggest that you remove these iPhone hacking posts entirely, though I do strongly encourage you to consolidate them. One post per day is plenty. Even more important, however, is the lack of other posts. There has been not one useful or interesting post from anyone aside from Erica since this whole fiasco began.

TUAW, I cannot handle this barrage of what amounts to crappy, worthless information as far as I’m concerned. I have no desire to hack an iPhone. I have no desire to read about minor changes and tiny discoveries in the hacking lab that is Erica Sadun’s brain. I want to read about APPLE! I want to read speculation about LEOPARD! I want to hear what you think Bungie’s latest move means for the Apple community and the Apple market share!

Please, bring the real TUAW back to me. Thank you, and good day.

This is to those of you complaining about Apple limiting the functionality of the iPod Touch (specifically the lack of a Mail application). It is in response to this article at TUAW.

Apple has chosen not to include this one application (Mail) because this is an iPod, not a laptop or a PDA. Sure, you can argue that it wouldn’t be more work for them to simply include it, but you could argue the same about them not including a cup holder on the TV (Apple TV)… It’s simply not the function of the device. Yes, I’m sure it is also partly the fact that it would hurt their iPhone sales. Can you blame them? They want the iPhone to be big. To be honest, if I were them, there is no way I would have released an iPod Touch AT ALL!

Now, let’s have a look at what Microsoft does. They produce about 60 different versions of their operating system, many of which are exactly the same for a different price just to test the market and see how much people will stand to pay. They severely handicap the cheap versions of the software, down to a point of non-functionality. Every single one of these costs them the same amount to produce: a few cents for the box and the disk, and a few cents a day to some guy in China or India to burn the proper version of the OS onto said disk.

I fail to see how anyone can make an honest comparison between Apple and Microsoft. I also fail to see how anyone can say Apple is a monopoly when they very clearly, by definition, are not. They own about 57% of the MP3 player market share in America, and shy of 5% of the computer market share. Monopoly means that you own 100%, or extremely close to it. Microsoft isn’t even a monopoly. Apple certainly isn’t. Be careful about throwing words like monopoly around.