The wait is over. The iPad will be available on April 3. All the Apple fan boys out there can start pre-ordering the Apple iPad on March 12.

Apple today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Beginning a week from today, March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

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There is so little chance that you haven’t heard of the Apple Event that took place a couple of hours ago. But just in case here is a sum up of the event (in headlines):

• Steve Jobs showed up saying they want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product.
• There was a little talk about the success of the iPod and the iPhone over the last years with some historical and data reference. Plus, saying that Apple is a mobile devices company, that’s what we do.
• After wondering if there is room for a third category device in the middle of a laptop and/or a smartphone, Steve just said iPad.
• From that time and on it was all about applauding and embracing this new magical thing called the iPad.

We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts — we want to make the best tech, but have them be intuitive. It’s the combination of these two things that have let us make the iPad.

iPad’s main features inlcude:

• 9.7-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
• 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip
• Wi-Fi + 3G model
• 3.5-mm stereo headphone jack
• Built-in speakers
• Microphone

You may find out more about the iPad here. However, as you may have noticed, there a few missing features.

If you ask me, I was getting ready to catch up with the event along with gdgt’s and engadget’s live coverage. I was ready to listen to whatever Steve was ready to say. I mean, we were all ready for the best tablet pc ever, right? Well, the first impression of the iPad was like “hmmm.. it’s not bad”. Not that I don’t think this is an exceptional mobile device. Maybe I was overwhelmed by all the buzz going on about the Apple Tablet. I was waiting for something truly innovative and outstanding.

The User Interface was awesome, as usual in all Apple products. Could be better though. The whole idea of downloading the same apps you download for your iPhone was a bit surprising and also a good way to endorse the power of the iPhone App Store. Everything else seemed to be quite elegant.

Anyhow, Apple’s iPad has definitely killed the netbook market and we are about to witness, as I have said before, a change in personal computing in the years to come shifting the Personal Computer (P.C.) towards the mobile devices.

Don’t forget to check out this real-time look at twitter mentions of terms related to Apple’s product launch earlier today.

I recall the first time I downloaded Boxee for my Mac about a year and half ago. At that time Macs were already equipped with this thing called the Front Row, a media center software by Apple which was quite impressive back then.

If you haven’t tried Boxee, go to boxee.tv for download it for free. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Apple TV. Once you ‘ve installed it just move around to explore Boxee’s capabilities and be prepared to be amazed.

Boxee is the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet and computer on your TV

Until yesterday Boxee was available only for your computer where you had to connect your computer to your TV to enjoy media from the Internet or your computer. However Boxee announced yesterday that they will be announcing Boxee Box tomorrow at CES.

[roll over to see the back]

Yeah, that’s right, now you can get all your favorite TV shows & movies from the Internet or your hard drive onto your TV – no PC needed.

Boxee Box features:

• HDMI
• Optical Audio
• RCA Stereo Audio
• WiFi (802.11n)
• Ethernet
• 2 USB Ports
• SD Cart Slot
• RF Remote

As you can see in the list above, Boxee Box comes with a super-remote (named after the super-phones). It’s a two-face remote with a QWERTY keyboard at the back! How amazing is that?!

I’ve finally made up my mind to upgrade to Snow Leopard. It has been a day or so since I did a clean install of the new Mac OS X. Well, the truth is nothing looks different from the previous version (10.5) until the moment you start to interact with this version of Mac OS X. The first thing that you may notice is the missing icon of your hard drive. Snow Leopard clearly urges users to change their cluttering-workspace behaviors towards a fewer-(if none)-icons desktop environment. Other than that, there are numerous other refinements you can find out about here. After a day of usage these are my likes and dislikes about the new Mac OS X aka Snow Leopard.

Likes:

• The secondary tap/click on the Dock icons pops up an nicely transparent menu that looks just perfect.
• Snow Leopard supports three- and four-finger gestures for all mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads.
• In case you did have a Mac notebook with Multi-Touch trackpad you might have heard of MultiClutch. MultiClutch allows you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in a given app to a given gesture. I personally used MultiClutch mostly for swiping back and forward inside Firefox. Well, Snow Leopard seems to be able to handle these swipes without any other third party application.
• Do you like the Grid View of the Stacks? Now you ‘ll love it! With its native folders support you will be able to open folders in a stack to see all the files inside and quickly return to previous folders.
• I can’t count the times I wanted to look up the date and had to switch to Dashboard or look at the Calendar icon in my hiding-on Dock. The date can now appear alongside the time in the menu bar which is definitely a time saver.
• When I first heard of the new borderless quicktime I knew it would be awesome. At first it may look strange to you but you ‘ll get used to it shortly.
• What a relief. Since I first saw this on the iPhone I wanted it so badly. Address Book now syncs with Google! Hurray!
• “Ok, we are in the Trash now. I need to take this accidentally deleted file back to where it came from. Wait a minute.. Where on earth did it came from?” Has this ever happened to you? No problem. The “Put Back” option inside the Trash gives you the option to retrieve that deleted file and put it back, even if you don’t recall where back is.
• Another cool feature in the new Mac OS X resides inside the Dock preferences. It is a check box that allows you to minimize windows into the application icon rather than to the special section of the Dock. It comes in very handy and you can you can either fire up Exposé or click and hold on any icon in the Dock, to see that both are displaying minimized windows a little bit smaller.
• Are you a Windows user? If yes, don’t worry, no one is perfect. The new Mac OS X enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It supports read-only access for security reasons.
• Finally, TextEdit’s automatic spelling correction rocks! If you are a regular TextEdit user you ‘ll love it.

However there are a couple things I don’t like about the new Mac OS X.

Dislikes:

• Firstly, I could not help but notice this awkward, you might say, transition from space to space. I don’t know if you are using Spaces at all (although I think you should) but you will definitely notice this clumsy effect. It lasts for milliseconds but hell yeah it is noticeable. I don’t recall this happening in Leopard. Has anyone else noticed this?
• Last but not least, when Apple introduced Multi-Touch trackpads I noticed that people (including myself) kept pinching (opening and closing) by accident and that caused zooming in and out icons in Finder windows (which was undeniably one of the worst things you could do with your Multi-Touch trackpad). Soon, a software update was released fixing this “bug”. Now, why on earth did this came back with Snow Leopard?

[ photo via adamjackson ]

Apple ‘s latest version of Mac OS X brought amongst many new and amazing features a new and extremely harmful bug. The bug is complete loss of all data in user’s home directory. For the bug to occur a user must log in as guest and then log out and log in as normal user.

Many users have been reporting the bug since September, but only yesterday Apple acknowledged it.

We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.

The only solution currently available is if you have Time Machine enabled, via witch you can restore your files, otherwise, good bye my precious data.

Unfortunately this appears to be only one of the many annoying bugs that have been introduced to Snow Leopard. Let ‘s hope that most of the issues will be fixed in the next updates.