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The Engadget Show 35: EVs in Portland, hacked bicycles and a Tesla Model S test drive
With a transportation themed episode, it only seemed natural to take the Engadget Show out of our traditional digs -- it was also a great excuse to visit one of our favorite cities in the world: Portland, Oregon. We drove Mitsubishi's i-MiEV EV around the Northwestern green mecca, stopping at some great PDX spots along the way, including the amazing Ground Kontrol arcade, Hand-Eye Supply and the hackerspace, Brain Silo. We also took the time to speak to some PDX residents, including Core77 co-founder Eric Ludlum and some local modders showing off their homebrew projects. Also, Brian travels out to Boston to ride along with a gang of bike hackers, Myriam takes the Tesla Model S for a spin around the streets of San Francisco and Michael does his best not to fall off the DTV Shredder in the California desert. And, as always, we got a pile of the month's latest and greatest gadgets, including the Google Nexus 7, Hasbro's new Lazer Tag guns and a quick trip around OS X Mountain Lion. Also: comic books, donuts and plenty of EV road trip shenanigans. Click through the break to tune in!
How to get Notification Center to show you what's playing in iTunes
OS X's Notification Center was introduced in Mountain Lion and is now your one-stop location for all alerts. Besides the customary notifications for incoming emails and reminders, you can also use Notification Center for other content like the title and artist of the current track that's playing in iTunes. As showcased by OS X Daily, Now Playing uses AppleScripts and Terminal-Notifier to display the current iTunes track and the artist's name along with your other notifications. The app also works with streaming services like Spotify. Now Playing can be downloaded from Mediafire and installed on your OS X Mountain Lion machine. Another alternative is iTunification from Onible. Inspired by Now Playing, iTunification lets you display the current track and artist in Notification Center and has the added benefit of Growl support. Besides the track and artist name, the Growl option also allows you to display cover art and setup custom alerts. Both of these apps are scaled down versions of GrowlTunes which adds playback controls your menu bar and displays the current track and artist as a Growl notification.
Apple releases Mountain Lion 10.8.2 build to devs, focuses on Facebook, iMessage and more
Shortly after letting the 10.8.1 Mountain Lion out of the bag, Cupertino's now released the next dotted version of its feline OS X to members of the developer community. According to the seed note, this early release will be focusing on a slew of social areas as well as other handy applications, including Facebook, Messages, Game Center, Reminders and, of course, the company's own web browser, Safari. As is usually the case with these young builds, Apple suggests you install it on a machine "you are prepared to erase if necessary," though something tells us you were already well aware of that. But in case you do want to install v10.8.2, you'll find the rest of the deets at the Apple Developer site linked below.
Daily Update for August 23, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Apple posts OS X 10.8.1 update, mends your Mountain Lion
There's a special moment in every operating system's life when it loses its innocent .0 status and grows up. It's OS X Mountain Lion's turn to mature, as Apple has just pushed out the 10.8.1 update for early adopters. Most of the fixes are for issues that plague specific use cases, such as audio output from a Thunderbolt Display or crashes in Migration Assistant. There are a few remedies that a wider audience might appreciate -- a fix for iMessages that don't send and an improvement to Exchange compatibility in Mail, for example. We don't yet know of any surprises lurking underneath, but it can't hurt to have a smoother-running Mac while we investigate.
Apple Remote Desktop Admin update
With all of the fanfare of a mouse creeping into a dark, dank basement, Apple updated the Apple Remote Desktop Admin app to version 3.6.1 a few days ago. Remote Desktop 3.6.1 requires either OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion. For Mountain Lion, the update is available via the Updates tab in the Mac App Store. For Lion, the update will be available in the Mac App Store if you purchased Apple Remote Desktop from the store originally, or as an automatic software update if purchased on disc. There's also a manual update available for direct download. What's in the update? Apple says that it will improve "the overall stability and reliability of the Remote Desktop application, and includes the following specific changes:" Faster launch speed when long computer lists are present. Reliability of migrated computer lists when upgrading from earlier versions of Apple Remote Desktop. Improves observing and controlling computers that have more than one display. More information about the update is available in KB articles HT5422 and HT1222.
OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.1 update now available
Apple has released OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1, and the update is now available in the Mac App Store under the Updates tab. A manual installer is also available for download. In the support notes about the update, Apple recommends backing up your system before running the installer. A reboot is required in order to complete the update. The update includes a number of fixes: Resolves an issue that may cause Migration Assistant to unexpectedly quit Improve compatibility when connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server in Mail Address an issue playing audio through a Thunderbolt display Resolves an issue that could prevent iMessages from being sent Addresses an issue that could cause the system to become unresponsive when using Pinyin input Resolves an issue when connecting to SMB servers with long names Addresses a issue that may prevent Safari from launching when using a Proxy Automatic Configuration (PAC) file Improves 802.1X authentication with Active Directory credentials If you are updating today (and please back up first!) let us know your results. Last week, we rounded up our top Mountain Lion gripes; hopefully some of them were addressed in this update.
VMware announces Fusion 5 with support for Windows 8
Mac users that run Windows on their machines will be happy to know that VMware just updated its Fusion software to support Windows 8. The new Fusion 5 is also optimized for OS X Mountain Lion, so you can run the best of both desktop platforms when Windows 8 debuts later this year. The latest update adds more than 70 new features including support for USB 3.0 devices, better memory management on devices with 16 GB or more of RAM and improved power management. You can also now use AirPlay with the software as well as run Mountain Lion or Mountain Lion Server in a virtual machine. The standard version of Fusion 5 is available for $49.99. Customers who bought version 4 since the release of Mountain Lion are eligible for a free upgrade. There's also a professional version available for $99 that'll let IT administrators deploy Fusion in a corporate environment. [Via Engadget]
VMware intros Fusion 5 virtualization software with support for Win 8, integration with Mountain Lion
With Mountain Lion newly available and Windows 8 on the verge of shipping, now was a pretty good time for VMware to update its Fusion virtualization software, dont'cha think? The company just announced Fusion 5 with 70-plus new features, including support for Win 8 and tight integration with OS X 10.8. For instance, you can now view Windows programs in Mountain Lion's Launchpad, while VMware software updates pop up in the Notification Center. Fusion also supports AirPlay for the first time, and you can also run either Mountain Lion or Mountain Lion Server as a virtual machine. The company also added support for Retina Display MacBook Pros, so that everything looks crisp on that 2,880 x 1,800 screen. Also of note: Fusion now supports USB 3.0, and Linux users get some love in the form of Open GL 2.1 graphics support. The standard version of Fusion 5 is available now for $49.99, but people who bought Fusion 4 since the release of Mountain Lion can upgrade for free. There's also a professional version ($100 for one license), which includes all the above features, and also lets IT departments lock down settings for employees' virtual machines.%Gallery-163118%
OS X 10.8.1 seeded to developers
Version 10.8.1 of OS X Mountain Lion has been seeded to developers. There aren't any known issues listed in the release notes, just a short list under "Focus areas": Active Directory Microsoft Exchange in Mail PAC proxies in Safari SMB USB Wi-Fi and audio when connected to Thunderbolt display These changes must be minor, as the delta update clocks in at a svelte 38.54 MB in size. This is the first developer seed we've seen since the release of Mountain Lion on July 25. This update is available at Apple's developer site under "Additional Downloads." As Ars and MacRumors pointed out, 10.8.1 made a cameo appearance in Geekbench results earlier this week -- but more interesting than the OS version was the machine ID it was supposedly running on, a possible hint of a 13" Retina display MacBook Pro.
Tweetbot for Mac's latest alpha adds experimental 'snap-together' column layout
Tweetbot's been offering a rough-around-the-edges alpha version on its upcoming refresh for a few weeks now, but it's the latest update that's caught our attention -- again. There's several substantial changes that could tempt you away from other desktop Twitter clients. These include a new multiple account view, with separate columns that can either be docked to your main feed or left in their own window. You can spin out mentions and search results into their own space, and even adjust each column's height and width -- if you're looking to squeeze even more Twitter content into a single screen. A new menu bar icon offers access to your multiple accounts, new tweets, direct messages and mentions, while the latest build also improves support for media upload and Mountain Lion's notification bar. Tweetbot's alpha is still free to try for now, but once the kinks are eventually worked out, expect to pay for the finished article.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me find Mountain Lion posts
Dear Aunt TUAW, Hello, can you provide me with a link to access all the Mountain Lion 101 articles instead of having to bookmark each individually? Your loving nephew, Graig Dear Graig, This is probably something that should be in TUAW's site operations manual. (We don't actually have an operations manual, but we do have a guide to the site's current design.) Every story on TUAW has tags. You can find them and click them in the Tags section at the bottom of each post. Any story tag can become a link, just like this: http://tuaw.com/tag/mountainlion101 Some of the tags you'll be interested in include Our excellent "getting started" 101 series; General coverage and how-to tips; Preparing your computer for the upgrade; and News reporting Auntie hopes you'll have lots of fun reading these posts. We've all put in lots of hours writing them up, and she's sure you'll find something there to engage, inspire, and amuse. Hugs, Auntie T. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Dear Aunt TUAW: Let me help people fix their notes on Mountain Lion
Dear Aunt TUAW, I am writing you because I think you may want to publish this on your column, as a tip to your trillions of readers. On Leopard, Apple included Notes within Mail, an app I use exclusively. I wrote many notes on Mail, including to-do reminders and background notes. Enter Mountain Lion. Mail upgraded and took a dump on my notes. *pffft* They were gone, kaput, with no way to access them. Fortunately, I discovered that their folder was not erased. Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes and locate Notes.mbox folder inside. Open this, and all its subfolders, and look for numerical files with the extension emlx. These are your notes. When you double-click, Mail opens them, allowing you to copy the notes to the new Notes.app. I hope my experience will help others! Please spread the word. Your loving nephew, Magno Dear Magno, Auntie hopes your how-to offers a handy solution for her other nieces and nephews. Be aware that the notes may be buried under subfolders in the Notes.mbox folder. Of course, if your notes were syncing to iCloud then they'd have been backed up and safe, which is a pleasant thought. In principle, your notes should migrate over when you upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion, but this is helpful if for some reason they don't. You may also be interested in checking the three-pane view in Notes (click the three-pane control at the bottom, to the right of the plus button) as that will display your different Notes accounts on the left hand side. Hugs, Auntie T. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Daily Update for July 30, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Mountain Lion 101: Mail VIPs
This Mountain Lion 101 feature is a quickie -- Apple's Mail app now has a new feature called VIPs that gives you one-click access to emails from those very important people in your life. Emails from VIPs have a star next to the sender's name, and a mailbox for each VIP is added to the Favorites bar. With a click on the VIPs tag in the toolbar, a popup showing "All VIPs" and the names of individual VIPs is displayed. You can have up to 100 VIPs identified, but in my opinion, if everybody's a VIP, then nobody's a VIP. I'm using the feature to highlight emails from my boss (Mrs. Sande) and my business partner (Erica Sadun). To make that special someone in your life a VIP, you just move your pointer to the left of the sender's name in a message header. A star appears, and clicking the star makes the person a VIP. You can also click the person's name in a message, then select "Add to VIPs" from the pop-up menu that appears (below). If that person becomes persona non grata in your life, removing them from the VIP list is quite simple. Just click the star again, or you can use the "Remove from VIPs" item that will appear in the pop-up menu seen above. For VIPs that have several email addresses in your Contacts list, messages from any of those email addresses appear in their VIP mailbox. If you're using iCloud Contacts, your VIPs appear on any other Mountain Lion-equipped Mac that is signed into the same iCloud account. To get a special notification in Notification Center when email arrives from my VIPs, I set up a rule in Mail Preferences: You could also theoretically add a special sound to the notification with a rule, or kick off an AppleScript to Tweet you. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. As I mentioned, this isn't an earthshaking addition to Mountain Lion, but it is a surprisingly useful feature that can help you pay more attention to email from special people. If it can help me take notice of one more "honey-do" from my wife and keep me out of the doghouse for at least one day, then the Mail VIP feature is worth the $19.99 Mountain Lion upgrade cost.
Apple mistakenly issues OS X Server codes to users entitled to Mountain Lion
Apple may have had some trouble with its Mountain Lion redemption codes, which provide a free Mountain Lion upgrade to new Mac owners who purchased a system between June 11 through July 25 via the OS X Up To Date program. Instead of receiving a code for Mountain Lion, some customers are reporting that they received a code for OS X Server instead. OS X Server, normally $19.99 in the App Store, adds filesharing and web services to Mountain Lion, but it requires the base OS to be installed first. This redemption process has not been as smooth as Apple would have hoped. Some of the early codes did not work, some were for the server upgrade and according to reports on Twitter, some people are still waiting for their code to arrive. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Mac App Store easter egg: subtle but fun
Are you familiar with easter eggs? Not the type that you dye in pastel colors and hide in the back yard, only to find them a year later in a disgusting mess; no, these are fun little software "signatures" that developers put into apps. Well, although many Apple devices used to contain easter eggs, Steve Jobs put the kibosh on them after he returned to Apple. Now Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo has found an easter egg built into the Mac App Store in OS X Mountain Lion -- could this be a sign of more easter eggs hiding in the new operating system? It's a really subtle easter egg. If you download an app from the Mac App Store and go into your applications folder during the download, you'll notice that the timestamp on the downloading application is set for January 24, 1984. For those of you who are new to the Apple world, that's the day the first Macintosh was unveiled to the world by none other than Steve Jobs. If any other easter eggs show up in OS X Mountain Lion, let us know. And while you're at it, be sure to watch the late Apple CEO performing his amazing magic at the Mac introduction.
Apple delivers update to bring Power Nap feature to 2011, 2012 MacBook Airs
Amidst all the Mountain Lion excitement from yesterday, a few members of the Apple crowd were inadvertently forgotten -- yes, we're talking about 2011 / 2012 MacBook Air and Retina MBP owners looking for some extensive Power Nap action. Luckily for most of them, however, the Cupertino behemoth's quickly acted, outing a solution that'll see the efficacious napping feature make its way onto the aforementioned generations of MacBook Airs. Unfortunately, not all is good news, as that pixel-packed MacBook Pro will have to wait it out on the sidelines a little longer, with Apple saying an SMC update is "coming soon." Sound good? You'll find the download on the company's support page, linked down below to save you more troubles. Update: According to MacRumors, Apple's pushed out an SMC update to Retina MacBook Pros that enables the Power Nap feature on these machines. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Mountain Lion 101: Safari
Apple's venerable Mac Web browser, Safari, was updated to version 6.0 yesterday with the release of OS X Mountain Lion with many new features and one glaring omission. Safari 6 is also available for Lion users. First, let's talk about the omission -- while earlier versions of Safari offered an RSS button in the address bar that allowed a one-click way to subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds for sites that provided them, Safari 6 did away with this feature. Fortunately, Daniel Jalkut has already stepped up and written a Safari extension to add the button back. Many of the changes to Safari 6 are subtle. For example, for many Safari users searching for Web content, it's second nature to click in the "search" field. When they move to Safari 6, they'll be surprised to find that the search field is now gone, replaced by one field for both searching and typing addresses. When you start typing in the field, Safari immediately tries to match your entry to a previously visited site. You can see this in the image below, where typing "macst" brought up a "Top Hit" of the MacStories.net website. This behavior will be familiar to users of Firefox's Awesome Bar or Chrome's unified search/address field, but it's new for Safari. Next, Safari 6 now supports the "Do Not Track" privacy standard. Either turning on Private Browsing (under the Safari menu) or selecting "Ask websites not to track me" from the Privacy pane of Safari preferences keeps your Web browsing private. Performance of Safari has apparently improved, with smoother scrolling, faster text and graphics rendering. JavaScript performance is claimed to be up to 6 percent faster than Safari 5.1. One of my favorite features -- something that has been in Google Chrome Sync for a while -- is called "iCloud Tabs." This feature stores all of your open Safari tabs and makes them available on your other Macs so you can move between computers and still have access to all of your recent websites. Once iOS 6 is available this fall, you'll see iCloud Tabs moving to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch as well. The image below shows the two windows, one with four open tabs, that I have open on my MacBook Air. I'm viewing this on my iMac. There's a new Share button just to the left of the address bar, that makes it a snap to share web pages. At the present time, you can share addresses using Mail, Messages, and Twitter -- when Facebook support is added to OS X Mountain Lion this fall, you'll be able to post to that social network with a few clicks. Multi-touch navigation of tabs has been added to Safari 6 as well. On a trackpad, a "pinch" shows open tabs as separate windows that can be navigated to with a click. In tab view, a two-finger swipe moves between the tabs. Safari offers to save passwords for you for AutoFill, which might keep you from having to type in a lot of passwords on your favorite sites. If you need to see those passwords, there's a Passwords pane in Safari preferences -- enter your system password, and you'll be able to see what's saved. Finally, there's one little item that I found extremely handy during the pre-release betas -- renaming bookmarks in the bookmarks bar. No longer do you need to go into the bookmarks editor to rename a bookmark. Now, clicking and holding on a bookmark or folder name makes it editable. Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to bookmarks inside folders. What's your favorite feature or pet peeve when it comes to Safari 6? Let us know in the comments. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Mountain Lion: Get your RSS button back in Safari 6
One of the most irritating omissions from Safari 6 -- the default Web browser in OS X Mountain Lion -- is that the RSS button has been removed from near the address bar. In fact, Safari no longer supports RSS feed reading natively, either. The feature page for Safari on Apple's site makes no mention of RSS now, leaving Mac users to rely on other browsers or standalone clients for RSS reading. Even with the removed reading capability, the RSS subscribe button is missed. It made it a one-click solution to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed on any website providing such a feed. Now developer Daniel Jalkut (Red Sweater Software) has stepped in with a free, "beta-quality" Safari extension to bring the feature back to Safari 6. The Subscribe to Feed extension (link to blog post) adds a button to your toolbar that, when clicked with a page open that is offering an RSS or Atom feed, opens the feed:// link and opens your default news reader. If a website doesn't offer a feed, the button remains grayed out. It should be noted that if a website already provides an RSS button, clicking it performs the same action. However, Jalkut's extension works well for those sites that do not have an obvious RSS button but are still providing a feed. Many thanks to Daniel for this outstanding service to the Mac community.
