I’m usually not that big on the gadgetry from Cupertino, but I’d heard rumours that Apple would be doing some big things today. Then earlier this week, I was in my boss’s office and he was checking out the details on the big day, so I had to take a moment to look at today’s special.

Just to help people out, $20 off an iPod or $50 off a computer probably isn’t going to make you rush out and buy everything your little Apple heart desires, but I came across two specials that might make you impulse buy. Office 2008 for Mac is on sale for $148 (save $351.95) - but wait, isn’t that similar to the sale that Microsoft is doing?

The most interesting offer for me is the Sanyo Xacti VPC-E2 Waterproof Digital Camcorder Apple has on sale for $198. Similar to what I found with Office, I noticed that Amazon had the exact same camera for that same price.

I think everyone would have been looking for some sort of drop on the iPhone, or something juicy with the iPod Touch (not 5% off a $400 product). Oh well, better luck next year Apple!

I keep telling myself that I’m going to finish an online portfolio, but for whatever reason, I never really seem to get too far on it - see what I mean? (I look at that now, almost a year later, and it makes me cringe!) Feeling ambitious, I decided to at least look for some inspiration, and not surprisingly, Smashing Magazine had a recent article with some really creative portfolio designs. Probably worth checking out for design inspiration in general, not just creating a personal portfolio.

I’m always trying to improve my prowess in the area of graphics/graphic design, and at some point I stumbled upon an Spoono’s photoshop tutorial for changing photos to colour sketches. Most of the tutorials that deal with photos to sketches are only for black and white (pencil) sketches, so I thought I’d share this.

It’s one of those tutorials that has to be used properly, or at least you can’t overuse it, and I’ll admit, it’s a bit difficult to find a perfect use for it, but the other day I was creating a landing page for an ad and used it to put a server configuration diagram graphic onto a ripped piece of paper to fit in better with the landing page. You can see the original image here.

It has been almost a year since I last posted, and in the last year, what has really happened?

Facebook and Facebook apps continue to be popular, but I think the social network is close to (if hasn’t already) peaked; while people will still flock to the site because everyone is there, it doesn’t seem to have the same luster. I’m not sure if anyone else is getting fed up with the invites to save this or promote that, but it’s starting to feel a lot more like MySpace without the annoying personal customizations.

Yahoo! has finally admitted it cannot continue under its current leadership. For almost a year now we’ve all watched the former Internet heavyweight flounder in almost all areas and lost a majority of the brilliance it once had. During this downward spiral, a wealth of talent and knowledge has walked out the doors as has billions in stock market value.

Microsoft continues to battle everything and everyone, but relatively speaking, hasn’t done as badly as it might have. Apple is cutting production (but still has the iPod to fall back on), Sun is going to help with search, and Windows 7 is a big step in the right direction.

Google continues to dominate search, but there are questions as to how reliable Google’s cloud-based apps are. However, as long as Google remains almost the only pay-per-click option on the block, they can continue to bully their advertisers into keeping profits high.

Obviously a whole lot more has happened, but hopefully I can comment on that more as it happens instead.