Ted Landau has his head in the iCloud, discussing the challenges of the Mac file system for novices and how iCloud may be the solution. Even if it isn’t, iCloud promises to make moving files to and from your iDevice a whole lot easier than it is now. Ted talks about why this will be such a boon, the move in the direction of a more complete touch interface, and how this may make our tech tools more like appliances.
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The WWDC 2011 announcements were many, varied, and all important. The MacJury convened to analyze the information and provide insight into everything Steve Jobs and company unveiled. Some of the topics discussed include the focus on touch, iMessage’s kill feature, Lion Server, the presence of Twitter and absence of Facebook, Game Center, the Reader feature in Safari, the many aspects of iCloud, issues surrounding bandwidth use and caps, Photo Stream, and why one panel member considers iTunes Match “freakin’ awesome.” Delivering all that and more are Peter Cohen, Mark Fuccio, Dave Hamilton, Don McAllister and host Chuck Joiner.
Joe Kissell is back to discuss another in his trilogy of Mac performance books, this time covering the newest revision to Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac. Things keep getting more complex, so your troubleshooting skills have to match. Joe discusses how his own experiences drove this revision, how he selects what topics to cover, and why it is important to learn how to think like a troubleshooter. To get started, Joe talks about corrupt pref files, Time Machine problems and why running Disk Utility isn’t necessarily the second thing to do when a problem arises.
In what turns out is the third book in a trilogy of Mac performance information, Joe Kissell has released Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac. While it didn’t start out as a series, this book joins Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac and Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac to help you get and keep the best performance possible on your Mac. Joe explains how he applies the scientific approach to the subject, and makes the techniques accessible to both geeks and non-geeks alike. Hardware, software, defragmentation and off-the-shelf maintenance utilities are just some of the points covered in this discussion, and are only a small sample of what is in what might be Joe’s most important book yet.
Rosetta, the part of the current version of the Mac OS that lets you run old PowerPC programs is rumored to be going away in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, and that has plenty of users upset. Matt Neuburg of TidBITS has been looking in to the situation and has an extended discussion with host Chuck Joiner about the history of Apple system software transitions, and how Apple has managed them. Find out how to determine what programs you have that might not work, why you may want to move away from Rosetta-dependent applications regardless of Lion, and several options and strategies for dealing with legacy hardware and software you just can’t replace.
