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Well the rumours proved correct with the Apple event on the 20th October with the release of iLife ’11, details of OS X 10.7 Lion and new MacBook Air models.
We got a new 13.3″ MacBook Air and a nice little 11.6″ model.
For me the 11.6″ model is a true portable Mac, almost a netbook. I really like the idea of that.
Slightly pricy though at £849 for the low end model.
If you have a look at the invite for the 20th…
Have another close look…
Notice how the bottom corners are square and the top are rounded?
Significant?
Photoshop error?
Probably!
Some other thoughts coming from discussions over the tubes.
3D could be coming.
Blu-Ray, though I think not…
Facetime, very likely in my opinion.
I still think touch will be there too.
October 20th sees an Apple event called Back to the Mac.
Now no more details than that.
There are two key clues though in the image.
First it says Mac, this probably means that it is about the Mac and not another iOS device.
Second, peeping behind that apple is a Lion.
Now this means that it is time for Apple to announce their new OS called Lion. Will it be 10.7 or 11.0 well we don’t know. A lot depends on what the big new thing will be.
10.6 was only a slight improvement over 10.5 and to be honest I am using 10.6 on my iMac and 10.5 on a MacBook Pro and I rarely notice the difference. What new stuff could we see in 10.7, no idea.
However if this is 11.0 then could we see the iOS touch interface integrated with the OS X (or is that OS XI) as rumoured earlier this year?
Whatever happens it will be interesting to see what Apple have to say.
Do you use Parallels (or other VM software)?
Do you prefer “hiding” Windows in a window, or do you hide Windows by integrating with OS X and use Coherence Mode?
In this mode the virtual machine’s desktop is invisible so that you can see the virtual machine’s application windows in Mac OS X and work with them side by side with your Mac OS X applications.
Personally I do not like Coherence Mode and will either use Windows in a Window or in Full Screen Mode.
How do you use Windows on a Mac?
I had been putting off adding my Canon MP600R to my new iMac, as the process on my 10.5 iMac was not simple.
Well things have improved with 10.6 as it was very simple and much easier than with previous versions of OS X.
The key though was to have some patience as it can take a bit of time for the printer to appear in the printer list.
Once though it “appears” then it is quite easy to add the printer like any other USB, network or Bonjour printer.
Once added though, run Software Update to get the most up to date drivers from Apple.
Next job to be able to scan from the printer.
One of the nice features of Snow Leopard is the 512 pixel wide icons – can you still call it an icon.
Cult of Mac has a wonderful gallery of said icons with Leander Kahney’s commentary on the detail Apple has in these icons is almost art in itself.
All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels. It’s a step toward making the operating system resolution independent, and perhaps also to make Snow Leopard a touchscreen friendly OS.
But it’s also obviously done just for the art of it. These icons are real beauties. They are full of great details and little surprises. One icon contains the words to a song, visible only if you blow it up to its full size.
I have now installed my copy of Snow Leopard. I have installed it onto an external LaCie Poulton 1TB Firewire drive for my iMac.
My current OS is Leopard 10.5 and that is also installed on a (different) LaCie Poulton 1TB Firewire drive. I am using external drives as the internal drive on the iMac was a little too small for me at 250GB – when did 250GB become too small?
So far everything seems okay and Snow Leopard appears a little snappier than 10.5.
My main concern is that EyeTV 2 is not compatible and so I will need to go out and buy EyeTV 3 which means that is not such a cheap upgrade as I would hope.
Adobe CS4 should work fine, and I already have iLife 09 and iWork 09, so no worries there.
Over the next week or so I will be installing various apps to check they work before moving over my data.
The advantage of not upgrading is that I can always fall back on my previous installation if it really doesn’t work out.
Well having set up one of my new LaCie Poulton 1TB Firewire drives I am installing OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 onto it.
The external drive needed to be formatted for the OS X operating system and the partition map set up to allow me to install the OS onto it. All relatively simple with Disk Utility.
Then I set it to install, said it would take 47 minutes, wonder if those are real minutes or Apple minutes?
I ordered my copy of Snow Leopard earlier this week and was pleased to receive it on day of release at about 7.3oam this morning!
I am intending to install it on a different external drive to the one I currently run Leopard 10.5 on as a fresh install and then install my applications as and when required.
I prefer to do it this way as I don’t have to worry about crowding the drive with unused applications or filling the memory with “helper” applications for apps I don’t run.
Of course the main downside is that none of my preferences are there, so I have to “add” them all back in again.
Andy Ihnatko (who I regularly listen to on MacBreak Weekly) in his column this week in the Chicago Sun-Times talks about his efforts to run OS X on a netbook.
Questions like “If a computer that isn’t made by Apple is nonetheless running the Macintosh operating system and Macintosh software…can we still call it a Mac?” are more up my street, and it’s been much on my mind lately.
No wonder. For nearly a week, I’ve been running Mac software on a Dell Mini 9 netbook.
It’s an interesting article and does demonstrate how much easier it is these days to install OS X on a non-Mac computer.
I do like the netbook concept and having used a fair few they certainly have their place in the world (generally as a second or traveling computer). Problem is that these netbooks either run Windows XP or Linux. Not that I don’t know how to use XP, and I can even get by in Linux, but both lack the familiarity that I now have with OS X.
Am I interested, yes I am.