Here’s part 2 of my round-of of the year’s Mac news and opinions here at the Mac Devcenter blog. If you missed Part 1, here it is.

July

Apple was conspicuously absent from the news this month. Reports began to emerge about weird discolorations on new MacBooks. Some people began to suspect that a MacBook was a better Windows dev computer than a PC.

After years of moaning about desktop email clients, I switched to Gmail as my primary email interface. Still no regrets.

There was some debate about “dashboardadvisoryd”; and lots of you had opinions about decent phone handsets for Derrick. He eventually settled on a Sony Ericsson W810i.

We wondered what makes a good icon? And whether palettes, or sidebars, are best?

August

My first rant about .Mac was by no means the only one of the year, on our site or on anyone else’s. There seems to be a consensus that it needs changing, or ditching, and soon. No sign of that happening just yet though. Erica wrote the earliest Christmas list I saw this year.

Then suddenly it was WWDC, and hello to the Mac Pro. Hooo boy. Plus, our first news about Core Animation, Time Machine, Spaces, and much more.

Joshua took some time to look away from the hype and towards the stock option investigation. We said Bye bye Classic - did anyone care much?

Jochen had some requests for Mail features; I wondered if todo items in Mail were a bit unecessary; then I had another rant about .Mac just to finish the month off.

September

The hype machine was switched back on with a mysterious invite to a “Showtime” event on September 12. A few days beforehand, Apple got some hardware upgrades out of the way with improved specs for iMacs and Mac minis.

Showtime itself was all about movies, iPods, iTunes 7, iTV, and “media stuff”. Oh, and iPod games. Chuck pointed out that he wouldn’t buy any iTV device that wouldn’t record. And Scot made an interesting observation about downloading cover art.

Barebones released BBEdit 8.5; the Quicktime 7.1.3 update caused a few headaches; Rogue Amoeba released Fission; and Apple rounded the month off by releasing OS X 10.4.8.

October

We wondered why coders switch to Mac, and got some fascinating answers. Erica pointed out some hacks for cooling down hot MacBook Pros. Todd continued his adventures in emulation and virtualization.

Eudora’s planned Cocoa release was axed, and the announcement made that it would be re-written using code from the Thunderbird project. Alan gave us insights into the Office 2.0 conference. Lawyer Larry Bodine attracted some interest, a lot of links, and a fair amount of criticism (to put it mildly) with his anti-Mac post.

Apple announced a new version of .Mac webmail with some nice new features, but they weren’t enough to keep Todd on board.

November

We saw more discussion of developing for Windows on a Mac; Jochen reminded everyone to back the hell up; and Bruce took control of his fans.

Francois learned Vim, and we learned that TextMate 2.0 will require Leopard (but be a free update for existing customers).

Matthew continued to enjoy Gmail (+1 on that from me); and Erica posted some top tips for using Boot Camp. Kevin had some more tips for wireless video streaming around the home.

December

Parallels got an update; I mused on the MacBook upgrade dilemma (no, I still haven’t made a decision); and Kevin waxed lyrical about the Mvix MX-760HD.

Then, yowch, there was some tense public debate about the pros and cons of Mac Heist. Oliver, a developer himself, had some interesting thoughts on this.

We rounded up our favorite new apps of the year, and Francois asked us to lay off Microsoft a bit.

Adobe made everyone blink with its new icons, and MacSanta did rather well.

And here we are at the end of the year.

There’s a lot to look forward to in 2007, rumored, imagined and predicted. Even if what transpires is half as interesting as the rumors, we’re in for an exciting year ahead.

Merry Christmas to you all, and enjoy a happy and peaceful New Year.