I love its large screen.
I love its dock.
I love its common-sense intuitiveness instead of the Microsoft-way.
I love its speed.
I love its form.
I love its function.
I love the way it makes me feel when I look at it.
I love its simplicity.
I love its intricacies.
I love its flipping cool productivity tools.

But there is one thing I don’t like: Spaces doesn’t behave nicely with BIG 3rd Party software developers. And by BIG, I mean, Microsoft and Adobe. Neither Microsoft Office nor Adobe CS4 stay in their assigned spaces. When they go out of their spaces, it’s hard to get them back, too!

Adobe blames Apple. Apples blames Adobe.
Apple blames Microsoft. Microsoft blames Apple.

Long story short, no one claims responsibility to fix this crazy issue means I’ll likely not have a fix until either Snow Leopard (10.7), Microsoft Office 2014, or Adobe CS7.
Methinks Apple should (and will) fix this annoyance with the release of Snow Leopard in 2009. Better than 2014!

Here’s a before and after shot of my desk. What do you think?

Before iMac

Seriously…download it now.

It is still taking me some getting used to for sure! Nothing is quite as simple and straight-forward as it was in Thunderbird.
But I am thankful to have a calendar program that syncs to my phone and my Email all in one place.
Now, I just need to relearn Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. (Don’t you just love that long name?)

Last night’s roll out took me somewhere around 3 1/2 hours, and I’m tired today. I guess I need to go for a training run!
(p.s. I still miss my T-bird.)

The fix was adopted and was part of the new minor release which was released this morning. Check it out (I even got mentioned in this link!)

Seriously, it’s a lot of fun to combine the technical with the creative juices…you should try it sometime, seriously a blast!

One of the reasons it’s been a lot of work is that I have placed an extreme importance on valid page code. This means, my desire is to have the NewHope.in website 100% standards-compliant.
This is not always (ever) an easy thing to do, but for someone who is blind, this is imperative.

Target got sued by a blind person because the blind person can’t use their site. (Just look at the validation report!). Check out NewHope.in’s validation report.

I’ve found that most companies–even web companies who produce products for the web really don’t care much about validation. NewHope.in completely validates, except for our calendar integration, which we have no control over the code. I’m still deciding what to do with this. There are work-arounds, just not easy ones, but perhaps some day…

So why is this important?
Do you think spending extra time on valid code is important, or does it not really matter?

Special thanks to my beautiful wife and Luke for doing some proofing and error-checking for me the past couple of days.

I know there are still a few issues to work through, but we’re close enough, and it was time to pull the trigger. Please feel free to look around and let me know if you find anything broken! www.NewHope.in

You saw it first here, people!

And, please don’t forget about the new series New Hope’s launching this coming weekend, One Prayer. This weekend, Pastor Diehl returns from his two-week vacation and shares the message, ‘Lord, Make Us Faithful‘.