flop ya mac out

Daniel and Jason go in deep (in the kiddies wading pool) into Apple’s latest operating system. Best you pack a day pack before beginning the journey. And not forgetting the best thing yet for the iPhone!

One the features of Leopard i was most looking forward to was Time Machine. Still am. I’m still looking forward to time machine.

But i’ve installed Leopard, how could this be? What’s going on here? Why don’t i know the joys of bringing deleted files back from the dead and forgoing the dread of file loss? 

Because Time Machine is being real… a real fuck stick really! Twice it has almost backed up my HDD completely, but then come up with some error.

The last two times it’s started to backup, it says it can’t find the drive. Great.

Well i’m glad that in that wasted time my laptop’s hard drive hasn’t packed it in! Or i’d be rooted! (Well, i do have that other back up i made for when i installed Leopard, but not the point!) 

What a let down. I’d just been complaining to Jase a few days ago that every backup program i’d used had crashed on me, and so Time Machine was to be my saviour. But now i’m going to be the one to try and do the saving. To save me. 

In fairness, it could be that my ext hard drive is about to pack it in. Better now than a month down the road too! I ran ‘Repair Disk’ and i got this wonderful message from the OS X gods… 

Do ya see that? What i named my ext hdd?… Geddit? Clever hey! I bet there have been a number of geeks patting themselves on their backs for that one. Comment us if you’re another great mind that thought alike…

With every Jean, Claude, Van and Damn on the internet giving their first impressions on Leopard, I thought I’d add my voice to the crowd, with a focus on some of the finer tweaks that I certainly get a kick out of in updates like this.

Dan and I journeyed to our local Australian Apple Store this evening and were nearly met with a rousing applause.

The install went smoothly, thought the damn thing seemed to take longer ‘verifying the disc’ than actually installing the thing. If you’re in a rush, I certainly see no harm in skipping the verify step. If you are installing a family pack on multiple computers and are cool like me, then I would definitely recommend skipping this lengthy time-waster.

My first impressions are thus:

• The whole install process is so breezy, it really has been perfected.
• Spotlight flies like an absolute bitch! Amazing! On my MacBook Pro it took about half an hour to build the library and was off and racing. It automatically highlights the top entry now, a nice change.
• Sleep/wake times on the MacBooks are the same
• There’s no ‘Loading OS’ screen per-say, it just gets it straight on! Sexy.
• The Airport menu loads instantly, at last!
• Time Machine most certainly backs up over the Airport Extreme Base Station, providing you perform your initial backup with your external HDD connected to your mac, and then when connected to your Airport, manually logon to it once through Finder and set it to remember the password.
• The new side-panel of Finder is brilliant. .Mac is enabled by default, but that can be pissed off through the settings pretty easily.
• Safari feels snappier. Really. It’s out of BETA finally, too. I’m going to try and make the switch over from Firefox one last time. Firefox runs like an absolute dog for some reason, too. All the more reason to go Safari.
• I’m not entirely sure what to think of the new translucent menus, or gratuitous use of drop-shadow. I’ll sleep on that one.
• All the Help menus have been rehashed, to better serve the kind of people who click on them.
• Screen capture gives feedback for the exact pixel that you are hovering over. Awww.
• Time Machine is a handsome bitch.

I’ll certainly add more as it comes up. But on the whole, this is one of those upgrades that doesn’t smack you in the face with joy straight away, but instead gently flicks marbles at you until you realise that all-in-all, it is actually freaking awesome. I think I might sleep in my free Leopard tshirt.

So what do two Mac geeks do with themselves on a Friday at 6pm? Any other day it might be repairing permissions or polishing their iPhone screens, but today the flop ya mac out-ers took a drive to get some of Apple’s latest OS X offerings, otherwise known as Leopard.

Geared up for the long waiting line at the Apple store, along with the patented Apple buzz and anticipation, Daniel and Jason were in for something rather different…

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I’m one of those 1.0.2 users who’ve been waiting waiting waiting for a ‘re-virginise’ method to come up, so i could re-lock my sim-unlocked 1.0.2 iPhone, to allow me to upgrade to 1.1.1 safely. And then sim-lock again.

And thank the lord for the iPhone Elite team! This week they came up with a method to re-virginise sim-unlocked 1.0.2, and further more, rather than users having to screw ’round in the terminal they put together an automated process(es) which makes the whole ordeal rather damn simple!

And even better, i can attest to the fact that it works! So if you indulge in some re-virginising goodness, be sure to donate some moola to these fine folks, allowing international peoples like mwa to enjoy the benefits of 1.1.1, and use of the iPhone as just that, a phone.

After i’d revirginised, i then followed this guide where it details upgrading from a re-virginised 1.0.2 iPhone to 1.1.1, and further more unlocking your updated iPhone. Thanks so much to the iPhone Dev Team for that beautiful solution, anySIM.

For those interested, i’ve posted some photo’s from my re-virginising escapades…

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I go and buy an expensive new external HDD and the new Airport Extreme Base Station, only to find out that to my horror Apple look to have pulled the support for wireless backups!

Last week the Apple website told us this:

“Effortless meets wireless.
With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine.”

Now we get a whole lot of this:

“Pick a disk. Any disk.
You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.”

Without any of this:

“a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station”

Apple’s 300 leopard features page is disturbingly absent of any wireless Time Machine action, too.

But then ‘listrophy’ of Digg alerted me to this:

So what’s it going to be, Apple?

Is this a way of saying ‘nuh-uh’ to wireless backups, or are just putting other features first?

My thinking is that wireless backups is way too-cool a feature to not be touting. Perhaps it works, but not terribly well at the moment, so they are avoiding a backlash by never actually saying it’s a go to begin with!

All will be revealed tomorrow in any case, when I line up to what is bound to be a lack of line at the Australian leopard launch. Australia just hasn’t quite mastered its Apple mayhem yet.

We will keep you posted.

Dan and Jase get up close and personal with the super sexy and slim iPod touch-me-baby. Virgins are all the rage again. New insight gained into Apple’s latest iPhone television ads. And Dan and Jase speculate about the FUTURE… FUture… future…

Checking out the features of the upcoming OS X Leopard on my iPhone this morning whilst still in bed. Went to open up another page from a link using the great Open In New Tab bookmark and got an unexpected alert message.

It went something like, “You cannot open more than eight pages in Safari. Go use a proper computer to get the most full Internet browsing experience”.

Well i didn’t know there was such a restriction. And why?

Does it slow down Safari if you have too many pages open at once? Does it make Safari or even the whole iPhone unstable?

Perhaps the number eight is simply Steve Jobs favourite number. Or the number of days one of Steve Jobs weeks contains.

Outa jail! New iPhone iNdependance. Jason’s mum wants to hang with the iPhone posse. 3G on a chip! 99 percent fat free. 100 percent awesome. Plus Apple sucking shite and other water gurgling hijynx.

Keep your eyes peeled the Apple store is down, and it’s worldwide!

store.apple.com

Apple are expected to announce the release date and time for leopard. At first we thought this might be typical maintenance, but when we saw that it’s worldwide, we thought otherwise!

At least this means that we won’t have to go through another Stevenote just to find out when Leopard will be launched. Let’s get some sweet Halloween Cat Action!

UPDATE: Well there you have it! Leopard 6pm on 26th October. Apple are offering free delivery on the 26th, which sounds verrry nice, though rural areas can wait up to two days for delivery.

I wish there was an easier way to find out what they classify as rural!