The Mountain Lion is Here
Apple stealthily announced OS X Mountain Lion to the world this morning. I’ve been reading reactions and reviews all day, and the best post is definitely by John Gruber:
There many new features, I’m told, but today they’re going to focus on telling me about ten of them. This is just like an Apple event, I keep thinking. Just like with Lion, Mountain Lion is evolving in the direction of the iPad. But, just as with Lion last year, it’s about sharing ideas and concepts with iOS, not sharing the exact same interaction design or code. The words “Windows” and “Microsoft” are never mentioned, but the insinuation is clear: Apple sees a fundamental difference between software for the keyboard-and-mouse-pointer Mac and that for the touchscreen iPad. Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes.
MG Siegler, Jason Snell, and The Verge also provided great coverage. We’ve been cranking out posts like crazy at Cult of Mac all day, and I wrote a little piece about Apple’s approach to iOS and OS X moving forward. My coworker Buster wrote a great review of the new Messages for Mac as well.
It’s been an interesting day.
Apple’s most revolutionary operating system to date.
Inception’s Plot Explained With the OS X Finder
I FINALLY get it now.
Apple BURNS Windows!
This never gets old.
Todolicious is Free in the Mac App Store - Today Only
Todolicious is an awesome, simple task manager for the Mac. (Developed by Steve Streza.)
Steve is offering Todolicious for $9.99 free on today ONLY. Pick it up and save yourself a few bucks in the Mac App Store.
This offer comes with the news that Todolicious will also be coming to the iPhone. I can’t wait.
The Mac app looks sweet, doesn’t it?
Hidden, for Mac is $20 FREE through January, 2011.
When you activate tracking, Hidden will locate your stolen computer anywhere on the planet, collect photos of the thief and screen shots of the computer in use.
This is a killer deal. Save $20 and get Hidden for free.
Reeder for Mac
Reeder (the popular iPhone Google RSS reader), was just released in beta for the Mac.
Desktop RSS apps have never really been that great. On OS X and Windows, there isn’t much to chose from. I tried using the most popular option on the Mac, Socialite, for a little while; but it was way too clunky and slow.
The desktop has been in desperate need for a breath of fresh air from an RSS reader that actually works. Reeder for Mac seems to be just that.
The app is only in it’s first draft, and there are a few key features missing (such as feed management), but Reeder already promises to be the Tweetie of desktop RSS apps.
Not only is it designed well, but it works well. That is something that’s hard to come by.
Download the free Reeder for Mac beta and follow Reeder on Twitter for more updates.
Stars Wars Weather Widgets // by Kit·blog
Fontcase - a $53 OS X app for organizing your fonts. Very useful. Designers and developers rejoice.
Keep your fonts together
BezelHUD. A snappy, pretty bezel for Quicksilver. This design emulates the look of the HUD interface seen throughout OS X and popular, mac apps. It’s free and it’s Snow Leopard friendly.
To install:
- double-click the download in Finder when it’s finished
- go to Quicksilver → Preferences
- select Appearance → Command Interface
- select BezelHUD from the drop-down
Welcome, Velkommen, Welkom…etc
I love the little aesthetic things Apple does with their products. An example would be their amazing intro video that plays whenever you first get your mac or you re-install OS X.
If you like this video too you’ll love this little tip…
(note: I did this in Snow Leopard, not sure about Leopard)
Open up Terminal, and type “open”, then System/Library/CoreServices/Setup\ Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/TransitionSection.bundle/Contents/Resources
In this folder will be the Snow Leopard intro video without audio (not sure why the audio is missing) and the 59 second audio file of the peppy, hipster music that plays during it. You can drag the files onto your desktop or whatever you want.
I made a ringtone of the little funky song. You can download it- here.
The band that does that song is an Indie group called Honeycut. Their album is really pretty good and it has plenty of groovy, hipster melodies and beats for the Apple lover (and anyone else of course). You can get the album for free- here.
So, yeah… there ya go. Not much practicality in this tip just something that’s a little fun.
The Honeymoon Phase Is Over
I have completed my first full week using my brand new 15” MacBookPro. I participated in my first major “Black Friday” purchase and bought (among other things) my beautiful new laptop. I wanted to write a post about the experience and what I thought on the weekend I got it, but I thought it would be better to wait until after the “honeymoon” phase of people in the Apple Store high-fiving me (which did happen by the way) and that intoxicating scent of an aluminum unibody (which now has an ever so slight scent of hot sauce and pizza) wore off.
Some things that I value the most about this machine are the little touches. The fact that the iSight camera is behind the glass makes cleaning worry free, the little light-up battery life indicator on the side is very useful when the laptop is on its side in my backpack, and the backlit keyboard is a gift from heaven. The most notable thing about the laptop for me (beyond the internal hardware specs) is the battery. The battery is amazing. I love that I can put my machine to sleep and wake it back up all throughout the day for word processing and web-surfing and not have to plug-in once.
This is definitely the most sturdy and well-built laptop I have ever used. The aluminum unibody gives the whole laptop such a classy touch. The wide spaces to rest your palms on each side of the trackpad make typing for long periods of time less painful. O yeah… the trackpad. When I bought this machine I was positive the trackpad was going to be my biggest complaint. The trackpad has changed the way that I use my computer entirely. The gestures are incredible. My favorite gesture is easily Expose’s, or as my friends and I like to call it, “FOUR FINGER DOOWN!” The trackpad makes all the difference. And when I use a laptop without that kind of trackpad; I know I will be hopelessly swiping my fingers across it to try to switch between applications to no avail.
But enough about the machine itself, the real fun part is what I did in OS X. Oddly enough, when I opened the laptop for the first time Leopard 10.5.7 was installed instead of Snow Leopard. However there was an included Snow Leopard disk so I just popped it in and Snow Leopard installed in about 40 minutes.
I was nervous that some of my favorite 3rd party apps wouldn’t work in Snow Leopard. So far the only thing that I can’t seem to get working is a plugin called Safari140 that gives support for link posting to twitter within Safari. Snow Leopard is definitely worth the upgrade. The slight changes and improvements of the GUI really make OS X better. Snow Leopard is now 64bit instead of Leopard being 32bit. If you don’t know what that technically means, know this: it’s a lot faster. It recognizes more than 4GBs of RAM and 64bit apps operate much quicker and more effectively. You can also use 64bit versions of Windows in Bootcamp which improves the Windows experience considerably. The Snow Leopard install will also free up to about 6GBs of space on your hardrive, which is really nice. I recommend running Monolingual. It is an app that will remove all the extra language packs that you will never use (unless you are fluent in multiple languages) and it ends up freeing about 2GBs of space.
There are several 3rd party apps I can’t live without on my new machine (all of which run in 64bit mode) : Quicksilver, Adium (don’t use it without visiting the xtras page too), Skype, Transmission, Cloud (it’s in private beta though, sorry :( ) and Tweetie. I recently stumbled on an app called Socialite. Socialite is meant to be an app to irrigate all of your social networks, but it has a Google RSS reader as well. It is fantastic. I turn off all the other features and just use the RSS reader.
If you’re like me, you’re into minimal workspaces and aesthetics. Frankly, the default OS X icons just don’t cut it for me. I use an app called Candybar to changed app icons, system icons, and dock for my system. The app has a sleek, intuitive, and easy to use look and feel to it. I get most of my icons from a site called Iconpaper. I like to have my icon’s color scale match my current desktop wallpaper. If you want some really nice, minimal, hi-res wallpapers- head over to SimpleDesktops.
So there ya go, a brief look at my new MacBookPro. Hope it was helpful and insightful.
