1. New Built-in Automatic Wordpress Upgrade.

It’s about time. There are various automatic methods for upgrading your Wordpress installation, but they weren’t perfect. Once you have installed Wordpress 2.7, you can upgrade to future versions with a single click. It’s officially supported, so no need to worry about it breaking on you halfway through. No more headaches or wasted time doing it manually.

2. Completely Re-Designed Admin Interface

With all the awesome Wordpress themes that’s been designed, the admin interface was sorely lacking. Instead of clicking through 2-3 menus to get where you’re going, everything can be accessed easily now. User-friendly Icon Menubar on the left, large stretchable typing area in the middle, and publish/ tags/categories boxes on the right.

The Dashboard was also redesigned to show your post/comments stats at a glance. You can even blog a post directly from the Dashboard through the QuickPress function. Once you try it, you won’t want to go back.

3. New Comment System

The coding for the comment system was completely redone. Without having to use plugins or custom php code, an updated theme will have Alternating colored comments, Author styling, Threaded comments that allow you to reply, AJAX editing, and multiple paged comments.

With all the new features in 2.7, I was able to remove 3-5 plugins and reduce a ton of custom coding. You can see many of the new Wordpress 2.7 implementations on Creativeherb.com as well. What are you waiting for? Get 2.7 Beta 3 here, or future latest releases here.

The design of the new Macbooks are obviously years ahead of PC notebooks. The Macbooks are smoothly built, great heat dispersion, and OSX is great for design work. Upon asking if they had a Macbook available, I was going to purchase one right there and then. No stranger to my impulsive purchase decisions, my girlfriend stopped me by pointing out that I should check on PC notebooks as well. I thought that it was only fair I do a proper pre-purchase research.

I went to Costco to roundout my research when I saw a cool little 12.1″ HP Pavilion TX2623CA notebook for $300 cheaper than the Apple Macbook. At this point I was still leaning towards the Macbook because I didn’t have a computer with OSX at home and I wanted to fill in that void. But check out this list of Pros and Cons:

Apple Macbook:
Faster CPU @ 2.0 Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram.

HP Pavilion TX2623CA:
AMD Athlon X2 QL-62 Dual-Core (equals to around 1.6 to 1.8 Core 2 Duo), 4 GB Ram.

Apple Macbook:
Great heat dispersion, more advanced track pad, looks very sleek, runs OSX.

HP Pavilion TX2623CA:
Heats up very quickly and needs a cooling pad or laptop fan, not as sleek looking by far, runs Windows.
At this point the Macbook is slightly ahead even with the $300 difference. Then I read on and saw the awesome features the HP has:

Features:
Fingerprint reader, memory card reader, Altec Lansing Speakers, touch screen, rotatable/convertible tablet screen(can flip the screen to collapse into a tablet configuration), built-in wacom tablet on screen, 2 headphone jacks, standard remote control.
Screw the Macbook. The HP costs less, has more ram, a cool finger print reader that I can show off to friends, a rotatable screen that I can use for adhoc presentations Tablet style, and a built-in screen wacom. The Wacom Cintiq 12WX (12″ Wacom tablet with a built in screen) costs $1,000 by itself. And now if I buy this HP I get it built-in already? Now that’s a great deal.

With a built-in Cintiq Wacom, I can use Photoshop or Painter to sketch out a few masterpieces or take notes during presentations. I was going to hook up a regular Wacom tablet to the Macbook anyways, but now this makes it infinitely more convenient.

Needless to say, I fell in love with the HP TX2623CA and been using it since. But what do you think of my decision to sacrifice OSX in exchange for additional features? Am I nuts?