What's it all about, Alfie?

One of the neat things I had hoped about the MacBook Pro with the two GPUs was that once OpenCL was in the OS (Snow Leopard), we'd be able to take advantage of both GPUs not just one as with the graphics display. I had wondered why someone in Apple's position would have wasted the space, power, heat, to put a second GPU without some idea that it would be useful to the user in the future. And it is.

This article talks about the benchmarks done with Snow Leopard and the OpenCL performance - and it's indeed using both GPUs. This is fantastic news, as it means that Apple is going to be pushing processing tasks into OpenCL, and we'll all be able to benefit from them.

Fantastic news. I just need to get Growl and Dropbox to be Snow Leopard compatible and then I can update and see the sweetness.

Well, while I'd heard it was running OK with Snow Leopard, LaunchBar 5 RC4 is out with the single release note:

• This version is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

so I'm glad that I was able to get this before I updated to Snow Leopard. I'm still holding off for Growl and Dropbox, but they should be fixed up any day now.

Another of those apps that's important to me - Dropbox, isn't ready. There's a beta, and it looks to be almost there, but it's one that's in the "not" column, for sure. I'll just have to wait a little while before moving to Snow Leopard.

Well... I see the first reason not to update to Snow Leopard this weekend - Growl is not ready, and from the messages I've been reading from the authors suggests that they won't even start discussing it - or committing code to the repository until Snow Leopard ships. Their concern, and I understand it, is their NDA with Apple, and not getting sued.

But if that's the case, can't they have one box that had the Snow Leopard code working? I can't believe they have the Snow Leopard betas (hence the NDA) and aren't at least trying to get their code working. Sure, they can't release it, but they can get it ready on a branch - waiting just for today when it's released, they can check it all in, and it's ready to go.

In any case, this is going to have to wait. Crud.

UPDATE: The latest word is that they are looking to have Growl 1.2 out today. They aren't sure if they'll make it, but that's what they are shooting for. If they get it, I'll be very pleased.

Skitch is one of those applications that I simply can't imagine not having, and so I was very happy this morning to see it was updated to provide Snow Leopard compatibility. I don't need any fancy new features - I just need to know it'll work with the new OS.

With all the updates for Snow Leopard, I was going through all the significant apps I have and thankfully, DrawIt 3.8.5 is out with updates and, I assume, Snow Leopard compatibility fixes.

• Significantly improves text display but only when there are no filters applied to the text
• Compatibility fixes with the upcoming Sketch application
• Other minor bug fixes

It's going to be a busy day of updating as it's on sale and that means the NDAs are dead and things are starting to flow. Sweet.

I was going through a Snow Leopard compatibility list this morning and noticed that Shimo 2.1.1/389 - the nice front-end to Cisco VPN is not Snow Leopard ready. So I fired it up to check the version. When I did, I saw that they have an update: v. 2.2.1 which is compatible with Snow Leopard.

Whew! That was close. I want to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but there are some things I can't live without. I'm going to make a list and check them off as we go. It's getting close - today's the day.

Again another update on the eve of the release of Snow Leopard, OmniGraphSketcher v1.0.1 is out with Snow Leopard compatibility, among it's list of notable changes:

• Fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
• You can now import data that has text labels specified for only some of the rows.
• Axis title styles are now saved separately in Save Current Styles as Default.
• Added a "Select All Fills" menu item.
• Fixed a bug where dragging a single point from a grouped data series could cause the point to get stuck to nearby points.
• Fixed several bugs where Undo had to be invoked more than once to revert a change.
• Fixed a bug where pasting data with the first column all zeroes sometimes caused a crash.
• Smaller fixes and improvements.

and while the big news this week is indeed the sale of Snow Leopard, it's nice to see the updates for Snow Leopard trickle in so that the upgrade is as seamless as possible.

This morning another of the updates for Snow Leopard (10.6) compatibility is out in Fission 1.6.5, the lossless audio editor from Rogue Amoeba. I was just using Fission yesterday to convert some sound files to iPhone ringtones, and it's simply amazing how simple it is. You simply tell Fission to "Save as Ringtone" and you look and it's there in iTunes, waiting to be synced to your iPhone. Wild.

I'm sure this isn't the last of the updates, but it's good to see that this one is ready to go for Friday.

iPhoto 8.1 has been updated by Apple, and is available on Software Updates this morning. It adds a few new book print options:

• Hardcover books can now be ordered in a new extra-large (13?x10?) size
• Includes three new book themes with travel-oriented designs: Tropical, Asian, Old World
• A variety of new holiday greeting cards themes are now available

With all the pictures I'm taking with my iPhone, iPhoto has become a great tool to organize them. Gotta get the update.