Over the weekend I upgraded four computers from 10.3 and 10.4 to 10.5. I had heard horror stories regarding the first release and so I decided to wait until the first software patch was released. That happened quite a few days ago. My wife bought the family pack on Saturday and I got down to upgrading a G4 iBook, a G5 iMac, a Mac Mini, and a Macbook Pro. The upgrades ranged from about 3 hours to just over an hour.

My first impressions.

Wow, what a great little MacOS X desktop app! Twitterific sits on your desktop and allows you to easily follow tweets from your posse. Download is simple. You go to http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific and click on "Get It". Extract the package that downloads and click on the little blue bird in the resulting directory. Twitterific asks you for your username and password and logs right on. You see a series of thumbnails with your friend's avatar with the post.

It is a slick, simple, interface.

If you are a twitterholic, this is definitely an enabler.

I'm an instant messaging junkie. Mostly I use the IM in Skype but I can also be seen on the AOL IM platform through iChat. I know lots of folks that also use GoogleTalk, Yahoo's IM offering, and so forth. This means, in general, these folks will have many different IM clients open.

Adium (sounds like a new cholesterol drug) allows you to access many services in a single client rather than having multiple windows open.

Adium does not support video or audio--no calling home on the cheap using it. However the handiness of NOT having multiple applications seems like it might be good.

In the first installment of discussing Remote Desktop, we covered how to set up a Mac to be accessed remotely and how to use a tool like Chicken of the VNC to access that computer over a local area network. To access the computer of the Internet is a tiny bit more complicated, but you've come this far.

First off, you need to know how to set up port forwarding on your router. This is usually a pretty simple process.

Since the announcement that Safari has been released for Windows, I have been thinking about and reading articles on eWeek and ZDNet which have good insight. Ed Bott supposes that Apple is looking to make a hostile takeover of Windows. I'm not sure that I agree with idea of the hostile takeover doesn't ring quite true. I think we're looking more at an attempt at a slow assimilation.

Leopard is scheduled to ship in October. There has been a lot of speculation that there will be an Apple supported option to have Vista ship as a second OS on Apple hardware--there are in fact third party sellers doing just this right now.

Today I received an email from the Joost Team to join the beta. They have created an OSX client but it has to be operated on an Intel based Mac.

Joost promises a combination of the TV experience and social networking. For example, live chat is available while you watch the content. It apparently uses a peer to peer scheme to stream content directly over a broadband connection using H.264.MPEG-4 AVC.

Installing the application was a snap. It was a quick download. It unzipped quickly. I pulled it into the Applications folder. Clicked twice on it and it launched immediately.