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Tag Archives: mac

Calling all students: Last chance for a mac with a sweet voucher

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If you are a student about to start a degree at college or university or just going back to school, then I would definitely take action on this one today.  Please pass this on to anyone you know.  For those of you unaware, Apple is currently doing a special offer on their PCs and laptops.  In particular, their MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and their iMac(the desktop PC) are part of this special offer.  

Basically, when you buy one of the above,  you will get a £65 voucher.  You can spend this voucher on anything in the following stores:

  • The Mac App Store
  • The iOS App Store(the App Store for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad)
  • The iTunes Store
  • The iBookstore(the store for purchasing eBooks on iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad)

This offer expires September 20th 2011(today), so I strongly recommend taking this offer by clicking here.  

Freebie Alert: Portal is free until 20th September 2011

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Valve have decided to let gamers get Portal(one its most popular titles) for free. I should warn you, that this offer is only valid until 20th September, so I suggest you jump on this one right now. It’s available through steam on PCs and Macs, as well as on Xbox360 and PlayStation 3.

To get your hands on this freebie, you have to have a Steam Account. If you don’t have a Steam account, then you can create your Steam account by clicking here . By the way, I should mention that it is completely free to create a Steam account. There are no monthly subscription fees, no signup fees or any other fees.  In addition to that, you can also use PayPal as your method of payment.  

Once you have created your free account, click here to get steam for free.  

IP Addresses are not enough to identify illegal P2P users

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Netflix is a popular service which allows you to watch many TV shows and movies for a monthly fee.  There was a small glitch over this previous weekend(3rd september 2011 to 4th September 2011) that basically limited people to streaming 1 piece of content at a time on one device at a time.  For example, if I was watching an episode of The West Wing on my iPad, then my brother could not watch an episode of sports night on his Windows PC until I had finished watching my TV show. I know netflix is not in the UK yet, but you get the idea.  

Netflix has a policy that says that the number of devices you can watch your content on at the same time is limited to how many DVDs you can have out at the same time. If your Netflix plan allows you to have 3 DVDs out at the same time, then you can only have up to 3 devices watching what they want at the same time.  If you have a Netflix plan that only allows you to have 4 DVDs or more out at the same time, then you can only watch your content on up to 4 devices at the same time.  

After many complaints from their customers, Netflix had acknowledged that this was a technical fault. To make things right, they had fixed this and customers can now stream their Netflix content on two devices at a time.  

My review of OSX Lion

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Mac OSX Lion has been out for a while now, and I thought I would take this opportunity to give you all my thoughts.  I found the installation process to be painless and without any problems. Of course, your mac may have to restart a few times, but the installation of OSX Lion was seamless nonetheless.

You will notice that the log-in screen is completely different to Apple’s previous releases of Mac OSX. It is a dark grey background with an Apple logo. The picture that represents your user account is now circle-shaped.  

As soon as you hit the desktop, you will notice that you have two new icons on the dock. These are two of the features of OSX Lion. The first of them is launchpad. If you have an iOS device, then you will notice that Launchpad is basically the home screen on your iOS device, but transferred onto a mac. All of the apps you have installed will be in Launchpad as well as the applications folder(which accessible from the dock at the bottom of the screen). It is good to see another way of quickly viewing the applications that you have installed. The only thing that is missing from launchpad is a search feature that would allow you to search the applications that I have. Of course, Mac OSX Lion already has the spotlight feature to quickly search for and launch applications. It would also be useful to have some way of seeing the all the pages of launchpad at-a-glance. 

The next thing I want to cover is Mission Control. As you can see, it allows you to see the different windows for each of the applications that you have open. It also allows you to see the workspaces you have open and what is in the other spaces. You can also see the dashboard. Personally, I don’t like Mission control that much. Before Mission Control, you had two features called Expos and spaces, which would allow you to see your open applications and windows, alongside the different workspaces and the applications that are open in the workspaces.

This next feature that I found useful is something called resume. Let’s say you needed to shut down your computer, but you were in the middle of some work. Essentially, resume allows you to pick up everything exactly how you left it. So, if you had some finder windows open, and you had to shut down, then resume would let you keep them on the screen when you shut down.  When you power up your computer again, you would see that your finder windows have not moved.  I have found this really useful, especially when I had many tabs open on my web browser.

I also have to commend Apple for giving us the ability to go back to a previous version of a document in the event of making a mistake. Personally, I also like having an app go full screen, so I can just focus on what I am doing.  

These are just some of the many new features that are in OSX Lion.  Of course OSX Lion has its drawbacks.  For example, when I put my mac to sleep, I lose the capability to zoom into a certain portion of the screen using my mouse. The other thing is, some of my old applications would not work under OSX Lion. Some of these applications were written using the Rosetta translation process, and OSX Lion does not support this. I would want Apple to fix this and make some kind of patch so I can run these applications. The final of my problems, is the reverse scrolling. In OSX Lion, Apple has changed the way the scrolling works. Personally, I found this to be quite an annoying thing. However, Apple knows that people like having a choice, and you can change the scrolling direction from System Preferences if you want to.  

All-in-all, it is not the best upgrade for an operating system that I have seen. However, it not the worst. Believe me, Windows Vista was possibly the worst upgrade yet. There are a lot of good features that Apple have added with OSX Lion, and some shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It also seems like Apple are trying to make OSX more like iOS. OSX Lion is only available from the Mac App Store and from Apple’s retail stores as a USB install disk(which will cost £55 in the UK or $70 in the USA). This upgrade will cost you only £21($30) from the Mac App Store. This makes Lion the cheapest upgrade for any of Apple’s operating systems yet. 

So is it worth upgrading? I would say, that if you are happy enough with what you have then don’t upgrade. Otherwise if you want to upgrade, then do. I am not going to stop you from doing so.  

If you are going to upgrade, then I suggest taking the following precautions:

  1. Use roaringapps.com to make sure that your applications are going to work on OSX Lion before upgrading
  2. Use Time machine or other methods to back up your data
  3. Please use my tutorial that I posted earlier to create your own USB install disk for OSX Lion, so that you don’t have to download it again(click here for my tutorial). 

    iCloud releasing soon

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    At the Worldwide Developers Conference in mid 2011, Apple announced that they would be making iCloud fully available to the public in the Autumn of 2011. Until then, we have access to the part of iCloud that allows us access to our iTunes purchases. However, they did not specify a date as usual. However, Apple has already sent out another beta of OSX Lion 10.7.2 and iCloud to developers.  In addition to that, it seems that Apple is also shortening the time between beta releases to developers. This means that we see a launch of iCloud and OSX Lion 10.7.2 very soon.  How soon depends on how confident Apple are in terms of being ready to release these two products.  

    Right now, you can use iCloud to download all of the applications that you have previously bought for any of your iOS devices from the App Store.  However, I can tell you that I will be sure to get my hands on iCloud and give my thoughts on it.  

    Apple creates a section of the Mac App Store for OSX Lion-enhanced apps

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    If you have bought an Apple Mac in the last year or so, then you may already know about the Mac App Store. Apple’s new place for buying apps for the mac.  

    Apple has just created a section of the Mac App Store called “Enhanced for OSX Lion”. This section is a place on the Mac App Store where you can find a lot of the apps that will work on OSX Lion.  Not only are they compatible, but they take advantage of features such as full screen mode, multi-touch gestures, and auto-save.  

    Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac is out now

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    For those of you who don’t know it, I am a huge advocate of desktop virtualisation. If you read a previous article, then you may know of Parallels Desktop. Parallels Desktop is a tool that is considered to be one of the best solutions for you to create and run Windows installations on the mac in a virtual machine.

    Earlier on today, Parallels released Parallels Desktop 7 for the mac. It is faster and better than its predecessor(Parallels Desktop 6). On top of that you can buy, download and install Windows 7 into a virtual machine right from within parallels.  In addition to this, the new version of this application supports Mac OSX Lion. Not only that but it also allows you to run OSX Lion inside a Virtual Machine. As before, you can download, install and run Google’s Chrome OS inside a virtual machine. However, you can download, install and run Fedora Linux and Ubuntu Linux inside Parallels Desktop 7. On a side-note I personally prefer to install Fedora and Ubuntu myself and customise the installations to my needs. 

    If you have Parallels Desktop 6 or 5, then you can upgrade to version 7 for $50 in the USA(£35 in the UK). The standalone copy will cost you $80 in the USA(£64).  

    Disclaimer: This is not a paid advertisement of Parallels Desktop. Additionally, this is not an endorsement of Parallels Desktop.  

    Freebie Alert: Skitch is now free

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    If you are on a mac and you like your freebies, then you will really like this one. There is a picture editing and screen capturing tool out there called Skitch. This Mac application was snapped up by a company called Evernote. In addition to this Evernote has now made Skitch a free product. It used to be a product that had some basic features in the free version. However, you are now able to download the full version for free for your mac.  Simply click here and you will be able to download the full app for free.  I suggest you go ahead, download it and let me know what you think.  

    Skitch is also available for free on Google’s Android operating system that is also available. You can download it from the Android app market place.  

    Onlive UK Launch Date Confirmed

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    In a recently published press release, OnLive have confirmed that their “Cloud Gaming” service will launch on 22nd September.  From this date, you will be able to play games such as Split second and the recently released duke nukem forever without the need 

    But, how does this awesome service work?

    When the service is available in the UK, you would go to onlive.co.uk and create your onlive account for free.  You can sign up for free with no commitments to make when you create your account.  Once you have done that, you will need to download the OnLive application and install it onto your computer.  If you are on Apple’s iPad or a Google Android device, you will need to download the application from Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android App Market.  

    When you have downloaded and installed the relevant application for your device, you will then need to launch the OnLive application sign in using the email and password you chose during the sign-up process.  Once you are in, you can go to the marketplace and check out all the games available.  

    Of course, you want to see how these games will run, and see just how good they are for yourself.  This is why most of the games on the Marketplace will give you a 30 minute free trial.  You will have full access to the game for 30 minutes. For me, I like using the 30 minutes to see how far I can get in an OnLive game.  At this point, you still don’t need to enter any credit/debit card info.  

    However, if you wish to rent a game, then you can. You can choose to rent a game for three or five days.  If you like the game, you can buy it and play the game as much as you want, for as long as you choose. 

    There are a lot of advantages to this service. First of all, you can use OnLive to play games on older machines, as well as netbooks. This is because OnLive’s data centers have all the high-end hardware. They send you the video for the game that you are playing. Therefore, you don’t need to have the latest PC or Mac. For example, I have a laptop that is at least 4 years old.  Using OnLive, I can play games such as Borderlands and NBA 2K11 without the need to upgrade my laptop. 

    When it launches here in the UK, you will be able to use OnLive on your Windows PC, Mac, iPad or Android Tablet.  

    OnLive is already available in the USA and I was able to sign up to it to try it out for myself. From what I have experienced using this service, I believe that OnLive has the possibility to become the future of gaming.

    I also think that OnLive reinforces a very important point here. When you buy a game for PC, XBox 360, Mac or any other gaming platform, you don’t own it. The company that makes the game owns it.  By buying the game in question, you are only given a license to play the game on the machine that you own.  

    To use OnLive you will need a PC with the following specifications:

    • A 2mbps internet connection
    • A PC running Windows XP SP3(32bit), Windows 7 or Mac OSX 10.5.8
    • A screen resolution of 1024×768

    However, it is recommended that you have a PC with the following specifications

    • A 2mbps internet connection
    • A PC running Windows XP SP3(32bit) or better, Mac OSX 10.6.0 or better
    • A screen resolution of 1280×720

    If you want to try it for free, then click here and you will be able to use it right now.  

      Duke Nukem Forever for Mac Has Been Released

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      After a long wait, Duke Nukem Forever has been released for mac. you can get it by clicking here.  Before downloading it, please make sure that your mac will be able to play this game by checking the system requirements. You can check the system requirements by clicking here.

      I have not had the chance to check it out yet. From videos I have seen for Duke Nukem forever, I believe that Duke Nukem Forever has been worth the wait regardless of what the media say.