Posted October 13th, 2009
by admin
Snow Leopard has come under some scrutiny lately for a bug which has the potential to delete user account data. The bug was first reported in Apple’s discussion boards, where more and more people started reporting the problem. Here’s a post from the discussion boards, highlighting the problem:
“I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard last week. By accident I clicked on the ‘guest log-in’ icon on my MBP 30 minutes ago. After about 1 minute it automatically returned to the log-in screen, without showing up the guest desktop, so I decided to click on the ‘guest log-in’ again. This went pretty smooth and when I logged out the message appeared that all the ‘guest log-in data’ wouldn’t be saved, but returned to normal. When logging in to my regular account, everything was gone. I don’t use filevault. Nothing has been renamed to something else. My home-directory still exists under /Users/username but it is just empty.”
It appears that when users log in as guests, that there’s a chance when they log back into their regular accounts that all of the user data is missing. As of now, the only solution is to back up all of your files. If not then you could find yourself losing a massive amount of data.
One solution being presented is for users that upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard should disable guest accounts, then re-enable it. This creates a brand new guest account, and it has apparently been helping people with the bug.
Apple has officially addressed the bug, stating, “We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix”
[via: Cnet - 9to5Mac]
Posted in Software
Posted August 27th, 2009
by admin
Tomorrow marks the official release date of Snow Leopard, and now is as good a time to talk about what updates will becoming with the software. Then you can decide if all the new features are worth the $30 price tag.
Here’s a list of features that are provided by Snow Leopard:
- The ability to activate Expose’ from Dock
- Improvements in wake-up and shutdown functions
- Once installed, disk space will be provided back to you (around 7 GB)
- Newly enhanced 64-bit support. All of your system apps can take advantage of your Mac’s entire memory
- A new tool called Grand Central Dispatch which will provide better means to use multicore processors
- OpenCL which will utilize graphics processors in new and interesting ways.
- QuickTime X provides many new features to the video program. Including easier ways for uploading to YouTube
- New built-in technologies provide people with disabilities easier access to the Mac OS X.
Along with those features, Safari 4 will be included as well. The system improvements alone are worth the cost in this writer’s eyes. The other improvements are fluff, but depending on what you use your Mac for could be big improvements as well.
Posted in Software
Posted July 23rd, 2009
by admin
Editing photos can be just about as fun as taking the photos themselves. The problem with photo editing software is that it can be a tad on the pricy side. There’s of course Photoshop which is about as expensive as it gets. Then at the other end of the spectrum are freeware programs like GIMP.
Pixelmator falls somewhere in betwee, at a price tag of $59.99. Also, it’s a much more simple program that a lot of other editing softwares out there.
What’s In The Box
Pixelmator Software
Manual
Features
Very precise precision
Large selection of tools
Retouching Tools
Selection of filters and effects
Support of more than 100 files formats
What I like - Pixelmator is a program that focuses on one single task. This is great for people who really want a photo editing program, for simply doing that. The fact that it’s $59.99 and can do many of things Photoshop can do is a huge plus. I especially like the interface, as it boasts a very clean look. There are less amount of steps for simple edits compared to the larger photo editors.
What I Didn’t Like - While it has many options, it isn’t quite as robust as Photoshop is. But to be honest, that’s all the negatives I have to say for it.
Bottom Line - This is one amazing deal for $59.99. With a slick interface, and a large amount of editing options it makes you wonder how Photoshop is able to get away with charging so much. Just be sure that there are certain edit options you won’t need from Photoshop.
Posted in Software
Posted July 2nd, 2009
by admin
If you’re someone who likes complete customization with everything they own, then Make Ringtones on your Mac might be a program for you to check out. It allows you to create your own ringtones, and also provides 300 pre-packaged ringtone you can choose from.
System Requirements:
- Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor
- iTunes
- GarageBand v 4.0 or later, that’s iLife ‘08 version or later, Some content requires v 5.0 the iLife ‘09 version so that is preferable
- iPhone
- 1 gig of spare disk space
Features:
- Professionally created loops so you can create your own ringtones.
- Hundreds of interactive songs you can use as ringtones. Edit, extend, overdub, and other options to create your own custom ringtones.
- Easy-to-follow user guide.
What I Like: The options for creating, or just utilizing the 300 pre-established ringtones provides a good amount of options. A nice variety of edits make for a fun, and deep experience.
What I didn’t like: While there’s a good amount of options, there isn’t really anything overly advance for those who really want to take it to the next level. Although making ringtones isool, I would have liked to see options for exporting and relating your creations to something other than a cell phone ringtone.
Bottom Line: If you really think you need software to create a ringtone, then this has everything you need. If the program was a bit cheaper, I might be able to recommend it. As it stands, $40 should allow me with more options than what is given. Maybe a Make Ringtones on your Mac ‘PLUS’ is needed sometime down the line.
Posted in Software
Posted April 3rd, 2009
by admin
AppleInsider reports that the release schedule for Mac OS X has leaked, culminating in a final release sometime in August. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the cite claims Apple will follow a three-part release schedule synchronized with the Worldwide Developers Conference this summer.
A preliminary developer build, timed for release between now and the WWDC in June, will include major updates to the operating system core and functionality. A second build will be released at the start of the conference on June 8.
What does this mean for those of us who aren’t developers? The build released at WWDC will probably be “feature complete” Ñ that is, every major update will be in place. Apple will probably throw in a couple of new features that have been kept secret until now. That means this build may contain the rumored “Marble” interface style Ñ Apple’s effort to completely refresh the visual look of OS X. All that will remain for Apple’s engineers to do after WWDC is tweak the software and fix as many bugs as can be found.
A final developer build will be released sometime between the end of the conference and the actual release of the software. This will be the last developer build released, as Apple will be preparing to manufacture the consumer version of Snow Leopard.
So keep an eye out for WWDC in June Ñ that’s when Snow Leopard will be fully unveiled to the world. We’ll just have to wait until Apple’s usual fall product refresh to buy a new Mac with it installed.
Posted in Software
Posted February 12th, 2009
by admin
One of the great things about having a Mac, is the great software that supports it. Of course, your best quality programs, and apps will cost you money. However, there are some free apps out there that definitely worth your time. Here is a list of them, and why they can be so useful.
StreamBaby
The StreamBaby app is useful if you have quite a bit of video on your Mac, that wish could be viewed in other places. It acts as a portal for streaming onto TiVo, and can doesn’t disappoint.
You can rewind, and fastforward past the buffer point, allowing for a great navigation of your videos. It has great compatibility with TiVo. If what you’re watching passed the streaming limit, it will cut off what you’ve already watched to allow TiVo to keep playing the file.
Download
Bullet
The Bullet app isn’t necessarily a very useful app. What it lacks in functionality, it definitely makes up for in pure simple fun. You can set this app to create a bullet hole on your screen every time you click it, and a gunshot sound will follow.
It can be just to use on your own, but the true joy comes from setting it up on someone and watching them click on their screen for the first time.
Download
Celestia
It’s hard to imagine, but with Celestia you can travel throughout the known universe for free. You can stick to the solar system which houses over 100,000 stars or you can go out beyond that.
Along with the main program, there are some fun and helpful add-ons to go along with it.
Download
WakeUp
WakeUp allows you to remotely wake up a machine asleep. WakeUp lets you store name and Ethernet addresses of your machines, and wake them up when needed, i.e. when you need to access a file on a distant machine whose File Sharing is on, without having to physically access the machine to wake it up.
Download
Tags: apps, Bullet, Celestia, downloads, fun, mac, OS X, portal, sleep, solar system, stars, StreamBaby, Tivo, WakeUp Posted in Software
Posted June 26th, 2008
by admin
Now that we’ve had a chance to really sit down and experience Apple’s newest cat, its time to share our initial reactions to OSX 10.6 - Snow Leopard. Right off the bat, its fast. Very fast. A clean installation took about 13 minutes from start to finish, which is a world of difference from the hour or so that a clean 10.5 Leopard install takes. This has been potentially attributed to the significant reduction in the size of core applications (Snow Leopard’s Mail application is under 100mb, whereas 10.5’s was nearly 300mb). Other theories involve a removal of PowerPC support freeing up space and speeding up the install time. Other than the actual time involved, there are very few differences between the 10.5 and 10.6 installation processes in the current build.
Once you’re up and running, it feels very similar to Leopard. I don’t know how much this will change through Snow Leopard’s development, but don’t expect a terribly different interface. The subtle changes to the current Aqua definitely look good though. The biggest changes are under the hood. Snow Leopard is fast. Very fast. Like, surprisingly fast. From boot times to general application usage, Snow Leopard was noticeably quicker than Leopard when using the same system. Apple and 3rd party applications alike, they all launched faster and performed smoother. I’m sure this can be attributed to the new 64-bit architecture, but its amazing how much of a difference it really is.
But I digress, as I’m sure you’re bored of all this text - lets go on to the good stuff! The pictures:
About This Mac:
Nothing to see here, just the standard “About This Mac” screen. Click for full screen.
Install Weight
This was very interesting, though probably evident by the quick install. By default, the System folder of Snow Leopard is nearly 1 gigabyte smaller than that of Leopard (10.5). Optimizations have clearly been made.
Now on to the software changes. Right off the bat, there were new (unreleased) versions of many of Apple’s “staple” softwares. Quicktime, Bootcamp, Mail, even the Address Book have seen updates. Address Book’s most notable feature is the Exchange Server integration so happily boasted by Apple at WWDC.
Software Update
By replacing the in-your-face popup window that was Leopard’s software update with the preferences panel, they took everything I hated and made it into a cleaner, friendlier interface. Bravo!
Boot Camp 3 Beta
This one was an “expected surprise”. I haven’t had a chance to play with the new drivers, but the current version 2 is already so polished that I doubt any major changes have been made.
32 Bit Mode
This is most likely a developer mode “feature” rather than a poor interface decision, but many of the system preference options require “restarting” into 32 bit mode. This is instantaneous (it simply closes system preferences 64 bit and opens 32 bit) but annoying.
Exchange Integration
Highly trumpeted, but nice to see anyways. Lacking a live Exchange Server, this feature went untested.
Quicktime 7.6
I was expecting to see the highly anticipated Quicktime X, but was instead greeted with the unreleased Quicktime 7.6
Thanks for looking! This post will be updated continually as our experience with Snow Leopard progresses. As of June 25th, we have experienced 0 crashes.
Tags: mac os x 10.6, mac os x snow leopard, mac osx snow leopard, mac osx snow leopard review, os x snow leopard review, osx 10.6, osx snow leopard Posted in Software, Testing
Posted June 15th, 2008
by admin
The two biggest players in the photo management game for OSX are Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom products. Both take RAW files in and make it easy to do basic editing and processing to greatly reduce the time required to process your images. Today, we will be testing the speed of imports, as well as their respective processing outputs, with sample images and 100% crops.
We used the latest versions of Aperture 2 and Lightroom 2 private beta (available to owners of Lightroom and by invitation). To test import speed, a Sandisk Ultra 2 card was filled with 21 RAW images, taking up 144.6MB space. It was placed in a Digital Concepts USB 2.0 CompactFlash Card Reader and connected via USB to an Apple Macbook Pro laptop with a 5400RPM hard drive. We used a clean install of Mac OSX 10.5.3 Leopard and new installations of Aperture and Lightroom. The camera used for testing was a Canon 30D.
First up - the import speed test. This was fairly self explanatory: both immediately recognized the CF card when it was inserted and were ready to roll.
Aperture was by far the big winner here, clocking in at 20.5 seconds to import our 21 RAW files.
Lightroom had a much poorer showing, though it is currently a beta version. It took 35.5 seconds to import our test files.
But what do measly seconds mean when the greater issue is image quality? We did a comparison test using the automatic tools built into Aperture and Lightroom to compare the final image quality. Thought you will always get the best results out of an individually processed file in Photoshop, Canon DPP or Nikon Capture NX, a photographer trying to process thousands of RAW files on a deadline doesn’t have time to edit each file. These presets and automatic adjustments are huge timesavers if the end result is acceptable. We used factory default settings and clicked Auto Adjust for both programs.
Lightroom
Full size (resized for web)
100% Crop (resized for web)
Aperture
Full size (resized for web)
100% Crop (resized for web)
In my opinion, Lightroom is the winner in terms of image quality using the automatic settings. Quality is completely subjective and I encourage readers to voice their opinions using the comment form as to which they feel is the better result, but the Lightroom sample is more pleasing to my eye then the Aperture sample. It may be due to more aggressive sharpening or higher contrast, but the Aperture version looks softer. Again, no sliders or settings were manually adjusted; only auto tools were used. It does appear that the Lightroom crop has more digital noise then the Aperture crop, perhaps a byproduct of the sharpening (or a lack of noise reduction, which can make an image less sharp).
Like any test, please take this with a grain of salt. Hopefully this has helped shed a bit of light on the best options for photo cataloguing and processing.
Tags: adobe, aperture, aperture 2, apple, beta, editing, lightroom, lightroom 2, photo, Photography, raw, Software, test Posted in Photography, Software, Testing
Posted June 14th, 2008
by admin
Mac Web Browser Showdown
There are a number of free alternatives to Apple’s bundled Safari web browser, and to get a better idea of which of these are worth your time, we have put together a brief comparison.
We took 5 popular browsers and tested them for loading speeds, memory usage and interface. Without further ado, the contenders are:
Mozilla Firefox 3 (RC3)
Camino 1.6
Opera 9.5
Safari 3
Shiira 2
We tested using a clean install of OSX 10.5.3 Leopard with all updates installed on an Intel Macbook Pro 2.4ghz with 4gb RAM and a 200gb 5400rpm hard drive (current base-end model with an additional 2 gigabytes of RAM).
If you would prefer to cut to the chase, we have cliffs notes: Shiira was the fastest browser we tested, but also the quirkiest. It would not be recommended to someone who was only familiar with Internet Explorer or Safari. We also determined that the Apple-supplied Safari browser held its own against the third parties and is not a bad choice if you are already comfortable with it.
We downloaded the latest available version of the browsers from their respective websites and placed each application on the desktop. Each was run to set homepages, disable prompts for “Default Browser” and finished the initial configuration/setup stages for each. Then, the test computer was restarted and had its permissions/pram cleared for the cleanest testing with the least variables.
Our first test was raw speed, from click to page loaded. We set each browser to load Google.com as their homepage (though one was unable to do so), cleared all preferences.
One problem we encountered right off the bat was the Shiira, no mater how hard we tried, would not allow a home page. Even when it was entered in the home page field, when the browser was re-opened, it defaults to a blank page. This may be part of the reason that Shiira’s speed was faster then others, so please take that result with a grain of salt.
Initial Boot Speed
In this test, lower is better. As we mentioned, Shiira (the current fastest) did not account for page load times. Google was cached by each browser so the impact is not tremendous but it is a factor.
The Winner: Shiira (with an asterisk by its record)
Javascript Test Speed
In this test, lower is better. Safari came out the champion of the Javascript test, blowing away the competition. Camino was far behind the rest, with Shiira placing a respectable second.
The Winner: Safari
Idle Memory Usage
In this test, lower is better. We conducted the memory usage test by opening each browser to Google.com and leaving it alone. Safari was by far the worst offender here, with Camino taking the prize for lowest idle memory usage.
The Winner: Camino
Load Memory Usage
In this test, lower is better. We conducted the load memory usage test by opening each browser to a Youtube video and played halfway through before testing. Safari made up for its poor idle memory with a very low load usage and won by a large margin.
The Winner: Safari
Shiira was the fastest browser we tested, but also the quirkiest. It would not be recommended to someone who was only familiar with Internet Explorer or Safari. We also determined that the Apple-supplied Safari browser held its own against the third parties and is not a bad choice if you are already comfortable with it. Often touted alt-browser Opera failed to impress in any categories, and fan-favorite Firefox was not exceptional, but its immense community support and extensive plugin library make it a very viable option.
I personally use Firefox, but after this testing, I’ve begun to use Shiira for daily browsing and found it to be a very comfortable interface. Any of these browsers are an excellent choice, hopefully we’ve helped provide some options!
Tags: best, browser, camino, fastest, firefox, mac, memory, opera, shiira, speed, test Posted in Software, Testing
