It's January of a new year, and that means Macworld 2008 is just getting underway.

Starting tomorrow at noon we'll get to see all the of Apple goodness Steve Jobs has for us. I'm very excited to see what's in store for this year. You can keep up with live blog coverage on Engadget.

I also really like the new ear buds. I could never use them before because they just completely hurt my ears after about 20 minutes. But, they have been completely re-sculpted and I'm able to wear them all day now. Maybe it's just me, but sound quality seems much higher as well.

Overall, I give it about a 9 out of 10.

UPDATE: Leopard installed flawlessly in less than an hour. Everything seems to be up and running just fine, except CF8. It is generating an error on startup. However, I've already found a posting online on how to fix this (requires a reinstall), so am still working on this.

Photo booth backdrop effects are cool, but a little flaky--a lot of artifacting going on. I'm guessing this would be better if I used a more neutral background.

UPDATE on photo booth--I haven't proven this yet, but from everything I've read, it's basically just like a "green screen" Hollywood uses. The backdrop needs to be a solid color, something that doesn't match your clothes, hair, skin, etc. and try not to have too much of a shadow of you cast onto the background. I might have to give this a try tonight to confirm.

Other features, such as Spaces and Time Machine, I haven't really tried out too much yet. I hope to get to play with Leopard a lot more over the next few days.

Of course, there are a few quirky-looking things with this release, but just with the new features like Spaces, Time Machine, the new capabilities of iChat, and others, it will be worth its weight in gold. And, now that my Macbook is beefed up with a nice 2GB of RAM it should handle Leopard very nicely.

My Mac has become one of my most critical assets, and a powerful development tool with which I am running ColdFusion 8, MySQL administrator, Dreamweaver, and even Eclipse. With the new RAM boost it has absolutely no trouble running multiple simultaneous apps. Leopard should have a good 'ol time running on it.

Just 8 more days!!!!

A lot of people were disappointed with Steve Jobs' keynote speech yesterday at the WWDC. They were especially upset about two things 1) No real "new" news on Leopard and 2) Safari getting supported on the Windows platform. Personally, I don't have a problem with the latter--just makes sense on Apple's part. But, I do have to agree with the first one. Don't get me wrong, Leopard is going to have some killer features, but it seems as though Jobs should have brought out some big guns and really shown what the deal will be. Maybe he's holding out for a later time to let all the cats out of the bag. He only showed 10 of the 300 (yes, that's right, 300) new features which will be in Leopard. I'm sure there's a heck of a lot more no one outside of Apple has laid eyes on yet, and they're saving that for right before the big release in October. Personally, I love my Mac, I love OSX, and can't wait to see what the future holds for my Macbook. Long live Apple!