Apple announces Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview with deep iOS integration: Messages, Notification Center, AirPlay, Game Center, Twitter and more

 MacOS X  No Responses »
Feb 162012
 

Apple today announced Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the next major update to its desktop operating system. As 9to5Mac first learned back in October, Mountain Lion sports a bunch of major new features, including new apps iMessage and Notification Center – plus the AirPlay mirroring feature. According to the people Apple invited to a private briefing a few day ago, Mountain Lion is all about putting even more iOS into the bowels of Mac OS X. iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues in Mountain Lion with

With over a hundred million iCloud accounts now in use, Mountain Lion’s setup assistant will ask you to set up an iCloud account for the Documents in the Cloud feature. You will also be able to access your iCloud storage in Finder and drag and drop documents for manual syncing between iOS apps that support Documents in the Cloud and their desktop counterparts.

Mountain Lion Beta is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today whilst end-users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store in late summer 2012. The company also pledged to update Mac OS X once a year from now on. Check out past the fold for full release, more features and two additional press shots.

 

 

Apple Releases OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview with Over 100 New Features

CUPERTINO, California—February 16, 2012—Apple today released a developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system, which brings popular apps and features from iPad to the Mac and accelerates the pace of OS X innovation. Mountain Lion introduces Messages, Notes, Reminders and Game Center to the Mac, as well as Notification Center, Share Sheets, Twitter integration and AirPlay Mirroring. Mountain Lion is the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind for easy setup and integration with apps. The developer preview of Mountain Lion also introduces Gatekeeper, a revolutionary security feature that helps keep you safe from malicious software by giving you complete control over what apps are installed on your Mac. The preview release of Mountain Lion is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today. Mac users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store™ in late summer 2012.

“The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world’s most advanced personal computer operating system.”

The developer preview of Mountain Lion features the all new Messages app which replaces iChat and allows you to send unlimited messages, high-quality photos and videos directly from your Mac to another Mac or iOS device. Messages will continue to support AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Starting today Lion users can download a beta of Messages from www.apple.com, and the final version will be available with Mountain Lion. Reminders and Notes help you create and track your to-dos across all your devices. Game Center lets you personalize your Mac gaming experience, find new games and challenge friends to play live multiplayer games, whether they’re on a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Mountain Lion presents notifications in an elegant new way, and Notification Center provides easy access to alerts from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps. System-wide Share Sheets make it easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple and third party apps. Twitter is integrated throughout Mountain Lion so you can sign on once and tweet directly from Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and third party apps. Mountain Lion also introduces AirPlay Mirroring, an easy way to wirelessly send a secure 720p video stream of what’s on your Mac to an HDTV using Apple TV.

More than 100 million users have iCloud accounts, and Mountain Lion makes it easier than ever to set up iCloud and access documents across your devices. Mountain Lion uses your Apple ID to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac. The new iCloud Documents pushes any changes to all your devices so documents are always up to date, and a new API helps developers make document-based apps work with iCloud.

Gatekeeper is a revolutionary new security feature that gives you control over which apps can be downloaded and installed on your Mac. You can choose to install apps from any source, just as you do on a Mac today, or you can use the safer default setting to install apps from the Mac App Store, along with apps from developers that have a unique Developer ID from Apple. For maximum security, you can set Gatekeeper to only allow apps from the Mac App Store to be downloaded and installed.

Mountain Lion also has features specifically designed to support Chinese users, including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and the option to select Baidu search in Safari. Mountain Lion makes it easy to set up Contacts, Mail and Calendar with top email service providers QQ, 126 and 163. Chinese users can also upload video via Share Sheets directly to leading video websites Youku and Tudou, and system-wide support for Sina weibo makes microblogging easy.

Hundreds of new APIs give developers access to new core technologies and enhanced features within OS X. The Game Kit APIs tap into the same services as Game Center on iOS, making it possible to create multiplayer games that work across Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A new graphics infrastructure underpins OpenGL and OpenCL and implements GLKit, first introduced in iOS 5, to make it easier to create OpenGL apps. Using Core Animation in Cocoa apps is easier than ever, and new video APIs deliver modern 64-bit replacements for low-level QuickTime APIs. Enhanced Multi-Touch™ APIs give developers double-tap zoom support and access to the system-wide lookup gesture. Kernel ASLR improves security through enhanced mitigation against buffer overflow attacks.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

 Posted by lsb at 3:23 pm

Run windows application on OSX with ease

 Apple, MacOS X, OSx86  No Responses »
Nov 202011
 

  • Want to be able to run Windows applications on Mac OS X without a virtual machine?

    Apple computer users have used virtual machines programs such as Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion to run Windows on their machines for ages now. Apple even implemented a feature called Bootcamp so that Mac users can install Windows on a second partition of their storage drive and boot up to it as a second operating system. But, what if you want to run Windows’ .exe programs directly from your Mac operating system? This has been impossible until now. In the Mac App Store, you can download an application called WinOnX. This application doesn’t require you to have any instance of Windows on your computer. Instead, you can download .exe (executable) applications to run directly from this program virtually. So in simpler words: you can run Windows applications on your Mac computer without Windows installed.

    Here’s how:

    Download WinOnX from the Mac App Store. It will cost you $4.99. After downloading WinOnX, find a .exe program that you wish to run, for example, Mozilla Firefox for Windows and download it. Once it downloads, you can double-click it to run it like you could with any .app application on your Mac computer. WinOnX will run you through installing and using the Windows application like you would on Windows, only on your Mac instead. Running Firefox for Windows on your Mac will yield this look:

    This option will cost you some money, but it uses a lot less disk space for Mac users. If you have a solid state drive like me, you may select this option instead of dual booting in order to save storage drive space. Redmond Pie recommends that you just buy a new PC to install Windows programs on, because Mac is beautiful on its own.

    Name: WinOnX
    Price: $4.99
    Version: 1.0.1
    Developer: Hisham El-Emam – NES Software
    Editor’s Rating:  3/5

    Alternatively, you can try the free application: WineBottler.

 Posted by lsb at 10:50 am

iCloud: Sync settings, files and documents across macs

 MacOS X, OSx86  No Responses »
Nov 022011
 

iCloud’s ‘Documents in the Cloud’ doesn’t let you do much except upload iWork files for use with iOS devices. To use those documents on another Mac, you have to download the file using the iCloud web interface.

Poking around in the ~/Library folder, you can find a ‘Mobile Documents’ folder that is used for syncing iWork documents. But it turns out you are not limited to iWork files if you just want to sync between Macs (i.e. no iOS use).

If you are using iCloud and have the ‘Documents & Data’ option selected in the preference pane, you can navigate to ~/Library/Mobile Documents. Depending on whether or not you’ve used iWork and synced documents to iCloud, you may or may not find folders there for each of the iWork applications (e.g. com~apple~numbers).

This doesn’t really matter. What is of use is that any files put into the ~/Library/Mobile Documents folder will automatically upload to iCloud and push to any other Mac you have that is signed in to the same iCloud account and has the ‘Document & Data’ iCloud preference checked. Lion even notifies you of version conflicts and allows you to resolve them when you open the document.

While its not entirely like with mobileme – its one step in the right direction

 Posted by lsb at 7:43 pm

Fix coolbook to work with OSX Lion

 MacOS X, OSx86  No Responses »
Oct 292011
 

Hi,

I recently upgraded my Dell D430 to run OSX Lion – and with that i noticed that coolbook no longer is working.

The problem lies within AppleACPIPlatform.kext in Lion and the solution is to replace it with the one from Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Howto fix it:

1. Download kexthelper
2. Download AppleACPIPlatform.kext from 10.6.7
3. Extract both to desktop
4. Use kexthelper to install AppleACPIPlatform.kext
5. Reboot
6. Reinstall coolbook

Enjoy!

 Posted by lsb at 9:51 am

Howto remove Hamachi from Mac OSX

 MacOS X  No Responses »
Oct 172011
 

The other day i wanted to test LogMeIn Hamachi on a older G4 – to my big disappointment the damn thing is only supported on Intel macs.. and best of all.. you first get to know about it after installation. good work.. NOT..

Ever funnier, the uninstall app is also for Intel only.. WTF?!?!?! .. well ok.. after a great deal of research i put together a guide for howto uninstall the damn thing.

1. Remove the actual app from /Applications
2. Open terminal and type:

sudo rm /usr/sbin/tuncfg
sudo rm /usr/bin/hamachi
sudo rm /usr/bin/hamachi-init
rm -r /home//.hamachi

Now remove any Hamachi/LogMeIn of the entries from:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents

.. and finally remove:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tuncfgd.plist

.. reboot..

Home this helps somebody out there…

 Posted by lsb at 2:02 pm

Mac OSX: Using the ‘cron’ scheduler

 Linux, MacOS X  No Responses »
Oct 162011
 

UNIX includes a program named ‘cron’ to handle the execution of tasks on a specified schedule, regardless of whether the user is logged in or not. Cron does this through a series of simple text files known as ‘crontabs’ which control the scheduling of jobs.

The cron daemon is used by the system for scheduled daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance, and can be used by users to run various programs at set intervals, such as to handle my site backup program as described elsewhere on this site.

Read the rest of this article if you’d like a simple overview of what cron is and how it can be used.

The system cron tasks are stored in /etc/crontab. You can “cat” this file to get an example of what a crontab looks like:
user% cat /etc/crontab
# $NetBSD: crontab,v 1.13 1997/10/26 13:36:31 lukem Exp $
#
# /etc/crontab – root’s crontab
#
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
HOME=/var/log

#min hour mday month wday user command

*/10 * * * * root /usr/libexec/atrun

# do daily/weekly/monthly maintenance
15 3 * * * root sh /etc/daily…
30 4 * * 6 root sh /etc/weekly…
30 5 1 * * root sh /etc/monthly…

[NOTE: There are TABS between the items, so don't copy/paste anything you see here; type it with tabs between fields!]

If you want even more info on what the system is actually doing for maintenance, follow the path under the COMMAND column, and “cat” the actual .sh files … there’s quite a bit going on for which you might like to leave your system running at least overnight on occasion!

The basic format of the file is relatively self-explanatory, sort of! An “*” in a column reads as “every”, and the “*/10″ in the first command line means “every 10th minute”. So the weekly maintenance is set to run at 30 mins, 4 hours (or 4:30am) every day of every month, on the 6th day of the week.

After the scheduling block is a column for which user the command will run as (root in this case), and what the acutal command is that will be executed. You can add new system-wide tasks to the cron program by inserting lines into this file (but you must be ‘root’ in order to do so).

More applicable to a typical user would be to schedule their own cron task. I did just that for my backup solution mentioned in another hint. To do this, I first copied the root crontab to a file in my directory (cp /etc/crontab ~/mycrontab). I then edited the ‘mycrontab’ file to look like this (I’ve skipped the header, which I left the same as the root file):
#min hour mday month wday command
25 2,14 * * * sh path/to/getmybackup.sh

The ‘sh getmybackup’ runs my backup download shell script (see the related article on automated backups), and the time section is set to run it twice a day – at 2:25am, and 2:25pm (1425 in military time). Once the edited file has been saved, the final step is to tell the ‘cron’ program to schedule the task:

crontab mycrontab
That’s all there is to it; the task is scheduled and will be executed twice a day at the specified time, as long as my machine is powered on. You can see a list of currently scheduled tasks by typing “crontab -l” at the command prompt, and you can cancel a crontab with “crontab -r”.

Hope this helped shed a little light on the dark world of cron…and as usual, there’s much more to this subject than I’ve covered here, but this should be enough to get you started.

Good way to edit your crontab on mac:

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

 Posted by lsb at 8:56 pm

Rumor: iCloud support coming in Snow Leopard 10.6.9

 Apple, MacOS X  No Responses »
Aug 302011
 

According to a image sent in to MacRumors, iCloud support may be coming to Snow Leopard users. As you can see in the screenshot above, the .Mac preference pane in a previous OS X’s System Preferences reads: “You will no longer be able to sync with this machine because you’ve upgraded to iCloud. iCloud requires a computer running Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.9 or later for Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks.”

This message appeared in OS X 10.4 Tiger after a developer updated his MobileMe account to an iCloud account. The notice appears to be the first indication that OS X 10.6.9 is in the works. Presumably it will only include minor bug fixes and provide limited iCloud support for Snow Leopard. CurrentlyApple states that iCloud will require OS X 10.7, but that is presumably for the more advanced Documents, iTunes Match, Photo Stream, and Backups features. It’s reasonable to assume Apple isn’t going to lock non-Lion users out of their @me.com email addresses.

 Posted by lsb at 12:42 pm
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