Disco is one of the smartest looking and basic (yet powerful) CD/DVD burning solutions for your Mac. Yesterday it was updated with a maintenance release to V1.0.3, which includes quite a number of fixes for crashing that may have occurred. It has been almost 1 year since the last update so this is welcomed. Incidentally, the developer is offering this software for USD$19.95 (and there is a very good USD->AUD exchange rate) for a limited time.

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.

After I read this macosxhints.com post, I decided to have a go at something slightly different. The orginal hint showed how to set up an AppleScript droplet to modify the creation date of a file. But what if you want to sync the modified date and Creation dates instead? This script has been created to do just that. It has evolved from one Daniel A. Shockley provided in a macosxhints comment to the previous hint, and has been extended to fit this purpose.

Last Friday at work my Mac (OS X 10.4) laptop HDD died. After the purchase of an extra external HDD and some custom recovery software, Data Rescue II, I tried to recover as much as I could. The bad news is the Hard drive had not just gotten corrupted, but failed. After an attempt to clone it to a second drive for analysis, and during my recovery attempt it developed the click of death.