Often we look at the world from a single perspective, assuming that it is the only perspective which exists. Its very easy to fall into this trap, and a lot more difficult to get out of it. Yet if we begin to look at things from a different perspective then it can open up many new doors to us - wether that be creatively or professionally. It can push you towards trying new things, improve relationships and collaboration.

Now before everyone thinks that I have decided to become a management consultant, let me explain… I have just spent the past few days at Flash on the Beach learning new things, meeting interesting people, crashing speaker parties and generally being inspired. It was really a tremendous conference and a big thanks to all the organizers and speakers for making it what it was.

One of the speakers who inspired me in particular was Chris Orwig who wowed us with some amazing photography and some inspirational advice. He used the example of two photo’s, both of the same object - a person and a car set against the backdrop of a beach. The difference was that one photo was taken at eye level, and the other whilst kneeling on the ground. This brought a totally different perspective to the scene, a different feel, and a sense of scale. Whereas previously the man appeared larger than the car, now he was dwarfed by it.

Such a small thing made a huge difference, and I think especially in my field of interactive design and development this is especially true. Lets face it, these days it is easy to build a web app, but it is increasingly difficult to build an amazing web app.

If we look at some of the more special sites, we can see what makes them special - they have been built considering a different perspective - the developers have knelt down and look at it from a different angle, which ultimately feeds and defines the user experience.

From now on, I am going to make a concerted effort to kneel and I would encourage everyone reading this to do the same.

I have a bit of an adrenaline rush at the moment following Adobe’s fantastic PokerCoder event which was held in London last night. It was a fantastic chance to network… whilst playing poker. A big thank you to Sean McSharry and everyone from Adobe who organized the event and made the whole thing possible, it was a refreshing twist on the usual geek event and hopefully will be the first of many!

I didn’t do too badly, making it onto the final table through a strategy which weaved elements of strategy, cunning and sheer luck! Unfortunately losing to a pair of three’s in a slightly misguided assumption that the other guy was bluffing, and simply leveraging his huge pile of chips to intimidate! I was also slightly intimidated when someone else pointed out that one of my fellow finalists was actually a professional poker player and not a Flash developer as I had previously assumed. Oh well, on the bright side, at least I didn’t get knocked out on one of the early rounds with a pair of aces. I like to think I brought some glory to the Brighton contingents valiant efforts.

Well… Leopard arrived this morning, and I have to admit it felt a bit like Christmas had came early! Having absolutely no self control, I just had to install it straight away.

The install process was totally painless, taking around half an hour to upgrade the existing installation of Tiger on my MacBook. Once complete, the machine rebooted and that was it. Totally painless, no problems whatsoever, and I was left on my new desktop.

Now my new desktop was very much the same as my old desktop, with a few notable differences - the menu bar no longer had rounded corners and was now semi-transparent and my dock was now a bit more 3D, with a few extra icons. Nothing too major.

In fact, one can be forgiven for being a bit underwhelmed by the upgrade - unlike upgrading versions of Windows, things still looked and functioned in what appeared to be the same way. Its not until I started poking around that I began to see the extent of the changes within Leopard.

than anything large, it is the little things which make Leopard worthwhile - Stacks in the dock make it easier to keep your desktop tidy, the many enhancements to Finder (notably CoverFlow and QuickLook) greatly enhance the experience of browsing and managing files and Spaces helps you to manage virtual desktops. You can now also create ad-hoc widgets from within Safari - which is quite neat, and which I will be blogging about later this week.

As of yet, I haven’t had a chance to try out the Time Machine, though I am hoping it will get me into the habit of backing up files.

Other enhancements seem a bit more superficial - stationary in Mail, for when you have that urge to send HTML emails, and visual effects in iChat - probably not the kind of features I will find myself using.

So, is there anything which annoys me? I will probably add to this list over the next few days, but at the moment the main annoyances seem to be visual for me - the new window chrome seems a tad dark, and I’m not too keen on the ridiculously huge drop shadows and translucent menu’s - wether they will grow on my still remains to be seen.

Is there anything which is incompatible? So far I have only found a single application which doesn’t seem to work - Aventail Connect VPN Client - which is slightly annoying. If anyone has a solution, please leave a comment!

Worthwhile? For all of the UI/UX experiences, probably. As many reviewers have said, Leopard is not revolutionary, however it is evolutionary and provides some welcome new features - most of which may not be immediately obvious, but which hopefully make the day to day experience of using a Mac more enjoyable.