Along comes OS X Leopard 10.5 and suddenly the scan function broke. I kept waiting for hp to release an update but no soap. There was a work-around though: scan it to JPEG or TIFF, write the scanned image to a memory card, and work from that. Yuck! Over the months, I would check hp’s site and no fix was forth-coming. You could print, fax and make copies without an issue, just not scan.

A couple of weeks ago, I got seriously frustrated about the scanning thing and bought a NeatReceipts scanner. As I noted in a previous post, I think it rocks. The unit is small so it doesn’t take up much desk space (small enough for travel if you do that sort of thing). While it is a single sheet, single side scanner, it works well for what I’m scanning: medical documents and receipts.

Anyway, we all know that OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 came out on August 28th. As I started installing it on our home machines, I came across this obscure note that Apple’s Image Capture application could now read scans from devices on the wireless network. Sure enough, I fired it up and it worked! I went to hp’s web site and they mentioned it in their notes on Snow Leopard.

In the notes for Snow Leopard, they confirmed that scanning had been incorporated into Image Capture.

There is also a release of software that can be installed on 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 machines that uses the hp Photosmart software for scanning.

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“It’s Here!”

From Apple: Apple today announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users for $29. (Box photo from the Apple website and is Copyright © 2009 Apple, Inc.)

Apple focused on making the OS more compact (7GB smaller on the disk), more stable, and faster than Leopard. It’s 64-bits out of the box yet retains 32-bit compatibility, improves security, reduces the OS foot print, better multi-core support via Grand Central, better graphics support via OpenCL, and a faster QuickTime X. For those lucky enough to use a Mac at work (not me I’m afraid), you’ll be getting Microsoft Exchange support right-out-of-the-box.

What About Mircosoft?”

Apple will beat the Microsoft to the punch with their next generation operating system by two months. Microsoft has announced availability of 22 October 2009 for Windows 7, their replacement for the ill-fated and much-maligned Windows Vista. Whilst I don’t normally shill for Microsoft, if you are still running Windows XP, you can upgrade to Vista right now and get Windows 7 when it comes out for FREE. (That alone should tell you something about Vista!) And provided you aren’t getting an OEM’d version of Windows 7 (i.e., you buy it straight from Microsoft), I think you will like it’s speed and enhancements. All that “value added” bloatware is missing.

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