With the 2008 Macworld only 2 days away here are my predictions:

• 13" sub-notebook
• iPhone/iTouch SDK
• Faster processors on all apple computers

That's about all I can think about for now. The sub-notebook will be, obviously, the talk of the conference. There have been many rumors about it and I think it's pretty obvious it will launch at Macworld. Contrary to the rumors, I think that it will have a DVD drive. Apple's crazy like that - they'll squeeze it into a < 1" thick notebook somehow.

DVD drive or not, it will surely have better battery life than current laptops and I really hope that the laptop is Macbook Pro style aluminum, rather than the cheap Macbook plastic.

It should be a good conference.

I installed leopard yesterday and today I'm reading my daily rss feeds and a whole bunch of items show up talking about all the new updates Apple has released.

I already knew about the Java update, which was the reason I finally switched to leopard. There was however some more updates that I didn't know about. One of the issues with leopard that I read about was the Macbook Pro keyboard freezing issues. I was worried that I would be affected, but it didn't really bother me too much. Well, today it turns out that Apple has released an update to fix the problem, as well as OSX 10.5.2 which fixes 76 bugs!

I guess it really was a good time to upgrade.

So far the leopard experience has been amazing. Tiger was the first Apple OS that I used full time, and I did enjoy it. After upgrading to leopard though - all I can say is: amazing. Stacks, the new dock, time machine, tonnes of awesome new features. If you are planning to upgrade, do it now.

Finally Java Support

I would have upgraded right when the OS came out, but from what I heard it didn't support Java 1.6, which I need for school and to run my various projects. Java 1.6 can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Connection website, and runs about 75MB. From Apple:

Java SE 6 Developer Preview 8

Apple has recently released a new developer preview of Java SE 6 for Leopard via the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) site at http://connect.apple.com.

The Java SE 6 release for Leopard is targeted at Java developers. This version of Java for Mac OS X requires an Intel-based Mac capable of running 64-bit applications, including computers with Core 2 Duo processors and any Mac Pro computer. Java SE 6 takes advantage of Leopard's 64-bit capabilities to offer unique performance capabilities for current and future generations of Macs. Please see the release notes included with the Java SE 6 download for additional information about this preview release.

When I saw this I was so happy that I could finally upgrade to leopard. I backed up my stuff and it was onto the install.

Installation

I put the leopard DVD onto a partition on my external hard drive, so the install went really fast. It was smooth and in about 15 minutes I had a fresh install of OSX Leopard. There were no problems, and even my bluetooth mouse was automatically detected. By the end of the installation, I was really impressed.

Post-Install

I was a little bit worried that the programs that ran perfectly on tiger would not run on leopard. Well, so much for that - everything runs perfectly. It seems like things are even running faster than with tiger, and certainly faster than windows. I have absolutely no complaints about leopard, and I hope I don't find anything too big that makes me hate it because with these features I don't think I could use anything else.