As the dust is settling over the WWDC smorgasbord of announcements overnight, one little factoid poked its head up as exceptionally pertinant to Aussie gadget-lovers: OS X Lion will be available through the Mac App Store in the States for $US29.99 and locally for $31.99 AUD. Does this signify a restructure of the way Apple calculates the exchange rate for Australians? More »
Home automation is the ultimate goal for a geeky homeowner, but it’s generally too expensive for most of us to even consider. The Savant Mac-based system is no exception, but it’s impressive in just how seamless it makes controlling your home via an iOS device. More »
Given the billions of articles written about the iPhone (at least half of which appeared here on Gizmodo), it’s kind of shocking to realise that the phone itself has only been available for just over three years. It’s also surprising to see just how different the operating system is today compared to the original version on the original iPhone, despite the fact that aesthetically it’s hardly changed. Let’s have a closer look at the progression of iOS. More »
Microsoft’s announcement overnight that they’re planning on bringing Outlook to the next version of Office for Mac may not sound like the most exciting piece of news this week, but it is a huge game changer. Forgetting for a second that Microsoft should have done this years ago, banishing that bastard piece of software Entourage to the seventh level of software hell, the move to bring Outlook to the Mac is going to make Apple’s machines even more appealing to enterprise, while at the same time forcing Apple to really bring changes to the way OS X’s Mail, Address Book and iCal interact. More »
No one expects an MSI Wind to run OSX as well as the latest MacBook, but how does the 1.6GHz N270 Atom system stand up to the 1.33GHz iBook G4 with 768MB of RAM?
We’ve seen demos where clever ubertechie folk run OSX on the Eee PC, but in case you wanted to do it yourself, Wired has published a complete wiki detailing the installation process. It’s still not a one and done installation—plan to get your hands a little digitally dirty—but at least you won’t be digging through message boards full of guesses and contradictions to get the job done. Wired’s instructions are clear and easy to follow, and they mention the caveats like that the sound doesn’t work (bye bye, iPod fatto). Ignore such crippling limitations; you have a Mac mini-note to create. [Wiki via Lifehacker]
Samsung has been pioneering efforts to improve performance of SSDs in operating systems, working with Apple to integrate ZFS reading and writing to the next version of OSX Server. This means a 128-bit file system with faster data throughput and lots of other fun things that make servers run better. This also means Apple is taking SSD technology seriously, as it has already dropped the price of the SSD upgrade for the MacBook Air—the only current MacBook to ship with an SSD option—to US$599 from US$999. We likely won’t see SSDs across the MacBook lines yet, but this means it could be in the cards. [MacRumors]
newVideoPlayer("macosxmusicvid_gizmodo.flv", 494, 390,""); Whether you like the song or not—Addy says technically this is called Wimp-Pop, but it sounds more to me like Foux Da Fa Fa*—I’ve got to say that this music video made using The Bird and the Bee’s Again and Again is mesmerising. Or at the very least, a really cool musical tour through 40 Mac OS X features and applications: it starts slow and boring with Word, but it ends being a complete explosion of synchronised eye candy using everything from Photo Booth to Stickies to Spotlight to Dashboard widgets to Stacks. See if you can distinguish each and every one of the features and apps featured, then compare it to the list after the jump (I think we are missing a few.)
While at the Zune Media Event in Redmond on Monday, the media had some downtime between presentations, and naturally the conversation moved to Microsoft vs. Apple. The mix of bloggers, reporters and Microsoft advertorial/internal bloggers provided some predictable replies. iPhone’s keyboard sucks…WinMo’s browser is blah…The iPhone isn’t mainstream because my grandma doesn’t care about it…on and on. Then the convo turned to iPod vs. Zune, and the question of Zune’s lack of Mac support came up. The closest anyone came to giving a good reason was suggesting Mac users bought Apple products more for the logo than the actual product, meaning they’d never abandon the iPod for a Zune. A fair point, perhaps, but a silly reason for a company to justify their lack of support for another platform. Here are a few reasons Zune should support OS X:
