And it’s great! I highly recommend it… buy one!

Excuse the short post… I’m too busy playing with it

I have now finally got one after the Apple Store got them back in stock! And, so far, it’s been amazing. My InvisibleShield hasn’t quite arrived yet, so I’m going to keep the temporary plastic cover on it until it does.

The interface is amazing… Coverflow has absolutely no lag or delay, unlike in iTunes on my PC – it’s not everyday you can say your mp3 player performs better than your computer!

Hopefully I’ll be able to hack it soon to get some of the iPhone applications on it, such as Mail, Weather and Google Maps.

I was hoping to get one before I start back at Uni tomorrow, but they’re not out until the weekend. I definitely plan to get one when they’re released though. Hopefully that will be enough time for my InvisbleShield to arrive

So far the keyboard has been great – as with all other Apple products, it “just worked”, even in Windows! It’s much lower on the desk than any other keyboard I’ve used, and seems to be smaller without actually looking smaller, which will let me push it further out of the way when I need to use my laptop on my desk.

I haven’t yet tried it in any games or doing any serious coding, but from my experience chatting with it, writing comments on blogs, and just “using” it, I would say it’s probably the best keyboard I’ve used to date – I highly recommend buying one if you need a new keyboard

So far it has just amazed me – considering it only has an Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics processing unit, you wouldn’t know that that was all that powered it from the way it does the animations. Exposé, Dashboard, the “genie” effect when minimizing and maximizing things to/from the dock, the “Flurry” screensaver, and various other subtle effects really show off the power of OS X

As Apple (and fans of Apple) often say, “it just works” – and I’d say they’re right Everything is so easy to install – most of the time it’s a simple drag and drop of one icon to a folder, and it does the rest for you. Even complicated applications, such as the Adobe CS3 are very easy and quick to install.

And that was a fresh start of iTunes, after it refused to play anything… Everything would work, it would even tell me it was playing… but no sound came out, and it didn’t move the progress bar.

It works well *most* of the time, but it crashes a lot more than it used to do when I had XP

I refuse to use anything else though; I’ll just wait until a patch is released

Edit: Seems to be working fine now – I think it was partially caused by a dodgy plugin.

I went to the opening today at 9AM (Getting up at 8AM on a Saturday is a very early start for me!), as they were giving out free T-shirts

The store will apparently operate just like their other stores, running various help sessions and such – click here to view a list of all the UK stores; you can select one to view the current timetable of events.

Since it’s so close to Uni, I know where my friends and I will be spending most of our spare time for the next week

Apart from the lack of add-ons (extensions appear to have been renamed) compatible yet, it’s really good. The new skin is nice too, but is gonna need replacing with something that blends in better with my SoftCrystal Linux WindowBlinds theme. There’s a built-in spell checker in text boxes, and much better tab/window handling – it can now remember (or so it says) what tabs and/or windows you had open in your last session, and restore them!

So far, I haven’t noticed any memory leaks – I hope it stays that way! The feeds system is also a lot better – I never really used to use it as it was quite hard to add a new feed so it would show as a pop-up menu – it seems a lot better now

I’ll update this post with any extra stuff I find, as I find it.

Update: There is a new extensions, or rather add-ons manager. It’s a lot nicer than the old one, and it seems to check for updates when you start the browser, and offers to update them then and there, and it doesn’t need a restart (as it’s not yet fully loaded) afterwards

Get Firefox!

It requires some patient (but easy) hacking of the firmware updater, but after that you just “Restore” the iPod and it’s done

It works for all iPods, even the new colour ones.

Here are two photos of it:

As you can see I have hacked the Hold icon, changed from a small padlock sign to an “L”. I also hacked the “Do Not Disconnect” image and the “OK To Disconnect” image. The last one I changed is the Apple logo (not shown) which is located in Settings -> Legal

Click here to read the guide

- Fr3d