So, in my last post, I added a rather cryptic photo of an Apple product I received for my birthday. Now that I’ve spent a week breaking it in,  I can write a blog about it!

It’s a shiny new MacBook Air. Core i7.

Up until now, the 13″ MacBook Pro I’ve been using has been a loaner from work. And while that laptop has been absolutely fantastic, being absolutely invaluable in at work, not to mention being a great help with some of my side projects in helping further my knowledge of iOS dev, I figured that now that I’m actually starting to get requests for paid commissions, I’d be in a much better position if I bought my own hardware dedicated for that. It also means ensuring I have the proper licenses for all of the software I use is a lot easier too.

So, after much research, and coming very close to buying a 15″ MacBook Pro, I decided to go with an Air.

Ultimately, when it came down to the tradeoff between power and physical weight, I decided that I’d rather go with a lighter laptop than a more powerful (but more heavy one) one. While the 15″ Pro is amazing, and from what I’ve seen, even runs rings around my desktop PC, I decided it was too big and too heavy for my liking. And going off the assumption that the Air would be at least as powerful as my 13″ Pro at that point, I figured it should handle everything perfectly.

And boy does it ever!

If you’ve had any doubts that the MacBook Air doesn’t really stand up to the Pro series (at least the lower end), you can put them to rest. This thing is extremely snappy in pretty much every case I tried, and the graphics processor can handle running at 2560×1600 at no trouble at all.

Obviously, it isn’t as powerful as most of the Pros can potentially be (eg 8GB RAM, truly quad core CPU etc), so if you’re looking to do really intense things like edit video or play games, I might recommend the Pro. But for my kind of daily usage, which consists mainly of Photoshop design, web code,  and/or iPhone app design, this thing is perfect on all counts.

I’m still wrapping my head around Lion here. There are quite a few new features to get used to. Also, I’m still trying to figure out what other apps I need to fully deck it out. I might write another blog later…

Alright. Here endeth the Apple fanboy post.

Hahahaha… I was sort of dreading this day… in a way. But since you can’t really stop time. It’s finally here.

I’m officially a quarter of a century old.

As I always say when I write these blogs, I feel a bit weird. I’m mid-freaking-twenties now.

Anyway… as far as birthday celebrations go, this weekend could not have been more epic. It started off at an izakaya on Friday night, followed by karaoke afterwards.

Saturday was a trip to a Microsoft-sponsored Windows Phone development workshop (so… nothing but food and code for a day ), which was epic. And Sunday (birth day actual) culminated in a JET Alumni-sponsored Aussie hanami event followed by a quiet dinner with the family at a Japanese restaurant.

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やあ、みんな！　ちょっと前に英語の投稿を出したが、やっぱり日本語でも投稿した方がいいと思った。　最近、株式会社ポケモンの弁護士さんから聞いたんだから。

ポケモン会社からの最初のメールをもらった時、弁護士さんはどうかほとんどのポケモンのファン作成は許可をとってなくても、許可をとった作成もあるって言った。　それを待たずに、すぐに、iずかんが許可を取る可能性があるかどうかをきいてみた。

ま、その時から、あまりちょうしに乗ってる気をしなかったから、それをあまりだれにも教えていなかった。

そして、１０月に、やっと弁護士さんから返事が届いてきた。

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日本語版はこちらです！

Hey guys.

I thought I’d quickly let you know what’s gone down with iPokédex over the last few weeks.

When I originally received the first email from the Pokémon Company counsel for the first time, they had mentioned that even though the majority of Pokémon fan productions aren’t licensed, there are a few that had made it through the process.
Not skipping a beat, despite the fact that they also said that they don’t have the resources to license many more, I asked the counsel if they could perhaps check with licensing and see if there was any potential for iPokédex to be officially licensed.

I didn’t really broadcast this information too much (I mainly just kept saying ‘man it would be nice IF it got licensed’ ) as I didn’t want to come off as ‘counting my chickens before they hatched’, so to speak.

Anyway, after a little while, about 2 weeks ago, I received the following email from the counsel:

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