Archive for category Mac OSX
Google Chrome Canary
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Internet, Mac OSX on September 10, 2011
If you’re the type of person who likes to live life on the bleeding edge where software is concerned, you run Google Chrome and you also use a Mac, you may want to give Chrome Canary a go. Canary is Google’s experimental version of Chrome, sporting a number of features they intend to include in the mainstream version. The current stable version of Chrome is 13.0.782.220, yet Canary is racing out in front with 15.0.874.7. Currently hiding behind those elevated numbers are a number of Lion-related additions such as a full-screen mode accessibly by the top right corner of the window plus a few new swiping gestures.
Aperture 3′s Flickr Integration
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Aperture, Mac OSX on September 4, 2011
Aperture 3 is a brilliant application for managing your photos, I trust it with all of my images, create slideshow videos from it at do 99.9% of my post-processing with it. However, there is one feature that causes much consternation amongst users who don’t understand how it is supposed to work.
Lion Update 10.7.1
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Apple, Hardware, Mac OSX on August 17, 2011
Lion’s first update has hit System Update and it addresses a problem I was having with the system becoming unresponsive when starting a video in Safari. It also addresses some wifi issues.
OSX Lion – Safari 5.1 Memory Leak
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on August 11, 2011
If you’ve spent a few hours using the new & improved Safari that is shipped with Lion, you may have noticed it consuming your RAM like it is going out of fashion. It appears that Safari 5.1 has a bit of a memory leak and it is down to a new sandboxing feature that moves all of the webpage rendering onto a separate process.
OSX Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Apple, Hardware, Mac OSX, News on August 9, 2011
Every Mac before OSX Lion’s release (that I’m aware of) came with a CD/DVD with the entire operating system on it. This allowed you to reinstall OSX very easily should you or some errant software manage to make a right mess of your boot partition. Now that Lion is download-only, you’re probably wondering how you [...]
How to Escape Lion’s “Resume” Infinite Loop
Posted by Gavin Lewis in iWork, Mac OSX on August 4, 2011
Useful tip from an old friend (from school actually) and boffin at Bad Apples Tech Support (site now gone). It seems that under certain circumstances you can find yourself in a feedback loop caused by what is arguably Lion’s most idiotic feature – Resume. You can find yourself locked out of an application in a [...]
OSX Lion – After One Week
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on August 1, 2011
Ok, it has been over a week since I installed Lion on both of my Macs. To tell you the truth, now that I’ve sorted out the performance problems by clearing my caches, running the maintenance scripts and repairing my permissions it is now running very nicely indeed. However, the Lion upgrade wasn’t about performance at all and was actually about the new iOS-like features. So, am I using any of them?
iTunes 10.4 and Last.fm scrobbling
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Internet, Mac OSX on July 26, 2011
If you’ve upgraded to iTunes 10.4 on OSX, whether that be Lion or Snow Leopard, you may be missing the familiar sight of your big red Last.fm application launching when you launch iTunes. You’ll also find that the last.fm application is unable to scrobble your iPod activity.
OSX Lion – The Ars Technica Review
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 25, 2011
If you are at all interested in Apple’s new operating system and in the mood to learn something, you owe it to yourself to read the stunning 19-page Ars Technica review of it. It is fantastically detailed and talks about everything from the UI design, through to the new security features and even goes into [...]
OSX Lion – Creating a Bootable Disc
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 24, 2011
I know that not everyone is best pleased about the lack of physical disk with which to install Lion from, but fortunately with a bit of pre-planning you can create one. As you will know by now, Lion is a download-only deal. Buying Lion from the App store will put an icon in your dock with a progress bar. When the bar fills up you’ll see a window pop up asking you to proceed with the installation.
Reeder – Mac OSX
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 24, 2011
Reeder is now available on the mac app store. I was very impressed with this application back when it was in beta, but now the finished product is out for a not unreasonable £6.99. It has been a few tweaks and improvements added since the beta and I challenge you to find a better way to access your Google Reader account.
OSX Lion – Maintenance Scripts
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 24, 2011
In my quest to get Lion carrying out my orders with a bit more zeel I’ve come across another function that may help to get the juices flowing again. At the heart of OSX, underneath all the pretty graphics beats a rock solid UNIX heart. UNIX didn’t start life on the desktops of home users, it was designed for servers – the Shire horses of the modern IT world. It has a reputation for its ability to keep going, requiring very little downtime (unlike Windows which needed to be restarted every few hours or after every update).
OSX Lion – Clear your caches!
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 24, 2011
As you’ll know from my previous post, I’m a little frustrated with Lion’s apparently sluggishness. One of the problems with an in-place upgrade is that you are often left with cruft left over from your previous OS, settings that no longer work or extraneous files you really don’t need. After clearing out my cache I’ve noticed a marked improvement in Lion’s responsiveness. It’s very easy to do too, so here goes.
OSX Lion – A progress update
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 23, 2011
Further to my post earlier in the week I’m happy to report that my opinion of some of the new features is starting to soften. Unfortunately, whilst I’d like to spend more time getting to know these new features, my mind is getting someone distracted, even enraged at the other issues that seem to have cropped up.
iMac hard-drive replacement programme
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Apple, Hardware, Mac OSX on July 23, 2011
You may recall back in May I posted that things were not all rosy in the world of iMac hard drives. It now appears that there was indeed something wrong with the hard drives fitted to certain iMac models but nothing to do with data transfer rates. The drives in question are made by Seagate and have been known to fail under certain conditions. If you bought your iMac between May 2011 and July 2011, you may be entitled to a free replacement. To find out you can simply go along to this page on the Apple website, type in your serial number (can be found in the Apple menu under “About this Mac”) and follow the instructions if your model is one of the ones affected by it.
Mac OSX Lion and your Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 22, 2011
If you’ve just upgraded to Lion and felt that sinking feeling as you discover that your shiny new desktop is unable to see your NAS, you’re not alone. Online Tech Tips has a useful post here that explains what is going on. You may get a message saying that the “network backup disk does not support the required AFP feature”. This all boils down to Lion’s new requirement for devices to use Netatalk 2.2 at the very least. Obviously, if you’ve had your NAS for a while, you may find yourself with one of the older versions of Netatalk.
Adobe’s list of issues with OSX Lion
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 21, 2011
Whilst Lion was only released yesterday, the first developer preview was released to members of Apple’s developer community back in February 2011. You would think this would be more than enough time for a big developer like Adobe to get their products ready for the new system, wouldn’t you? Apparently not, as Adobe has published a list of “known issues”.
OSX Lion – Initial thoughts
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX, News on July 21, 2011
Just yesterday Lion was unleashed upon the world and millions of eager Mac users began the process of updating their machines. Lion was a “download only” upgrade for a measly £20.99, which is a fantastic price for a proprietary operating system but thankfully I had it for free.
MplayerX – OSX
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Mac OSX on July 17, 2011
If you want to play video on your Mac but the file you want to play isn’t an MP4, the usual tactic is to download VLC media player and just put up with its slightly low-rent user interface. There’s a lot to like about VLC in fairness. It’s quite light-weight, it has a lot of [...]
Aperture 3.1.3
Posted by Gavin Lewis in Aperture, Mac OSX on July 13, 2011
Good news! Apple has released another update for Aperture 3!
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