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Mountain Lion Usability Update

Hot off the presses!

It's still not usable. At least, not on my mid-2011 iMac 27″ Quad Core 3.4 GHz i7 with 16 Gigs of RAM, a 240 Gig SSD, among other things.

When I play video, after 5, 10, or longer the video slows down and I lose audio altogether. This seems to happen more frequently in fullscreen mode.

I thought maybe if I downloaded the 10.8.1 full version that it might solve the problem. It did not.

Back to the safety of Lion (10.7.4) for now.

Update (9/25/12) – Mountain Lion Update 10.8.2 has been released. It still does not address the serious audio/video problem. According to folks in the Apple forums, Apple seems to be ignoring the issue. My guess is that they know about it and may not know how to fix it. Since this problem is among certain Mac models I would guess that its a driver issue. Perhaps, if we start replacing audio/video drivers with those from Lion it would fix the problem? Oh well, crossing fingers again.

September 11, 2012 by Mike Mountain Lion Tips 0

Windows 8 Versus Mac OS X Thought

Macintosh OS 9

The Mac operating system has changed over the years but not in very dramatic ways. In fact, anyone who has used OS 9 will know exactly how to use OS X. If you have used Tiger (10.4) then you can use Mountain Lion (10.8) without much todo or fanfare.

Steve Jobs knew that tablets were the future of computing and built the entire Mac eco-system around that idea. The features you find in iOS are readily becoming available in Mac OS X. This is deliberate.

What Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 is try to bridge a gap that has been building over a period of years. They are trying to jump ahead to a point that they were not preparing for. While Windows dabbled in touch screen interfaces, they saw something that was really “cool” but didn't really know how to apply it and use it to their advantage. I remember seeing Vista for the first time and listening to Microsoft tell me how awesome it was and was going to become. I also remember yawning and noting that all of those “cool new features” had been in Mac OS X for months or even years.

I am willing to bet (without having read the entire Steve Jobs biography) that Steve saw an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation's use of the PADD and snapped his fingers. I don't doubt that for a second because after watching the show, I myself wanted such a device. Man, the things you could do with a tablet computer! Steve Jobs did the same thing with the Xerox interface. While Xerox may not have fully understood what they had, Steve Jobs did. That is vision.

That is what Microsoft doesn't have.

This version of Windows is such a big jump from Windows 7 and so confusing to such a large base of users that this whole thing simply “smells” bad. Big jumps in OS are usually bad for consumers. I haven't even mentioned IT folks that may end up abandoning Windows in the workplace all together. They will have to weigh training hours, troubleshooting time, and costs against other alternatives that are much cheaper and offer less of a shock to their users. Let's face it. Windows in the workplace is expensive.

Windows 8 is such a big jump that it would be like paying someone to shoot you in the face if you are an IT guy.

Just. Sayin'

August 29, 2012 by Mike Apple News mac os 9 mac os x Microsoft windows 8 0

Photoshop JPG Problem Between Platforms

I recently downloaded a batch of pictures from the internet. The iMac refused to read those files as JPG so I did a little digging (actually Command-I on one of the files) and found that these particular files were saved with Photoshop CS5.1 for Windows. The following graphic shows what the files look like on OS X 10.8

Incorrect JPG Files on OS X 10.8

The next question you're probably asking is “how to I fix this?” The solution is rather simple but will require a 3rd party program unless you like renaming multiple files by hand. Great, if you only have a couple of pictures to fix but if you have a whole bunch then I recommend Name Mangler. I'll explain why.

Simply changing the name of the file to say “waterfall.jpg” won't fix the problem or at least, it didn't for me. What we need to do is change the extension as well. So, instead of JPG we need it to be JPEG. Name Mangler will allow you to make that change. Once, you rename the files with an extension of JPEG..boom! You have your files in a completely readable format by OS X 10.8.

Note - Append file extension is unchecked

How about Adobe Bridge CS6? I've tried converting with Adobe Bridge and it just wouldn't cooperate. Sure, you could actually view the photos and see how they were saved originally but that's it. If anyone knows of a method that works in Adobe Bridge, please let me know (me at smpmike dot com)

August 5, 2012 by Mike Apple News Mountain Lion Tips Neat and Cool 0