Nosce te ipsum

Longhorn, Bovine - Mad Cow, whatever you call it. Microsoft's Jim Allchin makes a guest appearence on Joy Of Tech to remind us all that yes Apple's new operating system Tiger is out, but just you wait, Microsoft is hard at work on the next release of thie operating system Longhorn.

Yes indeed, the folks in Redmond are busily warming up their idea photocopiers to learn all they can from Tiger. In related news, Microsoft announced this week at WinHec, the releaes of Longhorn Beta 1 -- and the web let out a collective sigh. More innovative features like brushed metal interfaces among other things. Check out some of these screen shots which really speak for themselves. If I was an IT person and this was the next greatest thing that I had to look forward to, well - it's never too early to start drinking I guess :-)

Note: Those particular screenshots are some old ones from back in November 2004 and (IMO) they are considerably better than the ones Gates showed off at WinHec. Apparently Microsoft went after anyone who dared post the beta 1 images online so I had to remove my orignal link and repalce it with a much older vers ion.

So tomorrow is the official big day when Cupertino releases Tiger upon the world and this week we've seen announcement after announcement for updated versions of so many different pieces of software for the Mac. I'm curious if Tiger is so different under the covers that it just flat out broke many of these apps (as it did with my beloved dbSuite), or if these developers are trying to catch a ride on the buzz train surrounding Tiger.

For geeks, this is like a holiday but it's got to be a major pain in the ass for your everyday Joes who have to now update not only their OS but many of their favorite applicatoins. Is it worth it? We'll see.

Update -- The Tiger launch party was a lot of fun. Our local Apple store had a good turn out and everyone received the scratch cards which at a minimum netted you a free iTunes Music Store song (how many times did we walk out and back in to get a new scratch card? :-) -- but overall it was fun to see many of the same people from the Panther launch party from last year. To my surprise, we did a 4 person video chat with a couple other Apple stores using a stock entry level Mac Mini (the $499 base model) which technically should not have been powerful enough for such a demanding task but it handled it quite well - even with several other apps running concurrently.

A big "Hello!" goes out to my friend Russell who is a recent switcher and this was his first real Mac event so it either helped welcome him to the community of scared him senseless. I'm hoping for the first one myself. Welcome aboard Russell, I think you'll find the Mac community to be made up of some of the most innovative, creative and just down right nice people that you could ever hope to meet and don't hesitate to take advantage of the many web resources out there devoted to helping you get the most out of your Macintosh. May I suggest dropping by Your Mac Life on any given Wednesday night to participate in the live show and see what this whole community is really all about.

Several years ago I tuned into YML for the first time and it's been a staple in my steady diet of Mac goodness. Lots of great people in the YML family and we all together annualy at MacWorld San Francisco.