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“The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented,” US President Barack Obama said in a statement.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. [...] Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Continue reading »]]> If you read the post prior to this one, you might have gotten on to the hint that I wasn’t necessarily impressed with Lion. Primarily for the reason that I feel like I’m operating a super-sized iPad with a keyboard attached, and making a clusterfuck within a clusterfuck. (-> Mission Control).

Since I purchased it from the App Store, I know I can get it again anytime I want. That said, I backed up my data and went into my closet of archives, to find the Snow Leopard DVD. Which I did find, by the way.

In order to boot from a DVD on a Mac you’ll have to press the C key after the chime, to make it read the CD/DVD instead of the HD (hence the C for CD). I put it in, it started reading it. I get to the installer and I get this, time and time again:

“Mac OS X cannot be installed on “Maclax”, because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer”
(Maclax is how I named the drive)

Apparently I’m not the only one.

I tried everything outlined in the post, but like the last guy – this does not work for me. At all. Nada. Zip. Nothing. The Lion won’t let go.

So I’m effectively stuck with a half-baked OS X, that won’t let me downgrade. The machine was €1049, btw. Linux’es won’t play well – only on secondary screen or all screens black.

It is pretty clear to me that they 1) want to sunset OS X entirely, and create a unified operating system that runs on any of their devices – guessed it yet? iOS.

Meanwhile you’ll have to put up with Mission Control making a clusterfuck of your clusterfuck, inverted scrolling if you have a mouse (although you can turn that off – the fact is that you actually manually have to turn it off), spaces you ain’t configuring anymore, neither do you easily assign apps to spaces – and even if you do, the spaces are still random since full-screen apps create their own space that pushes itself in between the other spaces.

The iMac goes back into the closet until Apple comes up with something better than this clusterfuck, seriously.

Continue reading »]]> After a bit of waiting for the initial rush of App Store rushes to be over, today I finally got around to have a look at Apple’s latest and greatest. It’s only EUR 24.99, so I thought I cannot do much wrong with that (considering that the Snow Leopard upgrade was already 29 Euro). Well, I’ll tell you what I like and what I don’t like.

Launchpad. I have enough on that on the iPhone and iPad, so that was not necessary to put in. So that’s a dislike and completely unnecessary bloat. Sorry Apple.

Mission Control. Well. If you liked Expose and Spaces, I have some sobering news for you. That’s gone entirely in System Preferences and has been consolidated into this. Also, if you really need your apps to be on different spaces by default (I had Mail and Safari on Space 3 for example), the news are even more sobering – cause that’s gone too.

And to make it worse: The ability to have an app appear on all desktops/Spaces, is gone as well.

That’s pretty much all you can set for Mission Control. The Hot Corners button opens up a panel that allows you to assign corners of the screen to actions – NO expose or some such though.

Now you have to understand they brought a lot of stuff over from iOS, which, naturally, for the most part, is designed for 1) full-screen apps, and 2) guessed it? Touch. For some out there who like the Magic Mouse and/or Magic Trackpad, the default setting for scrolling is probably pretty much what you want since you do the same gesture on the iPad and iPhone.

BUT! There are also people out there, like me, who do prefer a non-Apple mouse. If you’re among those people, you will notice the strangest thing. Pulling the wheel on your mouse scrolls up, pulling it up scrolls down. So it’s inverted. You have to go to System Preferences, Mouse, and uncheck this:

Also, this Resume feature is enabled by default. If you like that, no worries. If you don’t, it will take you a moment to figure out where exactly to turn this off. Turns out it’s in System Preferences and then General – where you will find:

This is neatly hidden under the options of “Recent Items”.

The new Finder has some sort of new view which is called “All My Files”. I really don’t like it so much, I changed my default to the home folder.

But! What strikes me as most odd is this: you see I have a HD TV connected via the Display port. If you go full-screen with any application, this is what you will see on the second screen:

That’s right. The great gray void of nothingness. You also cannot go and drag a window over, THEN enter full-screen… nope. That window will go back to your first screen, and go full blast there.

So in effect, I cannot use my second screen the way I used to before. It would have been nice to move iTunes there you know.

For 24 bucks… I’m not sure I’m impressed. Some features are certainly cool and worth purchasing Lion for alright. I’m sure some of you will welcome Resume and even more so Versions / Auto Save, especially if you’re a developer or work on a lot of documents, sensitive data, or presentations. The way a full-screen app creates a new Space/desktop is certainly cool, and the way that with Apple+Arrow Key you can navigate between them. Taking away some of the features that have been there for quite a while now and what people come to like and love, however, is not such a great idea and certainly killed a lot of excitement for me.

I guess I can console myself with the fact that I only lost 24 bucks, and hope that some of the features are coming back in some shape or form. Probably not, but one can hope. If you’re not too afraid for your files and data, and if you’re adventurous enough to try out some new things, Lion is for you. If however you liked your Spaces and Expose, then this is not for you (…yet?).

I’m done here.

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So a few days ago I finally got one! It’s one of the latest models with an i3 inside, clocked at 3 GHz and 4 GB RAM. “Only” 500 GB, but since I have almost everything on external drives, that’s not the issue.

The machine “scrolls like butter”, as your Steveness would say. I already tested game recording as well as other demanding tasks… no problem at all for this little fella.

It’s the 21.5 inch version with a 256 MB graphic card and 1920×1080 resolution. No Thunderbolt though… but that’s fine with me.

I love this machine! No more Hackintosh and no more worrying about the system being screwed after a system update.

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Mac OS X Lion 10.7 releases next summer.

Since the lion is the king of all wild life animals, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that this is the last Mac OS X, as in major version 10. What’s up next is anybody’s guess.

Some key features:

- Mission Control (Melting Expose, Spaces and Dashboard into one)
- Mac App Store (Well it’s an app store… pretty much like on iPhone)
- Launchpad (-> iPhone home screens)
- Full screen apps and switching (pretty much like on iPhone)
- Instant On (probably only for the MacBooks, but like iPhone)
- Auto save (no idea how that works exactly but apparently it’s like iPhone)

Box mockup:

Continue reading »]]> This is one of those iPhone clones, I believe this one is called “hiPhone”. Essentially it looks like an iPhone 4, only with a slightly smaller screen. It has single-touch. However, it is cool that you can put in two SIM cards, and expand the memory as needed with Micro SD cards.

One thing I did find impressive though (although no special technological feat) was the built-in TV tuner. THAT is something iPhone is yet to get… Maybe with iPhone 5.

AppleTV

Continue reading »]]> So if you’re thinking of getting a Mac without actually getting a Mac, here are the specs of the machine that run OS X Snow nearly 100% out of the box.

- Asus P5QC Motherboard
- 3GHz Intel Core i5
- 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM (you might be able to use more if Snow decides to switch to 64-bit)
- Sitecom WL-172 USB WLAN Dongle (for which I happen to have the driver if you need it)
- NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ with 512 MB RAM
- On board sound
- Standard 1TB SATA hard drive
- 22 inch widescreen, preferably of LG as OS X seems to have the drivers to switch to native resolution

That’s pretty much it… follow Tonymac’s guide with iBoot NVIDIA – and you’ll have a fairly cheap Mac Pro on your hands.

You don’t have to enable anything else… hardware acceleration works out of the box. Sound you have to enable with the MultiBeast on board sound kext. And that’s about it =)

Confirmed working apps:

- complete iLife ’09 suite
- complete iWork ’09 suite
- Time Machine
- iTunes 10 with Ping, syncing to iOS devices
- Firefox 3 (Firefox 4 I have not tested yet)
- Software Update (but be careful not to accidentally download system updates)
- VLC
- Xcode (including iOS device development)
- Final Cut Pro
- Transmission
- Pixelmator
- TextWrangler
- Cyberduck
- Burn.app
- Spaces and Expose
- Plex Media Center
- Spotlight Search

- World Of Warcraft
- EVE Online

It’s safe to say all apps should work as intended.

Continue reading »]]> Now that I am back to the Mac world (which I should never really have left, in retrospect), I’d like to point out some tools that you may or may not know about. Some of those are pretty incredible. One has a price tag – it is worth it’s money for sure. So here are a few.

But just to make that clear that I’m not bullshitting you… initially the machine was identified as iMac, but apparently after the update to 10.6.4 the machine changed its mind and now thinks it’s a Mac Pro. Which is, for the record, completely cool with me.

So the first app I want to show you is Seashore. It’s an image editing program… not that there’s something funky about that in itself – the cool gimmick is that it is based on GIMP, except it uses a more streamlined Aqua UI which blends the GIMP into Leopard. It uses the same native GIMP file format and can import all those layers and all that jazz. It’s open source, so check it out: Seashore Project

The next one also is an image editor called Pixelmator. However, this one is not based on anything, it’s its own thing. The cool thing with this one though is, not that it looks tremendously cool, it can use some of THE coolest features built into OS X – Quartz Composer. That pretty much opens up all sorts of incredible image manipulation stuff – I doubt that Photoshop CS has tapped into Quartz Composer and/or CoreImage yet – so it is worth a look. It has a price tag of 59 dollars – but I’d say: Well worth the price. Have a look: Pixelmator.

If you need to download something, Transmission is probably what most use. However don’t forget to check out xTorrent. It probably is one of the best and beautifully designed torrent clients for OS X, they claim to be the best. If that holds true, I don’t know, but I’d say it has potential. Only small issue is that you’d have to get a low priced license to keep its unlimited download speed, or it will slow down after a few minutes. Nonetheless this tool is well worth having a look, particularly if you download a lot. Check it out: xTorrent.

Last one I’d like to mention is Burn. As the name says it aids in burning. Not yourself or your house, but CDs and DVDs. It’s straight forward, easy to understand and does exactly what it says on the tin: burn. It’s free so give it a go. Burn.