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The MacBook Air includes an oversize trackpad with multi-touch technology. You can pinch, swipe, or rotate to zoom in on text, advance through a photo album, or adjust an image:

The new gestures work in existing Apple applications such as Finder, iPhoto and Safari, but carry slightly different functionality in each application. For example you can use the "swipe" gesture to drill down and up different folder levels in Finder.

You can double-tap and move the whole window, not just the cursor. When you’re in a large photo you can pan around with two fingers. When you want to rotate a photo, just rotate your fingers. If you want to go between photos, pan right, pan left — if you want to zoom, pinch in and out. All of those settings can be switched on via the System Preferences:

Another "secret" feature is the zoom-function: Hold down CTRL and then use two-finger swipe on the trackpad to zoom in/out of content.

And there is nothing cooler to show your Windows-friends how you can rotate pictures or PDF's in OS X by just rotating two fingers on the touchpad - smile.

While my MacBook Air has a built-in firewall and protects me from all the Internet-nastiness out there, I am still relive the Windows days of Trojans and Spyware. So to put my mind at ease, I installed Little Snitch:

Little Snitch informs you whenever a program attempts to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can then choose to allow or deny this connection, or define a rule how to handle similar, future connection attempts. This reliably prevents private data from being sent out without your knowledge. Little Snitch runs inconspicuously in the background and it can also detect network related activity of viruses, trojans and other malware.

Want to open and edit Visio's in OS X? Best (and probably only) choice is OmniGraffle:

I worked with OmniGraffle for a number of hours and impressed with it's flowcharting capabilities. Visio looks now like the poor kid.

I am starting to understand what those "Mac geeks" are ranting on about. Things just work naturally.... without pain.... or blue-screens...

One week has gone past and I am fully migrated to my MacBook Air running Leopard. Over the weekend I found the final deathblow for Windows. I can now open Microsoft Visio's as well as Microsoft Project files.

I stumbled across OmniPlan:

OmniPlan is a project management application for Mac OS X and has the not very publicly known feature of being able to open Microsoft Project file. I have never thought that a project plan could look sexy.

During my migration from the dark side, I had to overcome a few challenges to make all my gadgets and software work.

I was fascinated to find, that Garmin supports Mac OSX completely and they even have a brilliant blog - http://garmin.blogs.com/my_weblog/applemac/index.html.

For the Garmin savvy, you will be delighted to find the Windows equivalent of POI Loader and Web Updater. Even better, you will find BobCat, the OS X version of MapSource. I think the application is still in beta and therefore does not support the clipping and synchronization of map-portions. This is not really a great deal, since I have the whole map of Southern Africa on the SD-card.

Garmin Bobcat functions the same way as MapSource and the interface is in typical OS X fashion more polished. Was great to see that I could upgrade my Nuvi 710 to the latest version via the MBA.

Just a quick guideline to get your Entourage 2008 configured with a fully functional out-of-office assistant, global address book and proper synchronisation on the LAN and while connecting remotely - beautiful:

MS Exchange admins DO NOT like OS X! They will therefore also not help you to connect to Exchange - here is help though:
http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/03/optimize_entourage_to_better_work_with_exchange.html

If you need to switch between in-the-office and out-of-the-office connectivity, this is great:
http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2007/06/testers_needed_for_script.html

We all know what happens when the combination of a boring weekend, a loaded credit card and an arrogant salesperson in a electronic's store come together on a early Sunday morning:

The purpose of the early-morning-shopping was to get a small travel-laptop such as the ASUS Eepc to check email on the go and resulted in a gorgeous MacBook Air instead.

Not sure if the salesperson was completely asleep at 9am in the morning, but as I strolled through the store I spotted the ultra-thin and light MacBook Air - best of all, the label read R 12,999 (!). The Apple ZA store confirmed that their price is from R 17,999 and they mentioned that for that price I would probably only get a regular Mac.

If the store made a mistake in labeling it - it is pretty tough for them - the sales-people should learn not to treat their customers like shit and all ten of them were either reading their newspapers or having a casual chat while careful avoiding any customers.

Wrong! It is indeed a brand new MacBook Air - thin as a wafer and packed with latest technology such as Built-in AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi wireless networking (based on IEEE 802.11n draft specification and IEEE 802.11a/b/g), Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) and a whole lot more.

Certainly a laptop for coolness and light-weight (1.3kg). The magnetic power-cable is just one of the wow-introductions - as soon as you move the cable close to the MacBook Air, the laptop seems to "invisibly" suck the cable to the connector - schweet.

The backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor for automatic adjustment of keyboard illumination and screen brightness (and that glowing Apple logo) make people stare when you work on it.

The solid-state trackpad with multi-touch gesture support is also something I have not seen - it supports supports two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities.

Remote disk
The MacBook Air was already pre-installed, something I generally do not like and as I am about to start a clean-install I was wondering how I get the DVDs into the laptop. Well, the MacBook Air has no DVD-drive!!! Steve and his crew have cooked up the "remote disc"-feature. You install a small application on your Windows box, pop-in the Mac OS X install disc and then reboot the MacBook Air while holding down the Option key.

Within a few seconds the Macintosh logs into the wireless router, picks up that the Mac OSX install DVD is shared on a Windows machine and then happily continues installing Mac OSX ---- remotely (and over the air!!!).

As user friendly and idiot safe the OSX is, Bill Gates has certainly brain-washed me and as I work on the MacBook Air, I find myself wondering, why it could not be that easy on another OS.