Allison Sheridan NosillaCast Mac Podcast podfeet.com @podfeet
Katie Floyd Mac Power Users: macpowerusers.com katiefloyd.me @katiefloyd
Bart Busschots – bartb.ie International Mac Podcast: impodcast.com @bbusschots
Tim Verpoorten surfbits@gmail.com @surfbits http://www.surfbits.com
John F. Braun macgeekgab.com @johnfbraun @macgeekgab
Mountain Lion
- Who’s Upgraded & Who Hasn’t?
- Bart – I played dangerously and just upgraded all my machines – I’ve not yet noticed any problems (I did do two full backups before playing dangerously though)
- Tim – My Mac Pro cannot be updated to ML without a firmware hack (jabbawok.net/?p=47), but I have an updated video card that can handle it, 16 gigs of ram, and an SSD drive. Should Apple allow users to install ML on a Mac if the user feels they can run it?
- John – I upgraded on my MBP Early 2008 running Lion, all seems well
- TIP…WHen installing, you can view installation log, save to disk, good to stay amused or diagnose install issues
- Katie – yep running beta for weeks
- Allison – Wirecast Studio won’t be ready till mid-August so my primary MBP can’t go yet, so I used my spare MacBook for the upgrade
- Mountain Lion Supported Models: apple.com/osx/specs
- Disappointments
- Angry about Airplay limitations – nothing pre mid-2011? (Allison)
- My friend Kevin got a hand me down mac from his son. bought new RAM last week, installed Snow Leopard at the Apple Store on Monday so he could go to Lion on Tuesday…and Lion was gone. what the heck does he do? (Allison)
- First app I tried to install I had to get rid of Gatekeeper (Desktop Presenter from Telestream.net)
- Apps that are already on your Mac when you up-grade get grand-fathered in to Gatekeeper – this probably why I’ve not hit any snags
- Apple said in the keynote that you could make exceptions – but I can’t find out how on the intertubes, and all my un-signed apps are grandfathered in.
- Workaround – right click -> Open
- Don’t like VIP implementation – isn’t just new messages
- 802.11g Airport Express no longer works
- Snapz Pro doesn’t quite work, Ambrosia yet again has an app that doesn’t quite work under new OS (coming soon though: ambrosiasw.com/support/faqs/products/snapz-pro-x)
- None of my VM software (VMWare, VirtualBox) works, will need to upgrade, what did they change to kill all the VM software? It’s not a matter of ‘Killing’ – you can’t expect something so low-level to just work on a whole new OS without so much as an app update! BTW – the latest version of VirtualBox works fine according to roaringapps.com.
- Odd screen color bug after upgrade, had to go to Displays | Scaled then manually choose resolution to fix. In other news, there’s now a “Best for built-in display” option. Big Brother is going ot make all the decisions for us now, eh? Or – they are making things easy for human beings?
- Crashplan was disabled, had to select and reinstall JVM, seems to be working again.
- No way to choose how long to snooze calendar alerts – some things I want to be reminded of in 5 mins, some in a day – why was this feature removed?
Favorite Features
- Love Safari 6
- Cool “Ask websites not to track me” and “prevent search engines from providing suggestions” privacy options
- Web site and search entry field are the same, BLOW MY MIND
- Safari 6 killed the “Activity” section so you can’t use that as a workaround to download videos
- Privacy – can tell sites not to track me
- You have to love the built-in security features. Gatekeeper + FileVault2 really gives a lot of protection.
- Yeah what’s with warnings around accessing contact list, what are apps (so far I’ve had WeatherBug, DashBoard and SpamSieve request access) trying to do?
- I like the privacy controlls around the Addressbook APIs
- I think we are not seeing it’s full potential yet, but the Twitter & Flickr integration and the sharing panes are going to become really useful as more and more apps start to use these APIs
- Simiarly – I think Notification Centre has great potential, but ATM, most of my apps are still writting to Growl.
- New version of mail, why? Disabled my mail plug-ins, again (is there official support for mail plugins? Or are these hacks? Hacks will break, that’s the nature of hacking!)
The Future of the Mac App Store
- Great article from Marco Arment: marco.org/2012/07/26/mac-app-store-future and followup: marco.org/2012/07/26/not-just-geeks (what’s great about it? No facts, no figures, no great insights that I can see)
- Mass exodus since Sandboxing <– no stats on what “mass” means, how do we know this is true? I have a total of 1 apps that left (TextExpander) out of 50 – I don’t buy this OTT “mass exodus” scare mongering
- App Store use to be my “go to place” for Apps – but can we “trust it” with so many good apps being pulled. Makes me reconsider purchasing from the App Store
- I can see how this is a problem for power apps that need to poke around in non-standard things that are not covered by the current set of sandbox entitlements – but for simple apps, I just don’t see the danger. Solitaire isn’t going anywhere 🙂
- TextExpander have proven that having an app you bought leave the app store does not have to be a bad thing for users. The upgrade from V3 of TE from the App to V4 outside the App Store was painless. I was really impressed at how smooth the process was. If Smile can do it, so can other devs
- Still lack of Trials/Paid Upgrades – Likely Apple has just decided they don’t want to do this.
- I just don’t get this. You can’t try apps before you buy, and if you choose badly based on just screenshots and reviews your only recourse is to open a support ticket and hope Apple are in a good mood. This is bad for users, and for Apple. Total waste of time and effort all round!
- I noticed that now if you go to Software Update… in the Apple menu, it goes to the App Store!
Picks:
- Allison: AirParrot from airparrot.com gives non Mountain Lion (or pre-2011 macs) Airplay. $10 for one license, $30 for a family pack of 5.
- Tim: Olympics iOS apps:
- Reuters Photo app: reuters.com/london-olympics-2012/
- NBC Oympics Apps: nbcolympics.com/
- John : Colloquy – Mac IRC Client colloquy.info & mibbit.com for embedded IRC browser plugin
- Bart: Carbon Copy Cloner – new version has been updated for Mountain Lion, and had transitioned from donationware to paid software. Those who donated get the new version free, and it is at 25% off ($29.96) for everyone until 12 August (full price $39.95). bombich.com/ccc_features.html
- Katie – Tweetbot for Mac (public alpha) – tapbots.com/tweetbot_mac/
- Steve Sheridan – Web Video Downloader for Firefox v6.8 now that Safari Activity trick is gone web-video-downloader.com
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