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On August 28th, Apple released its latest operating system Snow Leopard on the masses. The big news with Snow Leopard is that the focus isn’t on whizz-bang features, but on performance and stability improvements.

As such, the price-point, just $29 for a single-user upgrade license (provided you already have Leopard on your Intel Mac) made it a no-brainer for me to immediately upgrade all the Macs in my house.

According to analysts at NPD, I wasn’t alone. Sales for the first two weeks of Mac OS X Snow Leopard have far exceeded those of both Mac OS X Leopard (released in October 2007) and Mac OS X Tiger (released in April 2005). NPD reports that sales for Snow Leopard were more than two times higher than those for Leopard and almost four times higher than those of Tiger.

The initial sales weren’t limited to just the first week (when many members of the Apple Faithful rush out and buy the latest iProduct), NPD reports that second-week sales dropped only 25%. Considering that Leopard saw its sales drop 60% the second-week, the price-point and the low-key marketing campaign seem to be working.

Although the NPD report doesn’t touch on this, I wonder what role social media played in Snow Leopard sales. Because the focus is on performance, not features, Apple has had a relatively quiet ad campaign for its latest OS. Having said that, I know my Twitter stream (which is admittedly full of lots of Mac users) full of conversation and links regarding Mac OS X 10.6.

So Mac users, have your upgraded to Snow Leopard? What have your experiences been so far?

Tags: mac os x, Snow Leopard

As content sites on the web mature, they continue to blur the line between straight news sites, social hubs, and references for structured data. No longer are these sites just home to editorial content — many of them have created databases of the products they cover (take for example TC sister site CrunchBase offers a comprehensive directory of companies and people in the startup community). Unfortunately, content management systems and databases that run these increasingly diversified sites don’t always play nicely together. CrowdFusion, a TechCrunch50 finalist launching today, is an impressive new CMS system that’s looking to eliminate these hassles. To put things simply, the platform helps streamline content writing, database management, and social features by combining features of blogs, wikis, and more into one unified platform.

To help give an idea of exactly what Crowd Fusion can do, the startup walked us through the process of creating a blog post. First, the CMS can present a writer with stories they might want to cover: the platform has an integrated feed reader, which can intelligently determine when there’s a breaking story that your site has yet to write about. The CMS can then facilitate actually writing the post by importing excerpts into your new posts (with links to the original articles). It can also suggest related blog posts for you to include at the bottom of your post (you can simply drag and drop to rearrange or remove the stories).

Say a gadget blog wanted to write about a new phone that had just come out (today’s demo featured our super-secret iPhone Killer, the CrunchPhone). Because the CMS can integrate the site’s gadget database directly into the CMS, adding a new product is simple — you can add it to your database using a small widget on the same page that you’re writing your blog post in, without having to leave the page. And because the blog system is integrated with the product database, you can generate intuitive tables comparing multiple existing phones against the new one.

CrowdFusion has a plugin architecture so it’s extensible. The company is open-sourcing the CrowdFusion platform, and will be releasing it in public beta today.

Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble:
DC: There are only so many blogs and companies that will need something like this. The millions of blogs out there won’t need this. We’re talking about the TechCrunch, Glams of the world. I think the challenge will be how big can you make the market?
RS: He didn’t say it, but (founder) Brian Alvey built the backend for Weblogs, Engadget, big publishing sites.
A: There are top publishers who know what I’ve built (big names like Engadget). But lots of people aren’t going to just immediately move over, so we open source it. Clicker is exactly the sort of thing you build on this.
RH: Getting people to adopt will have a slow curve. In tech I don’t think you’re ever the last everything. I think what you’re doing is exactly right, with plug-in arch and open source.
A:I’d love to be doing this for 10, 20 years.
A:We’re big fans of MySQL model where you have an industrial strength free product anyone can use. We figure we can build a valuable business with scaling, hosting, etc.

Videos:

Other Coverage
TC50: Crowd Fusion wants to be the ultimate tool for web publishing VentureBeat.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Adjusting and enhancing photos in Photoshop can involve a lot of trial and error, and be very time consuming. Thankfully their are actions to make our job easier. Here are 50 excellent Photoshop actions that can add professional looking enhancements to your photos with the click of a button. There are a few links below that contain more than one action.

Bright Eyes

Old Photo Action

Cool photo effect action

Soft Elegance

Pencil Draw Photoshop Action

InFection

Old style sepia effect

Photoshop Photography Action Set (8 actions)

Polaroid GENERATOR V1 (9 actions)

Vintage

Diabolic

Dim and Jade

Lith Print

Gradient action

Red action

Sharp action

Dream Blur

Oscar Pilch Photoshop Action

Wedding Enhancers (12 actions)

Black white sepia

Photo Coloring II

Stylish Sepia

Retro

Photo Coloring 11.2

Dropbox, the impressive file syncing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has released a brand new version of its online interface. Today’s upgrade brings with it a number of new features that will make it much easier to manage the large number of files users often have on their Dropboxes.

Among the new features are the ability to select multiple files in the file browser and perform bulk operations on them. You can also select multiple files and have them placed into a new Zip file, which will make it easy to send multiple files at once. Other new improvements include a search feature, Gmail-style keyboard shortcuts, and a version of the site that’s been optimized for mobile phones. Of course, many people primarily use Dropbox through its desktop clients that integrate quite nicely with your operating system, but these are welcome additions for anyone who has to access their files when they’re away from their primary computer.

For those iPhone users looking to get their fix, Dropbox submitted an iPhone application to the App Store about four weeks ago which still has not been approved by Apple. This is just one of the many iPhone developers that has been waiting for more then the usual two week waiting period to get their app approved.

Dropbox launched almost exactly one year ago at TechCrunch50, and has grown quite a bit over the last year with over 1,000,000 users. Dropbox is based in San Francisco and has raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0