Category Archives: OSX

How To Do a Clean Install of OS X Lion

Posted on by
Reply

If you want to do a clean install of OS X Lion when it’s launched in July you can use the following tip posted at TUAW:

  1. Use Finder to locate the Mac OS X Lion installer, right-click and select “Show Package Contents.”
  2. Find the SharedSupport folder and look for a file named “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion Boot Disc image.
  3. Copy the “InstallESD.dmg” file to another folder, such as your desktop.
  4. Launch Disk Utility and click the burn button.
  5. Select the “InstallESD.dmg” copy as the image to burn, insert a DVD, and in a few minutes, you will have a brand new Lion Boot Disc.

Strong Growth for Unity

Posted on by
Reply

The game development platform Unity has doubled its user base the past 6 months:

“Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today announced that its registered user base has doubled to more than 500,000 users in just over 6 months; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month. In addition, installs of the free Unity browser plugin for playing web games have surpassed 60 million.”

Read the full press release

In a related press announcement, Game Developer Magazine readers named Unity the #1 game engine they use for traditional and casual games. Read the full story.

I have used Unity myself for almost three years now, and have always believed firmly in the potential of the platform. Congratulations to David Helgason and his crew for the success, you deserve it!

Am I the Only One Who Sees These Things?

Posted on by
1

Today Google Chrome was updated to version 10.0, and the first thing that struck me was the menus. Google changed the shadow beneath the menus to look more similar to the built-in OSX menus, but still make them different enough so that I recognized it right away. And I kept noticing it every time I opened a menu.

Here’s the Google Chrome 10 menu shadow:

And here’s the Safari 10 menu shadow:

Sometimes it feels like I’m in a minority recognizing these things. Yes it might be a minor issue, but add 100 of these things together and you have a product that feels very rough around the edges in the end. And how hard can it be really to make a shadow look like all other shadows on the operating system?

Mac + Momentus XT: Upgrade your Firmware Now

Posted on by
10

If you use a Mac, MacBook or MacBook Pro and have replaced your hard drive with one of the newer hybrid SSD/HDD hard drives from Seagate, you might have stumbled upon quite a lot of issues with the drive.

Firmware SD22, the first firmware of the drive, was interesting on the Mac since the drive constantly went to sleep and then back again. Users were reporting around 20.000 on/off cycles per month.

Firmware SD23, released in summer 2010, disabled the power management of the drive completely under Mac OSX. It did not respond to sleep commands, and it did not spin down as a response to the sudden motion sensor. Users reported battery life of their laptops dropping to minutes instead of hours. Firmware SD23 also locked the system periodically, which meant that the Mac became useless for watching longer movies.

Last Friday on December 9, Seagate has now finally released firmware SD24 which fixes all the issues in SD23. The drive no longer locks the system, and it should now also properly respond to sleep and sudden motion sensor events.

If you own a Mac, MacBook or MacBook Pro and have replaced the built-in hard drive with the Seagate Momentus XT, you should definitely download the latest firmware now. To find out if you need to upgrade your firmware, you can open the System Profiler by clicking Apple -> About This Mac -> More Info…

Download Seagate Momentus XT SD24 firmware

Some users on the Seagate forum have reported that they had problems running the upgrade on their MacBooks. I did not, but if you cannot run the upgrade you should check out this thread for a solution.

VMware Fusion 3.1.2 Fixes Galaxy S Issue

Posted on by
1

If you run a Mac and have tried to synk the Samsung Galaxy S Android phone to the Samsung Kies software running in a VMware virtual machine, you probably know at this point that it doesn’t work. Samsung Kies is required to upgrade your phone to Android 2.2, which fixes some significant crashing issues in the first release of the Samsung phone.

Today VMware released Fusion 3.1.2 which among other things fixes the following issue:

  • Samsung Galaxy S phone with Android 2.1 does not work with Fusion. The phone does not appear in the virtual machine. This issue has been resolved.

So if you have a Samsung Galaxy S, a Mac, and VMware Fusion, head right over to the VMware web site and download Fusion 3.1.2.

MobileMe Subscriptions for Half the Price

Posted on by
Reply

If you like me live in a non-US country, a yearly Apple MobileMe subscription will cost you around $120 if you buy it directly from Apple (in Sweden the cost is 795 SEK).

May I suggest a cheaper alternative: eBay

If you search eBay for “MobileMe” you will find numerous high rated sellers that sell yearly MobileMe activation codes for around $50. If you pay with PayPal you won’t be charged any Swedish VAT for your purchase, so the total cost will be 60% cheaper than buying your subscription directly from Apple.

Worth a thought the next time your MobileMe subscription is about to expire.