$10 any Mac owner should invest

I don't know how long I am kind of hybrid in terms of computers. I feel like, that I used Apple products forever, but I had always as well a windows computer. I don't have any Windows computer at home, but every company I worked for made me to use Windows OS.

You can imagine that it is sometimes a problem, when switching your brain from one to the other OS. They are not always the same. Some key combinations are different (like copy and paste) and some functionality is not the same neither. It happened twice, that I deleted half of my songs and videos, because I assumed that Mac OS works the same like Windows when copying folders. I learned the hard way, it is not. When you copy in Windows a folder to another, the OS will ask you if yo want to replace or keep original for each file within the folder. Apple Mac OS does only ask once and then all content is either as it was before or overwritten. Means when your source folder had 3 files and target folder 5 files then after the process the target folder contain only 3 files from source nothing more. I did not know this and I honestly don't understand why the Mac OS is not smarter. I am pretty sure I am not the only one, who messed it up.

However, in the app store is a nice little app which works like wonder.




It is folder sync and costs $8.99. It is a great investment. The UI is easy to understand and has a lot of nice settings like scheduled sync. There are a few people who are moved from time machine to folder sync for their backups. I did not go so far, but I synced my three different iTunes folder I got through my earlier copying chaos. I have over 55GB music and 500GB movies. It took for folder sync only a few minutes to see the difference.



The screen is split in two. Left is source and right is target. You can easily see which file is missing, which file is the same or which one has different date or size etc. You can sync the whole folder or only a few items.

In my case folder sync had to move over 5,000 files over wifi and it seemed to be slowly. But I did start it at night and the next morning the files were copied. I can't tell how long it took but it was short enough not to interrupt my work during day.

This app is a must, if you have multiple HDs and copies of same folders everywhere. The best app i found so far to clean up my HDs.


iclean Memory
iclean Memory is a $0.99 app and does wonder.




For some reason my memory seems to get full by doing nothing, since i moved to Lion. I literally do nothing just have firefox open, mail and iTunes and my free memory goes down hour by hour.

iclean memory is a great helper. Just run the app, and you have suddenly 50% more memory available. It seems Apple does not a good job in garbage collection and clean up, but iclean does it for Apple.

However there are some drawbacks. When you start iclean memory, the computer will slow down. I would not recommend to run iclean memory when parallels and time machine backup are running. My iMac, which is certainly not a slow computer, did stop for 2 minutes during the iclean memory process.

But the side effect is pretty small and less a problem than iclean memory helps to speed up your computer.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple must get better, sometimes good is not good enough

After all innovations, Apple is pretty bad with file management. My wife has a MacBook Pro with a 120GB hard drive. I know this does not sound big, but for her usage it should be enough. She has around 12 GB of music, a few office applications and some movies. All together should not be more than 60GB, however her hard drive is full. I told her to use our server for her music but she does not trust it. I was in charge to make her notebook faster and free of disc space, because she had only 1 GB left and I needed at least 5 to install Lion. First I looked in her trash and she really never empties her trash. There were deleted files from over one year and at least 300 iPhone apps which got deleted when she did sync and a new update was available. Empty the trash gave me 2 GB. I could not believe.
Then I deleted her download folder, there were another 6 GB. I deleted as well some files, I knew she would not use anymore. After one hour I had 11 GB left. Enough to install Lion. After Lion install we had actually 13 GB left because some software got deleted because they don't run under Lion.

Today she decided to update the OS of her iPhone. But it crashed during upgrade. She went to restore and tried it again, it crashed again. And she tried again and so on. After 8 attempts the restore did mot work anymore, because her HD had only 64 MB left. What happened?
Itunes makes a backup, every time when you try to make a restore. She had at the end 12 backups.




The backups made her HD full each backup was between 1 and 2 GB. Apple does compress the data really well but still, it is a lot.
Deleting the backup gave her a lot of disc space back. Then I looked how many apps she has in iTunes. I could not believe what is saw, she had over 200 apps. No wonder the HD was full. Imagine an app is between 20MB to a few hundred like Pages.
All apps together are, in her case, over 10 GB. Some games are really big.
we deleted the apps from iTunes, but when she synced most of the apps came back. We had first to deselect them from iTunes, sync the phone to get them from the phone deleted and then we could delete them from iTunes.

Now we have enough disc space available but I think I end up to buy her a 250 GB hard rive, which costs just $50 at Macsales.com.

Apple is not anymore just for geeks, it is mainstream, but I feel the file management is too bad for users like my wife who is a typical end user. Especially now where the new Macs are coming with SSD drive which are as low 64GB. I understand that the new iOS 5 will allow update over the air and maybe the backup is stored in the cloud, but if not, a lot of people will be in trouble.

If Apple wants to get number one computer and OS company then they need to change a lot. They should take an example from the automobile industry. When we buy a car, we don't need to know when and how to change oil. The car is telling us we need an oil change and then we just go around the corner and get it done for a few bugs.

Apple PCs should work the same. It should tell us to empty the trash, or warn us to delete some backups or apps which we don't use. Windows is not perfect but at least it asks us every so often if we want delete certain apps we did not use of a year.

All the time when she downloads something from a website, even of it is just a pfd, will be saved in a download folder. Why is Apple not asking us to empty the download folder once a while. Why does a PDF need to be saved on the computer? Windows asks us at least if we want to save or not. Her safari does download the file and open It.

Apple could easily have in default settings that 3 GB of storage must be free or the user will be warned. Something like this.

Let us compare the MacBook Air and iPad. Both can have 64 GB of memory. The iPad as maximum and the MacBook Air as minimum. For the iPad it is plenty, because I can sync with my iMac. Therefore I don't need to have all my music or video on the iPad. And I can delete apps I don't need and have them still on my big computer. And the biggest apps, I did find so far were only pages, numbers and keynote each of them multiple hundred MB.



The MacBook Air, the most beautiful notebook starts for $999 with 64 GB. This sounds enough, if we consider that 3 years ago 40GB was common in a notebook.

But I believe it is not. People who are buying MacBook Airs don't have usually an iMac or a server at home. But they might have an iPad, learned that they need more and ended up to get the MacBook Air (like my wife wants). Most apps for OS X are much bigger than for iOs and we still will sync out iPad and iPhone with the MacBook Air. 64 GB are just as fast full as we needed to decide if we get 64 GB or 128 GB. Another problem is the build in autosave. Lion and certain Apple apps are cool. You open pages and it opens the last document you worked on. You even never need to save a document. Apple does it for you. Not only this, Apple has build in version control. Which is very awesome. However all this is eating HD space.

I am starting to wonder in which category the MacBook Air is going to be. Is it a notebook replacement or an iPad replacement? Does Apple expect iPad users will move to McBook Air and then to MacBook Pro? Or are they aware of the bad file management and are working on the perfect cloud? To keep most of the data in the cloud and only sync what is necessary?

Everybody who has a full HD should do what i did.

1. Empty trash at least once a week. Every sync with iPhone or iPad will pit a lot apps into trash.

2. Delete through iTunes iPhone and iPad backups which you don't need.

3. Clean your iPhone, ipad and ipod touch apps from you device and then delete them from your computer.

4. Empty once a month your download folder.

5. Don't buy a MacBook Air with 64GB. If you really want, then buy as well a time capsule or an mac mini for your music, movies and other files. Use either of them as a file server. This will help you a lot in the long run.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Lion without Java and Flash

Two weeks ago Apple presented the new Lion OS on the WWDC. If you watched the keynote you might have noticed thar on some webpages shown, when the presenter flipped through the presentation, had small blue Lego blocks on it. The reason is that Lion comes out of the box without Flash. You still can download flash for Safari but will not be included with Safari and OS. Apple will as well not deliver the OS with Java, but can be downloaded from the web if needed.

The OS will be only available as download, you can't buy it on a DVD, this means you don't have an optical disc to boot from in case the OS is failing when booting. However Lion does install a clean 600MB boot version which can be accesses when booting the computer.
This 600MB 'Restore HD'partition is accessed when you depress the option key while booting your machine. It then shows up beside your other partitions, select it and you'll be straight into recovery mode, which lets you restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup, reinstall Mac OS X, run Disk Utility or use Safari. If this new system works, it looks like Mac repair could be made a little easier.
Some more of the functions for the upcoming Lion OS.

Macs run Safari, no log-in required

Lion lets guest users launch Safari even when they are not logged into the system, reports claim. In the most recent beta, OS X's login screen began offering the option to "Restart to Safari" rather than logging in.

This means anyone should be able to use any Mac to access browser-based services, such as Web apps, online services -- iWork.com -- or email.

We keep hearing that iCloud won't offer Web-based access to previously available services such as Bookmarks, Contacts or Mail. This seems strange, as offering access to some iCloud services via a browser on a Mac would (theoretically) mean any users could use any Mac to get to their online lives.

This also trounces Google's Chrome, by making any Mac an Internet-connected device, which, given the move to make things such as Pages documents available in their most recent form to multiple products via iCloud makes for a more compelling connected computing experience.

Instant wipe

Some very interesting data within Apple's online description of FileVault 2. For a start, FileVault 2 now supports encryption of external USB and FireWire drives; beyond this, Apple's notes state:

"With FileVault 2, instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac instantaneously, making the data completely inaccessible. Then your Mac performs an entire wipe of the data from the disk."

In conjunction with the Find My Mac feature I'm expecting, the Mac will become one of the world's more data secure platforms -- straight out of the box!

Screen sharing

Screen sharing in Lion is much more useful than before. You can now log into a remote Mac user account even while someone on that remote machine is logged into a different user account. You can also log in with your Apple ID, the person on the other end can authorize you for access, and you'll be able to connect to that remote machine just as if using a local user account. Then there's an observation mode. This will be highly useful in many ways. Particularly if you get to use this feature from a mobile device (iPhone, iPad).

Apple melts Rosetta

No big surprise really, but Rosetta support will not feature within Lion. Already an optional install in Snow Leopard, Rosetta lets Mac users access PowerPC apps on their Intel machines. The Intel transition was five years ago so a move to abandon PowerPC completely seems appropriate enough. Built-in Java and Flash support also disappear in Lion, though you'll be able to install the most up-to-date Mac versions from their respective developers, if you need them.

A reader noted that Quicken requires Rosetta, a MacObserver report tells us that while this may be a problem at first, an unusual solution is planned.

Looking ahead, July's Apple news focuses on the Mac: MacBook Air, Mac Pro and Mac mini upgrades are all being discussed (some say new Mac launches are delayed until Lion ships), Final Cut Pro X is also expected to hit the Mac App Store as soon as next week.

One thing is to mention that upgrading to Lion works the best with the MacBook Air because it has a SSD drive. Normal hard drives might be sometimes too slow to take advantage of the new cool features from Apple like instant opening apps in last used state.

We tested Lion on my wife's old MacBook Pro. It is 4 years old and Lion seems sometimes a little bit slow but it might be because it is the developer version. We will see when the final version is out.

So far I have to admit that Lion is a big improvement of Snow Leopard. The low price of the OS should be a no brainer for people to update their computer but older systems might not take full advantage of the new OS.

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The future of Apple

Fall 1990, I had my first day at university. I have been an early adapter with computers. I had my first computer 1984 but i never had a windows computer. However at the university we did need a word program and a CAD program. Sure I could have used my Atari for this but neither our professors nor my colleagues had Atari but most of them (if they had a computer) had Windows with Word for Windows and AutoCAD 10.
I switched again away from Windows when a friend and I started an advertisement agency. We used Macs and Ataris even if most of our clients had windows. In 1994 I was sure no real design company could work on Windows computer. We with Apple had Photoshop, Quark Express and Freehand. Windows had CorelDRAW, which we called a housewife drawing program.

But when I joined in 1999 a bigger company (NEC), i had to use Windows again. I finally joined the corporate world. At this time and later most of my friends did buy Windows computers because they were used to them through work or bought them because it was important to have Windows and Office experience to get an office job or even a better office job.

From the beginning Microsoft understood that the first time people will be confronted with computers will be at work. The mission from the beginning was to build a mass OS for companies, they saw that in the 80es the mainframe server-terminal configuration will die. Apple on the other hand had always the consumer in mind, they did want build an easy to use computer. The problem was that computers have been expensive and there was no Internet. Not everybody could afford a computer or did know what to do with a computer at home after a long day at the office.
I believe, that Microsoft became the number one operating system for consumers was only an unexpected side effect. But it worked out. Because we used Windows and office at work, we decided to buy the same for home, we knew how it works and we could bring our documents to work to print or we knew we could share it with everybody.
Computer usage got a necessity at work, did not matter what our profession was, in some way we most likely had to use a computer.
Microsoft went further and did build and buy more and more enterprise applications. In the mid and late 90es the home computer got more and more introduced to younger people. The first generation had kids which have been now teens. And game companies started to build more and more games for Windows computers to attract the teens. At this time, game consoles were expensive and could not keep up with the speed. The first playstation from Sony got introduced 1994. But already a year later the graphics on the PC were so much better that it made sense to buy a computer instead of a game console to keep up with the rapid changes in speed and graphic. And then there was the Internet and AOL. In 94/95 we were able to use our home computer to read news, to talk to other people around the world. More and more people saw more sense in having a computer at home. The prices of the computer did not much go down but there were suddenly unlimited software for the consumer available.

In 1998 Apple started a strategy which changed everything.
I am pretty sure Steve Jobs was sitting 1997 on his back-porch and thought that it would be nice if computers could attract kids, the future working and decision making people. He needed to do something that children will influence their parents for the better of Apple. He knew the first contact with a computer is not anymore the enterprise world. It is in every house household.

When Apple released the first iMac in 1998, they changed the way we look at computers. Not only was the iMac not as boring as Windows PCs but was as well priced closer to PCs than ever before. The iMac was priced $1,299 same price as an average PC with monitor.




But there was an issue. Windows office was expensive on the iMac and there was not much common with the Windows UI.

2001 was the biggest most important step. Apple opened their first Apple store, totally designed to that whole families have fun. Parents can bring their kids to the store and can play at a round table on iMacs kids learning games.
In the same year Apple started to sell the iPod and iTunes. A great music player targeted to young audience with an easy to use music library. The iPod was an instant success but computers are still not growing as good as they could.

But Apple needed to understand a few years that beautiful computers don't sell if the user does not know how to use them. Apple introduced intel based imacs and bootcamp in 2006. Which allowed the user to install Windows on a Mac computer. This brought Apple closer to PCs. Consumers were now able to buy computers with beautiful design and still to run Windows on them. But at the same time the consumer is able to boot the Apple in MacOs.
I don't know how many people did really buy an Apple and run it only in Windows, but the marketing was good enough that Apple finally found a bigger user base for their computers. In Fiscal Year 2007 (October 1, 2006 - September 30, 2007), Apple sold approximately 4,887,000 Macintosh computers. In this year Apple market share almost doubled. And from there on Apple grow each year faster than PCs.




Of course it is easier to grow if you are an underdog.

Apple started something in 1998 which got perfected in the last 4 years. A way to introduce a new system to the consumer of the future for a price same or lower than the competition. In 2007 Apple released the iPhone and iPod touch. The iPod touch is basically a mini computer with music player. A device we parents do not mind to buy our kids if they are asking for a music player, it would not hurt our pockets. In 2010 Apple extended the mini computers (iPhone and iPod touch) with the iPad. A tablet computer. For all three devices are now over 400k of applications available (smart move to have one place where we can find all apps). And because there are some many apps, Apple was able to sell over 200 million of their devices. Many of them are used by kids. Apple took it a step further. If every kid knows how an iPod touch, iPad or iPhone works, would it not cool if they could switch to a computer and it would work the same way?
Therefore Apple introduced Lion and iOS 5.0. Two systems which got just closer. In only 2 years, there will be in the base functions no difference. Microsoft missed the step and was too much concentrated on the thing they are good. Game console and business. Unfortunate the xbox has not much in common with computers and what drove people to buy a PC will change in the opposite. There will come the time where businesses will choose what people are used to work with from childhood on. The biggest problem for Microsoft was and is the Internet. The Internet made it possible to run applications on browsers which are mostly OS independent. The cloud will even support web browser based applications. With the cloud it is not anymore necessary to have Office only to work as a desktop application. It will enable us to use it through browsers, like Google is already showing.

I believe Microsoft will be more and more an important role in enterprise applications and DB but will lose extensive market share in PC or user OS. We will see a lot of Apple products in offices in 5 years.

The question is were will google play a role in this? I can't really tell, Google has a potential to be a bigger player than Apple. But I doubt it will be in the office world. Google is too open. As an example, Linux might have been the better OS than Windows and even did run on PC and the best part, it was free. However support is difficult and there are not much applications on the market. Linux made it into the web server world because there you don't need tons of apps. Google has a similar problem, they have no experience with support and this will be their problem why they won't get fast into the office world.
Apple on the other side has a lot of experience in support and offers hardware with software which allows them to have a more stable system, because they can build it against their specifications, they don't need to consider many difference form factors or hardware part to support.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

New MacBook Pro and Lion OS Preview

Apple released today Lion for developers. The OS will be available mid 2011 for the consumer.


Most interesting part is the touch gesture functions. Which is not far away anymore of gestures captured through build in camera, which might come faster than we think (sure a developer will write a plug in for this)

.

Apple introduced today as well the new MacBook Pro. I have been a little disappointed. IT still has no SSD (you can upgrade to SSD for $1,100 a 500GB hard drive) just normal hard drive and still has built in CD Drive. Most of the software is now available in the app store, so why the need of a CD / DVD drive built in.

I would like to have seen the MacBook Pro in similar design like the MacBook Air.

Otherwise the new MacBook Pro is fast, very fast with i7 quadcore processors and a new I/O technology called Thunderbold developed from Intel.

The 17inch (2.2GHz quad-core, Intel Core i7 , 8GB 1333MHz, 750GB 5400-rpm1, Intel HD Graphics 3000, AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5) does not come cheap. It costs you around $2,699 and with SSD 500GB even $3,799, but it is a high tech professional Notebook which is more than just a desktop replacement.

Read more what is new in the MacBook Pro at the WSJ.

Apple new stunning features and taking more control

At the latest keynote from Apple we first heard how well the Mac sales went in the last five years and if Apple would separate the Mac Computers from the rest of the company then those company would be still #101 in the Inc 500 list. This is pretty amazing.
Plus auto desk is coming back to Apple OS and finally Windows will offer outlook, the best mail program in my opinion.

The next part was the introduction of iLife 11. A lot of changes to see with iLife. The good part is, if you just bought iLife 09 you can upgrade for less than $7. Otherwise the upgrade is $49 or if you buy a new computer it comes free.

iPhoto:
iPhoto has now a much nicer full screen mode, albums are displayed like on the iPad. It has nice Facebook and flickr integration. You can see within iPhoto to each photo what your friends did post to your photo in facebook.




Now we know why Steve had a dinner with Mark Z. Last week. They celebrated their new relationship. I will talk about my opinion to the dinner in another blog.

iPhoto got much more cool slideshows templates and new book templates. It is fascinating how Apple can build such beautiful function which so much logic behind. Both slideshow and books will analyze your photos and bring the photos together either by places, by theme etc. Example if 3 photos have same clouds in the background then these will put close together. Or if images have similar time stamp and so on.

Apple knows how to do the work. Geeks would say they want more freedom, but for rest of us it is so easy now. But still the user can make any changes in order or size etc. We are only limited by the themes Apple offers, we can't create our own themes. With iPhoto 09 I thought there were too less themes but I think now are much more and maybe we can buy more in the future.

iPhoto can now send photos via email without leaving the application. There you can send the photos as attachment or use the apple templates for a cool html email.
And we learned now what Steve Jobs email address is, see image below.




The last new feature is the letterpress card function. We can now order beautiful crafted cards with our text and photos. iPhoto has a video which shows how the letterpress cards are made. The best part is the machine is from Germany. A real Heidelberger press.

iMovie





iMovie got a big overhaul with 5 new features. Audio editing was in iMovie 09 pretty poor but now you can edit audio in many ways, a whole clip or only a part of a clip. You can easily change the volume, fade sound in or out or apply cool sound filters.
One step effects allows you to instantly make instantly replays or highlights of scenes.
With people finder iMovie recognized people which are tagged in iPhoto to instantly give them names or group scenes by people.
iMovie has 15 more themes with music taped in London with a symphony orchestra.
The coolest part is movie trailers. Within a few minutes users can create the most stunning trailer, not sure for what we need it but it is very cool.

Garage Band
I am not getting deep in garage band because I never used the old one and i am not so much interested into making my own music.
The new feature in garage band is that you can see how good you played, otherwise some of the existing features like guitar and piano lessons got upgraded.




How do I play is like a game, you can see if the timing is off, wrong note played and your overall performance in %. the beauty part is that the professional taped orchestra is playing with you. Get an USB keyboard or guitar and start. As soon garage band will come with drums, i will start using it.





Facetime
Facetime is finally coming to the Mac. No set up to perform it just works and even turns the image if somebody uses the phone and turns the phone. Facetime is since today as beta available.

The new Mac Os X (lion)
Mac OS X will get many features from the iPad. The new Macs will have a bigger touchpad with multiple touch rather than a touchscreen. Apple believes vertical touchscreen does not work, the arms will get fatigue.
The app store concept will come to the macs. Macs will have their own app store to download applications. If you lose an app you can download the app again with no charge. What happens when Apple's DB crashes? I don't know.
Lion will have home screen similar like the iPad and groups like the the iPhone.
Any app can run in full screen mode, if wished, like on iOS, but it is not clear how it works when you have two screens attached to the computer. Can we run two apps at the same time in full screen?
Any native app will save constantly open documents and if you leave an app and reopen it, the latest status will auto resume. Which does not always work on the iPad and for sure will be sometimes frustrating on Lion.




Overall Apple takes more control especially with the app store, no easy way for people to cheat anymore. With CDs you buy an app and install it as often as you want on as many machine as you wish. The app store will take full control to deny this.
The Mac OS will come much closer to iOs and pretty sure in 24 months both OS will look and work the same. A clear identification that Apple is building their own cloud with their own idea what a cloud is. Get the software from the cloud but install it on your device. I call it the Apple app cloud hybrid.

At last, Steve presented the new MacBook Air which is lighter than the old one, has as well no CD drive (which we don't need with the app store) and the starter notebook with 11 inch costs the same like the MacBook cheapest model. I believe the MacBook will disappear. Interesting is that the MacBook Air has not solid state drive it uses flash drive only.

All new things are pretty cool and interesting but not really unexpected.
Look at some statements I made a few days ago in my blog:

....But the big question will be, what is new?

We can expect that iChat gets upgraded to face time. The OS will have stronger integration of Apple's social hubs like ping.

Most of all the OS UI might slightly change to more look and feel like the iPad. The dock could look like in iOS.

Apple will prepare their Mac OSX for touch screens for their upcoming touch screen iMac.

http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com/2010/10/apple-will-give-sneak-preview-for-next.html

I have been off with touchscreen iMac but multi touch pad on the MacBook is pretty close to it.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States