"How shall we f*ck off, oh Jobs?"
Funny how Apple's efforts at privacy are hindered if not trampled outright by their most rabid followers. Reminds me of "The Life of Brian," with that crowd who wouldn't give the guy a moment's peace.
Details about Apple's upcoming Mac OS X version 10.7, code-named Lion, are flooding the web despite Cupertino's ban on such information being released by developers toying with the beta that was made available to them last Thursday. Steve Jobs revealed few details about the OS when he announced it at a "Back to the Mac" …
- What shall we do Steve? Everybody is trying to find out our secrets! Even though we are trying so hard to keep them secret, EVERYBODY IS TALKING ABOUT OUR UPCOMING PRODUCTS!
- Calm down, Tim. I will explain to you again how this works, more slowly this time.
Michael still does not get that one.
Finding it hard to get excited about this one. It's just dumbing down MacOS X to iDevice's level, they don't quite understand that simplicity being good on a small device which you operate on the move doesn't mean it's good on a desktop machine.
And pushing you more into Apple's ecosystem of course (Rosetta killed so you need to find new equivalents to old applications, Front Row killed so you need to buy an Apple TV, Java made optional as an excuse to deny developers the option to use it in the App Store, etc...).
So now i finally have a good reason to move up from Adobe CS2 to whatever they're pushing now. CS2 is PPC-only, and depends on Rosetta. About the only other PPC-only stuff I have left would be some items which are bundled with certain hardware (Epson, you noxious creature, you will DIE) and some abandonware such as Mac the Ripper.
Or maybe I'll just keep a copy of Snow Leopard on an external disk and reboot into it when I need to run certain apps, the way I've got copies of Leopard, and Tiger, and Panther... (Hmm. I can reformat that Panther disk, it's been at least 10 months since I last booted from it, vs 10 days since I last booted Tiger. Or not. It's not as though I really need a whole 80 GB of disk space, after all.)
>> surely you've had plenty of time to find a replacement in the YEARS since they provided Rosetta
I think I'm down to just one PPC application now - Eudora.
There is no Intel version of it - and development was stopped quite some time ago. But it works the way I like to work, and has features I use that aren't (AFAIK) in other programs. SO no, I haven't been able to find an acceptable replacement in a good few years.
My IP says I'm about 400km from where I actually live, so not likely. Find My Mac is perhaps just an interface to locate your /other/ lost iStuff. Wouldn't doubt it works a bit like most PC laptop trackers (basically, if it finds the internet, it phones the company with its current IP for police use).
I'm quite surprised to read about some of these features actually:
Autosave and Versions. Really? Sounds more like iProductivity apps to me. Last I checked, autosave has been in MS Office since at least 2003. Versions just means they stuck a front-end on RVS/CVS/etc.
FileVault: I applaud whole-disk encryption built into the OS. Linux has had it in Fedora since Fedora 11 I believe. Did BSD kernel finally get updated to that point? Same for SSD support. Win7 was /released/ with TRIM. Does the BSD kernel devel team really move this slow, or has it just taken this long for Apple to work on their front-end?
QuickView, if it works for /any/ "normal" file, would be fairly nifty. Currently, Windows only has "quickview" for pictures, Office files, adobe pdf/ps files, and txt (I might be missing some). Granted, as Adobe has shown with photoshop files, you can add a preview filter for any file type you please, but it's not baked in to the OS.
Sadly though, the list of things Windows does out-of-the-box is fairly limited, whereas OSX ships with a raft of iApps, and thus more things they can list as "OS Enhancements." Granted, the last time MS tried bundling something with their OS, they got sued from every angle (Internet Explorer). Imagine what would have happened has MS Security Essentials been installed and active by default with every copy of Win7. Yes, you can't deny it, even if you think MS SE is crap.
You mean the one that is so important that I can't touch it so it's duplicated on completely separate media?
To be honest, I don't think I've ever encountered a word document containing anything that important to begin with :p
Let's just hope it can be disabled, for those of us on smallish SSDs that want to live on the edge.
OSX, beautiful in some ways, too simple & infuriating in others. For example, why can't I maximise/minimise by toggling the program icon? Also, why do I have to squint when typing my email in Mail?
Hope Lion will be better!
Also, a conglomeration of Expose & Spaces eh? I hope it will improve on the current offerings, which are pretty good but far from perfect.
This took me a while to figure out. Plain Text, Rich Text Format, and HTML-based email all can play by different rules between email clients, let alone email clients tweaked by its user. It's a mess of spaghetti.
As you know, you can adjust the font size in Mail's Preferences to something more screen-friendly. However, what you may not know is when you configure Apple's Mail to send email in plain text, any size you've set to compose your email doesn't piggyback the outgoing email. The recipient's email client will use its settings to size the incoming plain text (typically pre-configured to Times Roman or Courier with a 10 point font). Rich Text formatting does hop along for the ride.
However, here's a tip you might find useful. I add the "Bigger - Smaller" button to my toolbar (View >> Customize Toolbar). When an incoming email's text is too small to read, or I've changed workstations/laptops with different screen pixel densities, I hit the "Bigger" button -- sometimes several times to either address the myriad of fonts and sizes to incoming email or to redress those emails sent by users who take great pleasure sending 6 point fonts in HTML or Rich Text.
(Side note: I add a "Bigger - Smaller" icon to the New Message toolbar, too. Also, changing Mail's "Message List" and "Mailbox" font/size helps the eyes, too.)
Mahalo
so far TRIM support only appears for drives sold by apple -- reports from OCZ forums so far are 3rd party drives e.g. Vertex2 not shown to have TRIM support, while apple-supplied SSD in same machine has it. that tag looks reasonably generic from linux, so seems that apple have gone the extra mile to protect you by checking a safety list of ble$$ed models/vendors. well now, isn't that special?
I think I read that the guy who was sent down yesterday for plotting to down BA flights used AES128, it took the Police 9 months to crack. You can be pretty sure that the Police don't have the facillities that the MI5/MI6/CIA/NSA have.
Basically: Ask yourself why you need to encrypt? If it is to stop some scrote getting your credit card numbers when you have your computer stolen or hacked, AES128 will probably be fine. If it is to stop "The Man" getting your stuff, I work on the principle that if I'm doing something that interesting to them (I'm not!) they'll get all the information they need and I'll either not know about it, or be banged up while they're getting it.
As for encryption at work (I design datastorage) I wouldn't touch less than AES256, but this information is much more interesting to criminals than a stolen computer would be.
The problem is many low and middle end Oki printers use a proprietary language called HiperC, which is a ZenoGraphics ZjStream language derivative. As I know, the only way to get it supported under Linux was foo2zjs. For Mac OS X, they have an official driver, but said driver is two years old, targets Tiger, and is apparently PPC code- I was prompted to download and install Rosetta when running the installer.
Well, maybe they'll get a new driver out when Lion rolls around (they do have a Win7 driver for the thing, so there's still hope). There's also instructions to compile foo2zjs on Mac OS X, but it looks like it'll need a whole free afternoon to get up and working.
"windows resizeable from any corner or side"
Wow! Just wow!
So, one of the *many* little annoyances in OSX has finally been fixed, and it's only 2011!
This is from the OS that is held up by mac acolytes as the shining beacon of user interface design in the operating system space.
Sheesh.
apparently OS X Server, as a separate product, will be dead with Lion. There'll be one install disc, and which version you install will depend on which license you bought. Kinda like Windows, only with just two choices instead of eleventy-seven. Allegedly the pricing will be US$30 for the basic version and $90 for the server version... and the key for the server version will also unlock the basic version, as it seems that Apple only cares if you use Apple hardware...
We'll find out for sure in around August.
after reading this post. How about a weekly (say) winner for the most pious and self-righteous post?
you could call it "the Assange of the week".
there need to be some rules, posts along the lines of "where's the IT angle" and "I'm going to whine about something frivilous in Bootnotes" should probably be ineligible.
there's no charge.
Sorry, but this is just a tinkering update, adding stuff we already had, and seems to have been lifted directly from IOS to save time/effort.
- Full screen apps....errrr...and what did the green button do?
- App icons on desktop (via overlay)...again...woopee
- a tweaked interface for mail. oooooh
- autosave...most office drones have this already in MS office
- versions...see previous
- Airdrop. A public share folder. really pushing the boat out there...
- About this mac - cosmetic tweaks. God almightly...
I was expecting more innovation to be honest, given this is a "premier" OS, not the cut-down-for-tablets/phones OS. Snow leopard did at least have an underlying premise of performance and 64bit. No real compelling reason to upgrade in this one. It's a yearly release purely for the sake of it.
Are Apple just getting lazy/complacent?
I want to buy it...I really do...but unless this is no more than £25 it's a bloody rip off.
Auto Save (at the OS level) + Versions (presumably) join together as an evolutionary advancement on Time Machine, further reducing the ability for people to lose work. Auto Save is a bit more interesting than the stuff provided since time immemorial by Word, etc, because it has an aspect of versioning to it and should become uniform across the OS (or, more probably, like the built in grammar and spell checker, the Keychain, etc, will just make it even more obvious which are the particularly shoddy Windows ports).
File Vault and Air Drop seem to be designed to expose what many people would consider latent functionality, even though your or I could easily achieve both things now, on any moderately recent major OS.
Bundling the server features into the mainstream OS arguably makes this more of a premier OS than previously.
I'm unable to come up with any reasons why full screen applications are being sold as something new or even a particularly good idea, or to support the other cosmetic changes as worth paying for.