The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.
If you went ahead and loaded the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onto your Mac, you likely already played around with the new Notification Center. Until you got bored and fired up Growl once again so you could enjoy notifications from all your apps, not just Mail and Calendar. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if all those Growl-capable apps could talk to Notification Center instead? With Hiss, they can.
Another Apple announcement, another de-emphasis on the Mac brand. It seems that every time Apple opens its corporate pie-hole, the venerable Macintosh brand drops down a notch in importance, and the Mac’s future demise seems more likely.
I was on a recent episode of Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly, and after an hour and 45 minutes on a show with “Mac” in the name, the M-word was scarcely mentioned.
No, the Mac brand isn’t going away soon. I’m sure they’ll be upgraded and improved and sold for years to come. And they’re not failing in the market.
But it’s clear that the Mac will die. Sort of. Here’s what I’m talking about.
One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.
It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.
With Mountain Lion, Apple has finally tied iCloud to the Mac desktop. While iCloud has worked seamlessly on iOS since launch, moving documents between iCould and your Mac was embarrassingly awkward, involving web browsers, dragging and dropping.
Now, it has been shoved deep into the heart of the OS, in the form of a kind of alternate Finder.
Imagine yourself at an Apple keynote event. A special, one-off launch for the newest version of Mac OS X. You see the familiar format: Phil Schiller and a couple of other Apple execs run through the successful sales numbers. Then they announce the new product, and then they work their way through a deck of pitch-perfect keynote slides.
It seems familiar, right? Only now imagine that you are alone. This presentation is for one person: you. This bizarro scenario is just what happened to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week when Apple briefed him on Mountain Lion.
It’s taken a while, but it seems that the dried up tear-duct that was the supply of Thunderbolt accessories is about to turn into a torrent of high-speed, daisy-chainable tears of relief. Hard drive supremo LaCie will at last sell you a 2big Thunderbolt Series external drive.
VLC, the cross-platform play-everything-and-we-mean-everything video client is about to go 2.0 on the Mac. And amongst all the new features is one very welcome change: A completely re-designed interface that makes it look a lot more at home on Apple hardware than the open-source v1.x ever did.
UPDATE: This article was written in 2012 and some of its predictions didn’t pan out. For a much more recent look at this subject, read 5 reasons Apple should dump Intel processors [Opinion].
Ever since Apple launched the new MacBook Air, analysts and Mac fans alike have gone wild speculating that Cupertino might dump Intel and use custom-made, ARM-based chips in their laptop line instead. Yesterday, more fuel was thrown on the fire when it was revealed that an Apple intern worked on porting OS X to ARM devices back in 2010. Even Intel has said it would be “remiss” of them to dismiss the possibility that ARM might steal their Apple business. On the surface of things, it looks like ARM might make its way to our MacBooks soon.
Is ARM really a threat to Intel? Yes, absolutely, and especially as we transition into Apple’s Post-PC world. But there is next to no chance Apple will replace Intel chips for ARM-based ones any time in the next five years. In fact, there’s a good chance the exact opposite could be true, and Intel chips will be powering our iPhones and iPads by then. Here’s why.
Labor activist Qiang Li says Apple is doing a much better job of monitoring factory conditions than Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and many others.
“I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia. And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple,” he said.
However, Li says that conditions in the supply chain are not the responsibility of the suppliers themselves or the Chinese government. Apple ultimately bears responsibility, and the company should spend some of its record profits in improving conditions.
Update: To spice things up a bit – we’re now going to select TWO winners for this Mac Super Bundle featuring Parallels 7 – ONE for you and ONE for a friend. Check below to see how you and your bestie can WIN!
Note: if you previously entered in the giveaway you will still be eligible to win, but if you want to give your friends a chance to win, be sure to check out the new rules below!
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It’s time for me to sign off my tipster post here at Cult of Mac. For my final tip, here’s one of my absolute favorites from my book. It describes how to turn any USB memory stick or storage device into an ultra-secure filestore. When inserted into any Mac, a password prompt will appear, just like with expensive ‘government grade secure’ memory sticks, and the contents will be as equally inaccessible to anybody else.
Here’s how to access a secret setting to make your Mac’s volume very quiet indeed—ideal if you’re trying to listen to something in a very quiet room where somebody else is working or sleeping, for example. As a tip this can be filed under the category, “Cool! I never knew that!”.
This is a guest post by Mike Daisey, who’s latest monologue, The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs, is at New York’s Public Theater through March 4. We highly recommend you go see it. It made Steve Wozniak cry. The post originally appeared here.
Stephen Fry, brilliant comedian, wonderful actor, and bon vivant just posted this in his Twitter feed:
As a fellow raconteur it’s painful to have to confront Mr. Fry with this fact, but he’s being a total idiot.
He’s in good company—most of the Mac universe is in the midst of a massive propaganda campaign, trying to convince itself and the universe that the cognitive dissonance they are feeling at this moment isn’t real.
So you’re going to see some good people, like Mr. Fry, who happen to love their Apple products very much, say some horrible things because they don’t actually understand how to reconcile the beauty and grace of their wonderful Apple products with the unvarnished, verified truth of how they are produced.
Here’s a basic but essential trick that Windows users take for granted—making the mouse cursor bigger, which can help on larger screens of if you simply prefer it that way.
Did you know you can move a window from one space to another by dragging and dropping it to the edge of the screen? If so you’ll know there’s a delay before the space will switch to the new one, but a simple tweak can speed that up. Read on for more info.
For fans of vintage Macintosh computers and truly rare finds, a very unusual item has just surfaced in the wild: a 128k Macintosh prototype that used a 5.25” “Twiggy” floppy disk mechanism, the same kind Apple used with the first generation Lisa workstation.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 – The final day of Macworld / iWorld was my fifth day away from my wife, daughter and son, and despite spending time around technology that I’m passionate about and in a city that is as awesome as advertised, I was a little homesick.
That’s why when I came across a pod that demonstrated an app that may very well help me in the future when I am spending days away from my family, I was all ears. Babiis is the missing piece in my “travel puzzle” going forward.
SAN FRANICSCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — Before the 2012 edition of the expo wrapped yesterday, I had the opportunity to take one last pass on the exhibit hall floor to check out what the Saturday crowd was showing interest in. There was one product that grabbed my interest as a writer, especially considering how much I use my iPad for creating articles.
I’m not the best typist — not by a long shot — and I’ve used a keyboard for my iPad for longer posts over the past year. Whether it was a keyboard that was part of a case or my trusty Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, I had one with me at all times. That’s where the iKeyboard comes in.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 2012 — Here is some video of the big drum circle that wrapped up Macworld. Such a great way to end a conference!
Macworld is done, but we’ll have the remainder of our show posts tomorrow.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — The exhibit hall was hopping today, with plenty of Apple enthusiasts checking out the various booths and panel discussions throughout the day.
Today’s crowd — not surprisingly — was the most diverse of the three-day event due to the “weekend factor”, and among the crowd were a lot of first-time attendees who were pretty happy with what they saw.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 2012 — Rain Design’s new one-piece MacBook stand is made in the same factory that makes Apple’s unibody Macs, says the company.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — One of the Macworld Best in Show winners that caught my attention during the past few days is an audio solution by Australia-based Dev-Audio. The Microcone features a revolutionary technology that innovates the way multiple tracks are produced.
The Microcone is an incredibly intelligent microphone that is unbelievably simple to use and can help anyone manage group conversations. While it’s not going to be something everyone can use, there are some practical applications beyond traditional meetings that are worth looking at.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — I’ve been looking for a docking station for my 11-inch MacBook Air ever since I picked it up a few months back. Not only has there not been anything that has caught my eye, but there haven’t been many available to even look at.
But there’s a Kickstarter-backed docking station that is on display here at Macworld/iWorld that is on my radar: LandingZone.