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It’s bleedin’ ages since I last did any linky stuff, so here goes.

Stephen Fry is writing a weekly technology column in the Guardian. Try as I might, I can’t seem to find an RSS feed for it. Hopefully he will republish his column on his blog each week, thus obviating the hunt through the Gruaniad’s several hundred articles on global warming to find it.

Joy of Tech points out that Leopard is the OS of choice for pr0n aficionados.

20/20 vision and hindsight and all that: the 15 dumbest Apple predictions of all time, from Wired.com

Yay! Tim Gaden’s Hawk Wings is back. If you use Mail.app as your mail client of choice, you should bookmark his feed.

Today’s the day. Mac OS X, version 10.5, codenamed Leopard makes its debut. It’s a little late, as we were all expecting it in the spring, but hey, at least we weren’t waiting five years.

According to Apple, there are 300+ new feature in the OS. I’m not going to go into them here, as gigs of bandwidth are being plundered right now all over the internets, as hardcore Mac geeks go all a-quiver over such new features as Time Machine, the spiffy new Finder with Quick View, Spaces, the new iChat, Mail, Core Animation, etc.

Some links to give you an idea of what it’s all about:

A guided tour, from the horse’s mouth.

David Pogue in the New York Times points out some lesser-heralded features.

Crazy Apple Rumors goes down that route too, but gets sidetracked.

If you were to time travel and take a Mac with Leopard loaded on it back to 1973 and were to show some people then what computers will be like in the future, you could totally get some hot 1973 chick into bed with you! But make sure it’s not your mom, dude.

TUAW have cleared the decks for the next 24 hours in order to bring us a comprehensive guide to Leopard. This could result in the fewest references to the iPhone in a 24-hour period since before 29 June.

Since the digital camera revolution, most of us now store photos on our computers. This gives us much more control over our images than we ever had with film. One time, we were very careful as to the composition of a photo, as a mistake was a costly waste. With digital, there is no waste and even if an image isn’t up to scratch when it’s downloaded onto the Mac, it’s not too difficult to try to fix it. If it can’t be fixed, it’s no big deal, because there’s usually another few taken either side of the bad one that will do.

Photoshop is obviously the best-known image editor, but by Christ you pay for it. The current version, from Creative Suite 3, weighs in at €689 + VAT. You can of course get the stripped down Photoshop Elements, currently on version 4 for the Mac. (Our Windows-using friends are enjoying version 6.)

There are dozens of alternative image editing applications available to Mac users. Some of them come pre-loaded, others are freely available via download (free and paid-for). In this post, I’m going to run through some of the image editors I have amassed over the last few years.

Preview

If you open an image on your desktop, or if you open one from the Finder, it will launch Preview as the default image viewer. Preview offers a very basic array of features, but some of them can be quite useful. You can rotate the image with Cmd+L and Cmd+R. From the Tools menu, Image Correction offers the possibility to do some basic adjustments to saturation, contrast, brightness and sharpness. You can also convert it into a sepia image. You can crop an image by dragging your mouse over a rectangular area and using Cmd+K (or Tools > Crop).

iPhoto

iPhoto has an impressive selection of editing tools. Double-click on an image in your library to enlarge it, and from the toolbar below the image, click on Edit. The image opens up in full-screen, with the editing toolbox on a pop-up toolbar where the Dock would normally be. As with Preview, you can crop and adjust the levels, but with iPhoto, there are more adjustment options. There is a simple red-eye removal tool, and a touch-up brush, which can remove unwanted skin blemishes with a click. That it would be so easy to remove them in real life! iPhoto also an effects pallette, where with one click, you can change your photo to black and white, sepia, give it an antique effect, etc. iPhoto is non-destructive, and when you make any adjustment to a photo, it creates a new file and stores the original safely, should you ever want to revert to the original. To do this, go to the Photos menu and select Revert to Original.

ComicLife

As the name might suggest, ComicLife is more than just a simple image editor. It is a fully featured application for turning your photos into comic strips, complete with captions, speech bubbles and styled text. There is a licenced copy in every new Mac, so if you have an Intel Mac and haven’t come across it before, have a root around your Applications folder and you’ll find it. If you have a Power PC Mac, ‘fraid you’ll have to buy it for $25 or so.

Photo Booth

Not an image editor as such, but Photo Booth is great fun. It takes a photo with the built-in iSight camera, and allows you to apply several different effects. The photo can be distorted, made into an x-ray, a pop-art collage, and many more effects. Kids love this app. The one above is of me losing the head.

Imagewell

I love Imagewell. It’s a tiny app, barely 1MB to download, but it packs a hell of a lot in. It is an essential tool for preparing an image for posting on the web. A couple of sliders reduce the dimensions of the image and the filesize. You can crop, add in text, speech bubbles, etc. And then when you’re done, you can choose where you want to send it - to your desktop, to a specific folder on your hard drive, to your .Mac account, even to an FTP location. This is one of my essential blogging tools. And best of all, it’s free.

Skitch

Skitch comes from plasq.com, the same people as Comic Life, and as I am such a fan of Comic Life, I thought I was going to love Skitch. But, sad to say, I hardly ever use it. It’s cute, but there isn’t a lot there that I haven’t got in other apps like Imagewell. Also, it seems to be centred around posting your images onto a central Skitch website, and saving as a jpeg isn’t as intuitive as it could be. It’s still a beta, and to get a copy you need to be invited.

Pixelmator

One of the most keenly anticipated new Mac releases this year, Pixelmator is an excellent (and cheaper) alternative to Photoshop. The layout is very familiar to anyone who has ever used Photoshop or Elements. The big selling point is that it uses the video card in the Mac to render the images, thus speeding up edits and transitions. A licence costs $59, and considering all the gear that comes with that, is pretty good value.

GIMP

If you want Photoshop functionality, but don’t want to pay for it, you can always go Open Source. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. One big drawback is that it doesn’t run natively on OS X. Instead you have to dig out your Install disks and load up X11, an emulator for OS X. This slows it down a lot, a major disadvantage if you are playing around with complex images.

So, are there any more really good Mac OS X image editors out there I should know about?

A propos of nothing, here’s a shot of my set-up:

I got the speakers yesterday, and they are the biz. I had been promising myself a pair of speakers for ages, and originally was going to buy them from Spectra in Grafton Street, as I had some gift vouchers from there to use up. They didn’t have the JBLs, but instead the guy there recommended Harmon Kardon Soundsticks and gave me a price on them.

I was all set to buy them and went into the shop, vouchers in my sweaty little palm, only to be told by another sales assistant that they didn’t actually sell Soundsticks. The fact that there was music playing in the shop through a set of Soundsticks was irrelevant. And then I was told that I should go around the corner to Peat’s on College Green, because they had them there at a really good price. Bizarre. Send your customers to a competitor. I just went on to the Apple site and ordered the JBLs there.

I love the design of them. Two little bug-eyed aliens, and their spaceship underneath the desk. And they look great alongside the iMac as well.

By the way, the desk in never usually this tidy.

The day will probably come when I will have to install some Windows apps on my Mac. While this would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago, the emergence of Apple’s own BootCamp and third-party virtualisation systems like Parallels and VMWare have made the practice unremarkable.

The latest version of Parallels allows you to run Windows apps on your Mac OS X desktop, side by side with your OS X apps. You can even drag and drop between them. But, according to MacUser, it looks like VMWare has gone one further, with the beta release of VMWare Fusion, which “enables Macs to run Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris applications alongside OS X without having to install the respective operating system.”

This sounds a teensy bit too good to be true. In the FAQ for Fusion, it states that it supports the top-end versions of Windows Vista, with full 64-bit support.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but that sounds to me like you have to have some version of Windows installed before you can run your Windows apps.

Yesterday was iCal day, when the date on the iCal dock icon matches the day’s date.

joy of Tech explains further:

This could well have been the last iCal day though. When Leopard is released later this year, I’d guess that the date in the Dock icon will update automatically, regardless of whether the app is active or idle.

Many thanks to Tom Raftery, who kindly passed on an invitation to Skitch, the image manipulation app from plasq.com. Plasq are the people who make the wonderful ComicLife, which has quickly become one of my most indispensible apps. If Skitch is even half as good as ComicLife, it will be a cracker.

Speaking of ComicLife, if you are not familiar with it, and are the owner of a new or even new-ish Intel Mac, chances are there’s a fully licenced copy in your Applications folder. To get to grips with it, have a look at ScreenCastsOnline, episode 103, where Don goes through the workings of the app.

Don’t mess with Damien Mulley.

Spark up Software Update, as Mac OS X 10.4.10 update is now available.

YouTube for Apple TV is now live. The iPhone will have YouTube integration out of the box.

Microsoft agree to change Vista to accommodate Google Desktop better. Hmmm. Google didn’t get up on its hind legs when Spotlight was released as a component of OS X Tiger. Fake Steve offers an opinion.

I’m miles behind in my ScreenCastsOnline viewing. WordPress, RapidWeaver 3.6 and now ComicLife are just some of the goodies that await me.

The Macalope has sold out, and is now blogging for The Man on CNET

I’ve only managed to watch about half on the WWDC Keynote so far. What I have watched so far is somewhat underwhelming, but given that Apple are just about to launch their most important device since the iPod, it’s understandable if this year’s Keynote is a bit like WWDC Keynote 1.1

Have the Daily Mail managed to get hold of an iPhone for review? I doubt it somehow, but that doesn’t stop them posting a negative preview of the device. They complain that it lacks “high-speed 3G technology – just standard GPRS connectivity – so web browsing is slow outside wi-fi hotspots.” Well, we don’t know what it will have when it arrives in Europe. It has EDGE on the Cingular network in the US, because that is the technology they use. But no-one uses EDGE over here, so it’s very likely that it will be a 3G device. Using GPRS would be like putting a 1.1 litre diesel engine in a BMW.

Speaking of the iPhone, I was chatting about it with someone who is in the know, and the word on the street is that T-Mobile are set to get an exclusive deal for the iPhone for Europe. One small problem: T-Mobile don’t operate in Ireland. Shit. That means I’ll have to emigrate again. Alternatively, I’m tempted to upgrade my BlackBerry 7100x to one of these babies as a birthday present to myself.

John Gruber dramatises the demise of Brushed Metal, an integral part of Mac OS X’s GUI since the start.

It’s very funny, and the ending could have come straight from the pen of a Sopranos scriptwriter.