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Apple starts selling Lion USB sticks
As promised, Apple has begun selling Mac OS X Lion on flash USB sticks in its retail stores. The US$69 drives (seventy dollars?!) contain a full install of the operating system and look much like the recovery drives that ship with MacBook Airs. You can use the little doohickey to install Lion (or reinstall it), attempt a repair with Disk Utility or run Time Machine. They're not yet available online, so stop by your local Apple Store to buy one. Happy recovery!
Mac 101: Capture your signature using OS X Lion's Preview app
OS X Lion has made signing PDFs easier than ever before. It's been possible to scan in your handwritten signature and sign documents in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it was a complex process and one most people probably never trifled with. More often than not, I found it easier to simply print out the document, sign it the normal way, and scan the whole document back into Preview using my flatbed scanner. Lion's version of Preview comes with a built-in signature scanner that makes signing documents far simpler. In the Annotations toolbar you now have an option to create a signature from your Mac's built-in iSight camera. All you need to do is use black ink to sign a piece of white paper, align your signature toward the camera using the onscreen guides, and take a snapshot of the signature. (I haven't used my real signature here, obviously.) Preview can store multiple signatures, so if you need to both sign and initial documents, you're able to do so easily using Preview's annotation functions. It's a great feature, and one that ensures my printer will be gathering even more dust than it already has. [Just to be clear, this process only applies a graphical representation of your signature; it does not cryptographically 'sign' the PDF document to ensure that it has remained unmodified. Adobe's Acrobat application can sign PDFs with both a graphic and a digital signature; NitroPDF also has this feature, as does the DocQ web service. The DocuSign web service provides 'electronic signatures,' which are not exactly the same thing either. –Ed.] One step closer to a truly paperless office
Apple updates Migration Assistant for Leopard-to-Lion compatibility
Apple previously updated its Migration Assistant app for compatibility between Lion and Snow Leopard, and now here's the original Leopard update. The Migration Assistant Update for Mac OS X Leopard smooths out the transfer from a Leopard Mac to one running with the newest Lion OS, making sure your data, settings, and apps all make the trip over. Yes, it's not exactly groundbreaking. But if you've got a Leopard Mac sitting around and have been planning on picking up a new one complete with a Lion install, this will definitely be helpful in the transition. The update is of course free, and can be picked up from Apple's site. [via MacRumors]
How saving changed in Lion - Infographic
You can check out the full-size images in the gallery below, but clearly Lion thinks about saving documents differently. Read more about versions and locking documents in this post. %Gallery-130270% Note: If you're having an issue with the image loading in the gallery, click one of the thumbnails and it should load. There's an issue with our CMS which we're still trying to fix. Our apologies. Another note: Once the thumbnail loads, right-click the image and choose View Image to get to the full-sized image. Final note: Or download or view the full sizes here: Before Lion saving After Lion saving
Lion's iOS-like Automatic Termination not ideal for some users
Matt Neuberg over at Tidbits has noticed an interesting behavior in Lion: Occasionally, apps running without an active window on will disappear from the Command-Tab application switcher, and sometimes disappear from Activity Monitor completely. The culprit is a new "feature" in Lion called Automatic Termination, which will shut down and quit any (compatible) apps that aren't active and don't have any visible windows. Of course, most official Apple apps support Automatic Termination. As Neuberg notes, this is obviously a hat tip to iOS and its background processes, in which you "close" an app simply by navigating away from it, leaving the system to shut it down when additional memory is needed. Neuberg suggests, however, that this implementation isn't so much a feature as a problem. Obviously, a desktop computer has many more resources to run processes than a mobile device, and there several scenarios in which a user might need to access an app that's been inactive for a while. Granted, with Lion's Auto Save and Resume features, you could argue that there's no real difference to an app or a user between "inactive" and "closed," but Neuberg says that there is, and he doesn't like it. The feature is designed to keep the decision of which apps are open and closed away from the user, and while that might be a help on iOS, it's a hindrance on the Mac. I agree -- I'm perfectly capable of dealing with app management on my desktop, and it's lame of Apple to take that away from me. Of course you can't opt out of Automatic Termination, short of simply avoiding compatible apps. There are certainly good reasons on both sides for having or not having this feature running, but in this case, it seems like bringing over this certain aspect of iOS app management might not be ideal for all Lion users.
Apple releases Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
While OS X Lion automatically creates a recovery partition on your existing hard drive, many people have correctly pointed out that this does you no good if the hard drive itself fails. While many third-party solutions for creating a Lion recovery disk on an external drive have sprouted up over the past few weeks, there's now an official solution from Apple: Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. According to Apple, "Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari." The program will walk you through the process of creating a recovery disk on an external USB drive. The assistant notes that the external disk will be erased in the process of creating a recovery disk, however, so if you were hoping to use this solution to create a recovery disk on a drive that's already loaded with other information, you might want to explore other options or find a dedicated drive that you can use instead. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is just over 1 megabyte and available for download now.
Skype for Mac updates to 5.3, adds Lion and HD video call support
The good folks over at Skype have been mighty busy recently. In the last month (give or take a day) the company has announced integration with Facebook, launched a new version of its Windows client to support the social network, released an iPad-optimized version, and expanded Android support to an additional 17 handsets. Now the video-chat stalwart has update its Mac app with support for Lion and HD video calls -- something Microsoft fans have been enjoying since 2010. You can check out the full announcement and download Skype 5.3 for Max OS X at the source link.
Discount education-only iMac appears, makes you wish you'd opened that institute of higher learning
A new $999 iMac popped up on Apple's site this week -- great news if you or someone you love owns an educational establishment. The cheap education-only all-in-one boasts a 21.5 inch display, a 3.1GHz Intel Core i3 processor, and 250GB of storage. As MacRumors points out, however, there's no mention of a Thunderbolt port amongst the specs listed, so maybe this whole running a school thing isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Talkcast tonight, 10pm ET: Living with Lion
It's a summer Sunday, and we're in the heart of the dog days; no better time to talk about the newest big cat, and the adjustments and improvements we've found over a few weeks of using Lion. Come on down for the Talkcast, at the usual time (10 pm ET), and share your experiences. To participate, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for +5 Interactivity, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8. If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Blink or X-Lite SIP clients, basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!
Track packages automatically in Lion Mail
Mail in Lion has added a "data detector" for tracking packages. When you get an email with a tracking number in it, you can hover over the number and click the arrow to select Track Shipment... This should open a window in Mail that shows you shipping details for that package.
Debunk: Lion USB sticks are not yet available
Apple clearly considers its new App Store-based distribution model one of the biggest advances in Lion, and to the company's credit, we found the whole thing to be quite painless. But physical media devotees needn't worry too much -- the company quietly announced at launch that the latest version of OS X will also be available on a USB key, for the lofty price of $69 -- which, incidentally, still requires Snow Leopard, unlike what has been previously reported. Word hit today that the company has finally issued the flash drive version of the software, information gleaned from an internal document reportedly leaked by AppleCare. We have it on good authority, however, that the drives mentioned in the document are not, in fact, the aforementioned sticks. Rather, the "recovery media" discussed is actually a restoration tool for AppleCare employees, used to fix faulty systems. We hate to be the burster of bubbles, but it seems that the App Store-impaired will still have to wait until later this month to get their hands on the $70 Apple dongle.
Apple offers Find My Mac for beta testing, wants to play Cops and Robbers
Ever misplaced your hard earned MacBook Air or had an entire project vanish at the hands of a dirty thief, only to be gone forever? Well friends, the time is coming soon for the Find My Mac feature to provide a highly sought after sigh of relief, Find My iPhone-style. Apple has released the software into the wild for registered iOS devs, with the only other requirements being OS X Lion and an iCloud subscription. Using WiFi networks to locate your missing appendage via a web browser or iOS device, the location tool offers you a number of anti-theft options -- send a threatening message, lock down the machine remotely, or even wipe the machine's drive clean. Perhaps we will see this security detail launch with iCloud in fall, which was also released in beta form earlier this week.
Apple opens Find My Mac to beta testing
Apple has enabled beta testing of Find My Mac to registered OS X developers, according to MacRumors. Just like Find My iPhone, Find My Mac allows users to locate their Macs from any web browser or iOS device. When found, you can choose to play a sound or send a message on the Mac; you can also remote lock or remote wipe the Mac. However, remote locking and wiping will prevent you from locating the Mac again. The Find My Mac feature will be free. All you'll need to use it will be OS X Lion and a free iCloud membership. iCloud is expected to debut this fall, and we'll likely start hearing the first Find My Mac success stories soon afterward.
Apple's training site back online, Lion certifications due this fall
For the past couple of weeks (since shortly before the Lion introduction, I believe) Apple's professional training and certification site at training.apple.com has been under renovation. Today it's back with a new Lion-esque look and previews of new training courses and certifications for Apple-centric IT professionals. The three new tracks/certs are for Lion (no surprise), Final Cut Pro X and Mac Integration Basics 10.7. None of the certification exams for those tracks are ready yet, nor are most of the course materials -- only the MIB class has full documentation available right now. Lion certification testing is due to start up in the fall, and FCP X certifications are "coming soon." The Snow Leopard 10.6 certification courses/testing suite is still available, and according to Apple's internal sales web site it will remain on offer until January 2012. Snow Leopard certification will not expire when the Lion exams come online, so if you get certified now you're still considered up to date well into 2012. Thanks, Wheat!
Boot Camp in Lion requires Windows 7
Apple's latest version of OS X 10.7 Lion ships with Boot Camp 4 which, according to an Apple support document, only runs Windows 7. Previous versions of Windows like Vista and XP are no longer supported. There's no reason for this change, but Apple, like Microsoft, is likely increasing its focus on the newer OS and lessening it on legacy versions. Mac users that must run an older version of Windows will either have to keep Boot Camp 3 if they wish to upgrade to Lion or use a third-party virtualization solution from VMWare or Parallels. [Via Macworld]
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me agitate for Lion Rosetta
Dear Aunt TUAW, Apple should SELL Rosetta in the App store. Please remind folks that they can complain about Lion most effectively by writing to Apple's feedback page. Your loving nephew, Dave Y. Dear Dave, Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as that. Rosetta represents far more than a simple app. Auntie is not an expert on these matters so she turned to Uncle Mike for clarification. Here's how he explained things. The Power PC (PPC) backwards-compatibility provided by Rosetta was created by an entire OS of "fat" frameworks, combining support for PPC as well as Intel. Apple described it this way: New applications bearing the Universal symbol will run natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Mac computers. What about the applications you already own? Enter Rosetta. You'll never see it, you'll never configure it, you'll never have to think about it. It's built into Mac OS X to ensure that most of your existing applications live a long and fruitful life. Rosetta was pretty awesome. It invisibly translated and executed code so old apps could continue to run on new hardware. Here's what the QuickLook framework looks like under Snow Leopard % file QuickLook QuickLook: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures QuickLook (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64 QuickLook (for architecture i386): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library i386 QuickLook (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library ppc And under Lion % file QuickLook QuickLook: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures QuickLook (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64 QuickLook (for architecture i386): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library i386 Notice how the new frameworks don't have any PPC architecture? Even though Snow Leopard wouldn't run on PPC hardware, it still provided this backwards compatibility for PPC-compiled apps to link to, which was in turn translated in real time to the native instruction set. Apple can be pretty brutal when it comes to policy decisions. From the floppy drive to Rosetta, it has a vision of the future that it moves forward to meet. It never hesitates to cut away the anchors of the past. Lion has dropped support for all PPC applications, creating a leaner meaner cleaner operating system that isn't tied back to archaic processors. But that means Apple can't just sell Rosetta in App Store. Sorry. Hugs, Auntie T.
Apple iCloud and iWork beta for iOS hands-on
We've had a few weeks to get accustomed to iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, but one headlining feature has been notably inaccessible since it was unveiled earlier this summer. During his WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs touted iCloud as a service that will sync many of your Apple devices, for free. Macs, iPhones, iPads, and even Windows computers can synchronize documents, contacts, calendar appointments, and other data. You'll also be able to back up your iOS devices remotely, use an Apple-hosted email account, and store your music in the cloud. Well, this week Apple finally lit up its cloud-based service for developers, letting some of us take a sneak peek at the new service. Apple also announced pricing, confirming that you'll be able to add annual subscriptions with 10GB ($20), 20GB ($40), or 50GB ($100) of storage 'atop your free 5GB account. We took our five gig account for a spin, creating documents in Pages, spreadsheets in Numbers, and presentations in Keynote, then accessing them from the iCloud web interface to download Microsoft Office and PDF versions. We also tried our luck at iOS data syncing and the soon-to-be-controversial Photo Stream, so jump past the break for our full iCloud hands-on.%Gallery-129793%
Baffling inconsistencies in OS X Lion Multi-Touch
OS X Lion's new Multi-Touch gestures have switched things up more than any previous version of OS X, and they're brought a lot of confusion with them. While "natural" scrolling is the most obvious change and the one that takes the most getting used to (unless you disable it), other inconsistencies in the way Lion handles Multi-Touch gestures are both more subtle and potentially more baffling. The one that's been tripping me up even after almost two weeks of using Lion is the gestures for going forward and back in Safari and other applications. In Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, a three-finger swipe would take you backward and forward in any app that supported that gesture, like Apple's Safari, Finder, Preview, iPhoto, Aperture, and even the iTunes Store. Eventually, third-party browsers like Firefox baked in support for these three-finger gestures, and the whole system worked pretty well. OS X Lion introduced a new gesture for forward/back navigation: a two-finger swipe. I actually like this gesture better, because when you're using Safari you get a preview of the next/previous page as you swipe, something that three-finger swiping doesn't provide. It's a very neat trick, but there's a problem: the gesture only works in Safari. No other programs react to this gesture at all. So if you have "Swipe between pages" set to "Scroll left or right with two fingers" in System Preferences, you lose the ability to use gestures to go back and forward in Finder, iPhoto, Aperture, and other apps. Things get even more confusing if you enable "Swipe with two or three fingers" and have natural scrolling enabled. I'll try to explain why with the outline below: Two-finger swipe: natural scrolling disabled Swipe from left to right: Go forward Swipe from right to left: Go back Two-finger swipe: natural scrolling enabled Swipe from left to right: Go back Swipe from right to left: Go forward Three-finger swipe: natural scrolling enabled/disabled makes no difference Swipe from left to right: Go forward Swipe from right to left: Go back You might have already caught on to the inconsistency, but I'll spell it out anyway: If you have natural scrolling enabled and have also enabled swiping with either two or three fingers, the gesture direction is completely reversed depending on the number of fingers you use. The result: brain meltdown. Right now, the only ways around this inconsistency are: Disable natural scrolling Leave three-finger gestures disabled and lose the ability to swipe forward/back in any app other than Safari Set swiping to three fingers only and lose Safari's ability to preview pages as you swipe Reverse the three-finger swipe gesture directions with a third-party app like BetterTouchTool (my personal choice) Live with it, while your muscle memory quietly rebels and plots to overthrow you I'd like to think this inconsistency is something that Apple will address in a future update to Lion, but as it's likely Apple considers three-finger swiping a "legacy" gesture from earlier versions of OS X and only kept it around to placate users who upgraded from Snow Leopard, the company may not bother. A better solution might be to expand the new two-finger gestures to apps other than Safari. In the meantime, using BetterTouchTool to work around the problem has at least stopped my muscle memory from cursing Apple's UI design team fifty times a day.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me locate incompatible software
Dear Aunt TUAW, Is there a way in LION to conduct a search for all those incompatible apps that have the ø thru them? Your loving nephew, Paul Dear Paul, Uncle Steve tells Auntie that Lion automatically searches for incompatible apps during installation. You can do a Spotlight search for "Incompatible Software" and it will find a folder containing all of those apps, plus a text file explaining which apps are "bad". Here's what he found on his iMac just after installation: A quick look into that folder revealed a couple of kernel extensions that weren't playing well with Lion. The "Read Me" file showed exactly what those files were: A simple Finder search also helps you locate incompatible software on an external drive or software that you added after the Lion installation. In Finder, start a search for "Kind is Application" and sort by Kind. Your "Classic Application" files will appear at the top of the list, each one representing a now-unsupported app. This allows you to detect those apps on demand, even after you've already installed Lion. Hope these pointers help you. Hugs, Auntie T.
Hackinations: How to bring the spring back into TextEdit's step
TextEdit on Lion has version control coming out of its ears, vertical layout for Eastern languages, and improved toolbars. It's got some really great forward-looking features. It also is slow as a hungover mule carrying ten sacks of potatoes. Launching the file open dialog takes countable seconds. It's no longer instant the way it used to be. And losing that responsiveness has been getting on my nerves more and more the past few weeks. Today, I finally had enough of Lion's TextEdit. I replaced it with Snow Leopard's. I keep an entire SL install around on a spare USB drive. (/Volumes/Backed was my last Carbon Copy Cloner backup, made as I was about to switch to my new SSD HDD.) I launched my copy off that backup. Now that I've been using it, I'm not sure if I'm going back anytime soon. When you open a lot of files throughout the day, searching for items, making updates in to-do lists, and so forth, that re-found zippiness is incredibly welcome. I'm no longer plagued by "Could not create file" errors, or slow-loading screens with their pause-pause-pause delays. Find and replace has returned to the uglier but faster floating panel from the built-in version, and "replace" is back to being a standard element rather than an option. Returning to 10.6 TextEdit is like putting that mule on methamphetamines. Speed, I tell you, speed. I'm going to give this about a week and see how things go before I make a more permanent commitment. For now, I've remapped my Quickeys macros to open the SL version rather than the Lion one, but I haven't changed anything else in-system. Are you a heavy TextEdit user? How has the change to Lion affected your workflow. Pipe up in the comments. And for all of you who are about to comment "If you hate Lion so much why not go back to Snow Leopard," well get off of my lawn, you rotten kids. I love Lion, but I'm not afraid to keep making it better.