Tag: Mac OS X

Mountain Lion Marks a Change at Apple

On Thursday night Apple pulled Mountain Lion out of a hat. A select number of journalists and bloggers had been given early access to a developer’s preview version for about a week and kept them quiet. These lucky ones got to see Apple’s next major operating system for the Mac and all of them published their reviews almost at the same time, giving Apple maximum coverage on the web and surprising everyone else.

Unlike in years past, Apple this time did not reveal its upcoming Mac OS X version on stage in front of a large audience with full press coverage. Instead it did things very differently.

As John Gruber noted in his impression of the unveiling, Apple’s Phil Schiller told him that Apple was starting to do things differently. Like not giving early access to New York Times for one. David Pogue was once among Apple’s most favored journalists but not this time as Apple shunned the Times for its scathing series of reports on the working conditions of Foxconn’s factories in China which made Apple’s products.

Apple had staged a press event for the education sector a few weeks ago in New York and is expected to do another one for the next version of iPad in early March. If it had done another one for Mountain Lion, it would have had three events in three months and could be seen as cheapening the value of its press gatherings. Apple hasn’t had press conferences for Mac product releases in a while either as the current versions of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks were silent updates to the Apple Online Store.

Apple will definitely talk about Mountain Lion at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco in June and that is when it will get its stage time. Mountain Lion comes a year after Lion when nobody was expecting an update until 2013 since Lion took nearly two years after Snow Leopard.

From 2001 to 2003 Apple had released yearly upgrades for Mac OS X but it took longer to release Tiger in 2005 and since then, new versions had been released approximately every year and a half. It looks like Apple is now hoping to catch the momentum of the iPhone and iPad and bring the Mac back in the spotlight.

Additionally, while Apple had started calling its Mac operating system as OS X instead of Mac OS X with Lion, it took until Mountain Lion to finally drop Mac from the About This Mac display. The Mac name will obviously still be used for its hardware products, Apple is just differentiating the OS from the computers.

As I noted in my post about Tim Cook’s speech at a Goldman Sachs conference being streamed by Apple, it was a clear sign that Apple was beginning to institute a different policy with regards to public engagements. Phil Schiller’s statement to John Gruber only confirmed that.

[update]

Shortly after posting this I found out that David Pogue was indeed among the early group of people given access to Mountain Lion but of course, I was already on a trip out of town with little access to the internet and almost no way of editing this post. Gruber especially noted some time later that Pogue was the next person to be briefed after him.

Here it is, as promised. Now it’s actually 2008 calendars, up from 2004.

Zombie iCal Calendars

Ever since Apple opened the beta version of Mail and iCal on MobileMe last year, my list of calendars in iCal (Calendars, not calendar entries) has been piling up. 

I’ve got to the point of having more than 2000 calendars in iCal and that was causing the app on the Mac as well as on MobileMe to take such a long time in opening. 

The MobileMe calendar actually would give up after several minutes and I haven’t even bothered to open iCal ever since. If I need to input anything into the calendar I would use the one on my iPhone instead and made sure it doesn’t sync with iTunes whenever I sync the iPhone.

I let my MobileMe account lapse last March and figured that would be the end of it. Having ignored iCal for months, I thought I might try Lion’s calendar for a change, completely forgetting that I have more than 2000 calendars, so it took a while to open and left me wondering until it finally opened and showed me my monster list.

I figured, okay, let’s find the proper calendars, export them to import back later and nuke the bastards so I can start iCal from fresh. Having gone through that, I opened iCal and found myself looking at a calendar app with no entries. Oh joy!. 

A few minutes later, I saw that the proper calendars were already loading. Hmm, that was strange but okay, saves me from having to import them. Note that my Mac was online during all this.

After having added one new calendar and a handful of entries, the app began to slow down and wouldn’t quit unless I force quit it. And then I decided to head down to home/Library/Calendars/ where I found 2004 folders of calendars appearing out of nowhere. ZOMG ZOMBIE CALENDARS!! THEY’RE BACK FROM THE DEAD!

I realized I had lost three subscribed calendars in the process but there I was looking at 2004 calendars. Where had they come from? Can’t be MobileMe, my account is gone. So then I proceed to remove all the calendars directly from the Finder for the second time. It’s been about 30 minutes and the zombie calendars haven’t made their way back yet. We’ll see later on.

Since I no longer have access to MobileMe, I can’t see whether I can do anything on the server side from MobileMe to stop this form happening again.

It also seems that old appointments and invitations from the calendars were being resent. All the way back from 2006. How do I know this? I’ve been getting failed delivery messages of those invitations in my Gmail inbox. Why Gmail? Not sure. I thought it should have been on my mac.com address, which would have bounced.

So far I haven’t seen the zombies returning again yet but if they do, I’ll make sure to grab a screenshot and post it here.

lharboe:

Lion’s All My Files icon. Read the quotes.

Love is all around icons

parislemon:

“Flash Is Great.” — Anonymous Flash Developer

Switchlet

When it comes to web browsers I tend to stick to just two at a time and I keep same two browsers for quite some time, sometimes it can take years before a better one comes along or they cease to be as useful, functional and practical as I need them to be. 

Anyway, if you’re the kind of person who not only changes browsers often but find the need to switch your default browser every now and then, Switchlet is an applet that lets you do just that easily.

The default browser handles all the URL actions you perform on other apps, for example clicking a link in Mail or in a Twitter app, or anywhere else. While this applet doesn’t give you the ability to change the destination browser for a particular link, it’s one step towards that and saves you from having to copy and paste.

On launch, it automatically places itself on the menu bar and lists all the browser apps it finds on your hard drive. It seems like a handy little app.

The downside is if you’ve already got a highly populated menu bar, this adds yet another resident and you can’t command+drag it to reposition the icon.

Switchlet works in Mac OS X 10.6.

Switchlet

finermac:

You can blog to Tumblr with myTumblr, a full-featured blogging client from MOApp Software Manufactory built just for Tumblr, entirely from the keyboard. A series of shortcuts let you pick which type of post you want to start (ex: Command+1 for Text, Command+5 for Link), and you can tab through all the fields like tags and the body of your post. When you’re done, Command+Shift+D ships the post off to Tumblr, just like it sends a message in Mail.