I received and email from the MacHeist directorate today. The controversy has been solved by YazSoft offering a free upgrade to Speed Download 5 for MacHeist customers, but only for a very limited time – March 13 2008 until March 27 2008. It is nice that I got the email, albeit 5 days after the offer was extended. This list of changes that come with SD5 are available online. So if you purchased Speed Download 4 with MacHeist II, and choose to upgrade, then proceed to yazsoft’s website in a quick and orderly fashion to get the upgrade offer.

David Watanabe announced the most recent upgrade to Newsfire RSS as now free for all users. In David’s own words, he explains what the buzz about news aggregation is, and why Newsfire is a must for ALL mac users: For those new to this, NewsFire is a news reader for blogs, news sites, and anything else that publishes an ‘RSS’ syndication feed. It watches for news so you don’t have to.

I took the plunge and decided to upgrade to Mac OS 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard this weekend. Here’s how it went… Initially I made sure I had two full cloned and boot-able backups that I made with CCC. After this I actually tried booting off them just to make sure. Having backups before such a major upgrade is a mandatory step for all people whom undertake any OS upgrade. Secondly I decided on the upgrade path.

A friend told me he had dropped his notebook PC, and it was going to cost more to repair than it was worth. I advised: Get a Mac. I started looking around for some information for him. Why would the Mac benefit his Computer Science course? Why would the Mac be more reliable? What does he need to know about compatibility? One of the articles I read was a blog post by The Shepherd’s Sons called “All Signs Point To Apple”.

With MacHeist.com still selling their bundle for another 3 days, they have added a new Mac application to the bundle. VectorDesigner brings the total number of applications in the bundle up to 14, with the recent addition of the Freeverse games. If you get referrals from your friends there are another two up for grabs as well. Here is what MacHeist have to say about VectorDesigner: With the latest version of Adobe Illustrator costing $600, it’s no surprise that the Mac community has been clamoring for a powerful, fast, and easy to use program for creating vector art that doesn’t break the bank.

I am currently watching the Macworld 2008 Keynote speech, and Steve Jobs – though starting off a bit slow – wowed the gadget hungry crowd in his usual fashion. Besides some new Apple TV innovations (limited to the US – bah!), iPhone/iPod updates and the new Timecapsule; the key component of the speech was the introduction of the new Macbook Air. Although I run my servers on OpenBSD, I write my blog from my Mac and prefer my Powerbook over all the other computers I use.

This is one for my Mac readers; MS Windows lovers please have your eyes glaze over – Now. Following the lead of other bloggers, I thought it would be pertinent to let you know that MacHeist II has completed all their heists, and the bundle sale is well underway. This morning the last of the 10 11 12 applications, Pixelmator, was unlocked. The developers say “If your image editing experience so far has been defined by PhotoShop, we guarantee you will be blown away by Pixelmator’s speed and beautiful UI”.

Chris blogged on PhatBoyG about the Web Inspector included in Safari 3. Previously this tool was a simple content inspector, but now it looks to be so much more. If you are using Safari V3 and you are a web developer, have a look at this useful tool. You can gain access to it by enabling the debug menu. Open Terminal and type this defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 then restart Safari.

I have my Powerbook G4 back now. Woooot! It has a fresh install of 10.4.6 on it from the Mac repair shop. The question is, what do I do with my CCC backup firewire HDD? Clone it back? Migrate it back? Having watched others roll into 10.5 aka Leopard, I thought it would be time for me to roll into a fresh computer as well. Sans postgresql, custom php install, CVS repository and the last 2 years of installed junk.