Operating system

Tomorrow, after much excitement, Apple will officially launch OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for $19.99 to the public on the App Store. A new operating system certainly brings a ton of new features. However, there is always the lingering possibility that your favorite app may not be compatible. Just before the launch of Lion last year, we told you about a website called RoaringApps. As Mountain Lion is unleashed from its cage tomorrow, here is a little reminder on exactly why RoaringApps is so useful.

RoaringApps is a free website that allows you to check the compatibility of your apps with Mountain Lion. The website provides a long table of apps (it is a ton) that displays what apps are supported on the new OS X and whether the app is available on the App Store. If you are planning to upgrade to Mountain Lion tomorrow, this is definitely a website worth checking. The website organizes apps by name, and it has a search function to make things easy. [RoaringApps]

On a related note, how many of you plan to purchase Mountain Lion tomorrow? Is anyone holding off?

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During its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple demoed a new app called “Passbook” with its unveiling of iOS 6. The app allows you to manage boarding passes, movie tickets, store cards, and other passes that have QR codes, barcodes, or visual, scannable codes. Scott Forstall demonstrated how the feature is integrated into the iOS 6 lock screen by allowing cards or tickets to be displayed when—for instance—walking by a movie theatre. The cards are also live, so things such as boarding passes or show tickets will update live with cancellations or show times.

Forstall noted that Apple would make templates available to developers to make it easy for companies to offer their cards and tickets through Passbook. Apple’s press release described the app:

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Update: Macworld and The Verge report that Apple will actually not begin rejecting apps that utilize hotkeys. 

According to a report from TUAW, Apple will soon begin rejecting OS X apps submitted to the Mac App Store that utilize hotkey functionality. The report does not cite a specific source, and app developers we have talked to seem to be unaware of the change. TUAW claimed Apple will only allow existing “hotkey apps”, and those released before June 1, to issue future bug fixes. New apps and existing apps that are releasing updates with new features will apparently not be permitted to use hotkeys:

TUAW has been told that Apple will be rejecting all apps with hotkey functionality starting June 1, regardless of whether the new features are hotkey related or not. Basically, if you’re developing one of those apps, an app that assumes you can still add hotkeys, don’t bother submitting it to the Mac App Store.

The June 1 deadline lines up with the latest deadline Apple set for sandboxing Mac App Store apps, which is a new requirement that limits an app’s access to certain areas of the operating system. Apple is pushing sandboxing as “a great way to protect systems and users by limiting the resources apps can access and making it more difficult for malicious software to compromise users’ systems.” It appears it will also prevent apps from using hotkeys.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE-D2RtagHU]

This is an interesting little paragraph from Wired’s profile of Linus Torvalds, the founder of Open Source Linux OS:

Torvalds has never met Bill Gates, but around 2000, when he was still working at Transmeta, he met Steve Jobs. Jobs invited him to Apple’s Cupertino campus and tried to hire him. “Unix for the biggest user base: that was the pitch,” says Torvalds. The condition: He’d have to drop Linux development. “He wanted me to work at Apple doing non-Linux things,” he said. That was a non-starter for Torvalds. Besides, he hated Mac OS’s Mach kernel.

Linux is now the core of many operating systems, such as Android, Chrome WebOS, and a few others. If Apple hired Torvalds in 2000, Linux might not have made it to 2012.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=098wGRRCnOU]

Love this idea for controlling your Mac – especially for applications which don’t require you to be near your computer.  Apple has lots of patents on 3D gestures so it wouldn’t be absurd to see some of this at the OS level in the not-so-distant future.

Download here
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According to a forum post on tonymacx86, Apple’s latest release of Mountain Lion, the 10.8 developer preview, is able to natively support AMD Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 without the need for any tweaks or hacks. As for the 6950 and 6970 specifically, the reports originate from the netkas.org forums where several posters report a 6950 running Netkas EFI working natively in 10.8. One poster even reported the 6950 continues to be recognized in Lion with unmodified drivers after “warm booting back to Lion from Mountain Lion.”

There are still issues, as tonymacx86 posters pointed out: “It looks like the 69xx situation seems a bit immature and experimental at this point. Even in the new OS.” Another forum poster claimed NVIDIA 5xx cards also seem to run natively with mkchis claiming full support for the GTX 570 graphics card with no hacks or mods. He said it is “running at full res even smoother than a patched Lion. It’s like native.”

When it comes to booting from Mountain Lion to Lion with unmodified drivers, one poster warned it does not seem to work if you are connecting a display to the 6950. The good news is a prominent hackintosher informed us that Chimera was updated to run on both Lion and Mountain Lion with a dev release coming within days:

We’ve fixed Chimera to work with both LIon and Mtn. Lion- there was a small change necessary to boot 10.8. We’ll be releasing that in a day or 2 for devs.

As a side note for Mountain Lion support, Robservatory shared its method of getting VMware Tools to work when running Mountain Lion in VMware Fusion. According to the post, Mountain Lion “will kernel panic” when trying to install VMware Tools. Here is the fix:

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Here is some new stuff within Mountain Lion: Once you enable Documents & Data in the iCloud Control Panel…

You can then start manually uploading documents from your Mac to the iCloud using this screen:

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Early last week, Apple discontinued the white plastic MacBook, which had been an education-only item since mid-2011, but is continuing to sell the product to education institutions while supplies last. The remaining supplies are being sold for $899, and sources say that Apple’s white MacBook inventory for educational institutions is still rather high. While white MacBooks for education are a thing of the past, Apple is not giving up on education: they are launching two new MacBook Airs for schools programs today.

The first new program is called MacBook Air 5-Pack Bundles and allows schools to purchase the MacBook Air in bundles of five at a discount. There are six bundle options, and each bundle saves schools $20 per MacBook Air:

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Apple just released Mac OS 10.7.3 via Software update and manual download.  Apple released some peripheral downloads today as well:

• Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.2 Client, Release Notes

• OS X Lion Update 10.7.3 (Server), Release Notes

• Server Admin Tools 10.7.3, Release Notes

• Security Update 2012-001 Server (Snow Leopard), Release Notes

• OS X Lion Update 10.7.3 (Server) Combo, Release Notes

• Security Update 2012-001 (Snow Leopard), Release Notes

Release notes are as follows:
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With Apple deciding not to include support for T-Mobile’s bands in the US, T-Mobile has turned into an Android wasteland with over 90% of the smartphones sold on the network running on Google’s OS. Looking for some diversification (besides the over million legacy iPhones), T-Mobile looks to be one of the first in the US to roll out one of the new Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices which they plan to announce on Dec 14th, a little late for the holidays.

VMware, the maker of a popular virtualization software Fusion, seems to be backpedalling on the last week’s release of VMware Fusion 4.1 for the Mac. As originally noted by Macworld, Fusion 4.1 was released with support for virtualization of Lion, Snow Leopard and Leopard clients. A dialog box pops up when installing an operating system client in Fusion 4.1, asking user to “verify” that they are in compliance with their software’s licensing terms.

In essence, this removes VMware from the position of having to evaluate and enforce Apple’s operating-system license, and instead leaves the decision in the hands of users.

In a new blog post today, VMware hinted an upcoming update will “fix” their “mistake”.

When the license verification step was added in VMware Fusion 4.1 the server edition check was omitted. We are preparing an update. […] Users should always ensure they remain in compliance with any applicable software license agreements.

Of course, per Apple’s EULA only server software is supposed to be virtualized and the above wording pretty much spells doom for Snow Leopard or Leopard client virtualization in the next Fusion release. At the end of the day, VMware is fixing Fusion the same way people fix their dogs. What is Apple’s official stance on this issue?

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Mac OS 10.8 testers both inside Apple’s HQ and in the surrounding area of Silicon Valley have been spotted in Web Logs by MacRumors. Indeed, looking at our own logs (above), 10.8 users have been hitting our servers since mid-August, though only in numbers that probably could have been faked.

More recently, however, 10.8 testing has grown more abundant, with testers hitting our site every day including on weekends from non-Apple IP addresses throughout October.

Similar patterns emerged in testing OS 10.7 which leads us to conclude that this is still very early testing and it is likely more than a year before we’ll see even public betas of the OS.

Still, very nice to see Apple’s already working on the next big cat.

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VMware Fusion was upgraded to version 4 today with “over 90 new features” and low introductory $49.99 price. That follows the release two weeks ago of main competitor Parallels with many of the same Lion and speed improvements but heftier $79.99 price tag.

VMware touts three major areas of improvement:

If, for some reason, you don’t want to run Lion on your new Mac Mini, it appears that using a clone of a recent MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard will boot and operate the Mac Mini.  MacBidoulle cautions the Ethernet hasn’t been properly tested and the new Radeon Video cards in the high end model may need some hacking to get 3D working.
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Today was Microsoft’s Windows Tablet 8 unveiling.  The product on the surface looks cool, people are hyped, but alas it will be a year before real products are given to real people.  The iPad 3 with its Retina Display will have been on the market for months and Google will have iterated 10,000 Beta releases of Android before then on 200 different pieces of tablet hardware.

On top of that, this new OS is really just smashing together Windows Phone 7 Metro UI Windowing (some admittedly nice UI features) with Windows 7 applications.  Real world use of Windows 7 apps in tablet form isn’t going to be fun.  I’ve tried using Windows on the Parallels iPad app – and it is OK in a pinch, but apps need to be redesigned 100% to work in tablet mode effectively.  Try entering data into Excel on a tablet for instance.  Then try Numbers on an iPad – it is slightly better.

Luckily, just about every iOS app was designed or redesigned first for touch over the past four years.  Microsoft is, today, telling its developers to do the same for their Windows apps.

How long can Microsoft keep up its “next year” strategy?  Windows 8 tablet isn’t the only thing coming “Next Year”.

Two years ago, Microsoft made the decision to scrap Windows Mobile and said: “Next year we’ll have Windows Phone 7”.  When Windows Phone didn’t grab much attention at the end of last year, Microsoft ‘bought Nokia’ and said, by the end of this year we’ll have some top quality phones from Nokia.  We’re waiting to see how that pans out, but by the time Nokia can produce anything with a Windows logo on it, it will have fallen from #1 in the world in smartphones to #4 or #5 behind Apple, Samsung and probably HTC and RIM.  But Windows Mango devices are coming to AT&T, have you heard?

How did this “wait until next year” thing become business as usual for Microsoft?  
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TechCrunch points us to this amusing Microsoft blog post articulating the decision to put just about every possible item in the future Windows Explorer 8 bar.

This is clearly an example of trying to put everything somewhere with no regard for clutter or usability or design. It is hard to imagine a better example of why Apple’s ability to say no to extraneous features is better for usage.

Check the video

Reader Elaine sends us this scene from a Costco

So I imagine there is a marketing meeting at the Sony Bravia offices a few months ago where they are brainstorming new ways to market this 46″ TV.

Someone steps up and says Apple is about to release a new OS and all of their boxes are going to have this ‘Galaxy Swirl’ thing on the cover.  Perhaps we can confuse a few people into thinking this is Apple/type/quality products.

Sure, its a different angle and view, but it is pretty clear what the intention was.  While this is probably legal and will certainly fool a certain part of the population, those who follow tech have to feel a little sorry for the once-great Sony, which is rapidly turning into an also-ran knock-off artist.

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[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8DTFdw7Q7Qe”]

Lifehacker has conducted a series of tests to see which is faster: Lion or Snow Leopard. As you can see in the video above, the two operating systems do about the same in almost every category tested, but Snow Leopard weasels out the win almost every time. To be fair, most categories were won by a very small margin. Lifehacker summarizes:

Boot	1:32	1:25
Compress a ~900MB File	0:51	0:59
Decompress a ~900MB File	0:10	0:09
Duplicate a ~900MB File	0:09	0:09
Encoder a Movie for iPhone in Quicktime X	0:56	0:53
Launch 9 Applications	0:59	0:37
Open 10 Tabs in Safari	0:15	0:17
Total Time	4:43+	4:29

Snow Leopard was built for speed and Lion was built to add functionality. It’s great to see Lion isn’t exactly slipping away on the speed end of things. How’s the speed on your end?

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Lion just hit the Mac App Store!!  Ladies and Gentlemen, start your downloads!

The $29.99 download is 3.5GB so your download times may vary.  After Lion downloads we are expecting an update to iWork shortly as well.  On the hardware side we are expecting some new Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs, new Mac Minis and a new Thunderbolt Display as well.

How fast is your download?  Are you getting the good speed?  Full specs and details below:

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We’ve just been informed that Apple has a significant upgrade on the way for iWork.  The new version has support for Lion’s standout features including Full Screen mode, Resume, Auto Save and Versions.  The download, at least in its pre-release form is 90.2MB.

Also, is that Safari getting a little update as well?

In case you are wondering, that KB Article isn’t yet live.

Thanks anon!

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When updating the MacOS, bugs are usually a part of the ordeal. After upgrading to 10.6.8, 9to5Mac readers have had printers connected via their networks drop, optical audio out stop working, and some Parallels bugs. Never fear, there are fixes for all of these problems:
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