As always, there were iPod cases to satisfy every appetite. If you have an idea for an iPod case, chances are it’s already been done. Although I must say that I didn’t see a some of my best ideas: an organic iPod case that would allow it to be both a meal and protection for your iPod, nor did I see one that flies, or one that doubles as a semi-automatic pistol, but the show was so huge I’m sure I just happened to miss those booths.

The Next Big Thing of course is 3D. I got my first view of glasses-less 3D TV, and it’s not bad. I wouldn’t want it that way for everything I watch, but it’s not bad. As usual, the early adopters will pay the highest price for the lowest performance as it develops, but once they really get it all figured out, 3D will become reasonably mainstream. And I suppose that means it’s only a matter of time before we see it on our computer screens.  I wonder if I’ll be able to make all my “s’s” float closer to my eyeballs, for no other reason than I’d be able to do it.

Speaking of which, there was, as usual, no shortage of Chinese companies who seem to specialize in doing exactly that: just making something because they can. After a given technology gets invented, the Chinese simply make every device they can think of using said technology, often with the greatest number of buttons possible on the controller. They don’t seem to give much thought as to whether we really need the device, or what problem it will solve, or how it will be used, or whether it’s easy to use. They just make them.

Apple of course leads the way in taking a category and actually creating a product with a well-defined user interface. For instance, before the iPad, there were already plenty of tablet computers. The thing of it is that all of them were simply there because they could be. Apple thought about the user and created the most successful product in electronics history without inventing anything new at all.

One of the most amazing things about that is that it was done with a distinct emphasis on extremely high quality of production. Usually the cheapest product leads a given category in sales. Apple has proven that value for the money can be just as compelling as a cheap price. Since most companies don’t follow that lead, and instead just continue to rush headlong into offering something as cheap as possible instead, is what keeps Apple’s sales soaring, with no letup in sight.

While Apple had no booth there, its presence and impact was felt throughout the show. While Microsoft had its booth there for the last time, its presence and impact was nary to be found otherwise. And while its big news that this is their last show, the size of the show itself certainly seems to indicate that it’s going to continue for some time to come.

To take it further, you also wouldn’t be able to read this if you weren’t also connected to the internet… something yet even more people in the world cannot say.

What’s amazing to me is how this technology has become so pervasive and accepted that any interruption in service is akin to what happens when our electricity is interrupted for any reason. Today, it’s not just whether the lights go out, if our connection to the internet goes down… gaaaa! We’re dead in the water!

It wasn’t so long ago that most of us had never even heard of the internet. When it sprung up, it had its own protocols and culture if you will. You were supposed to be a good citizen of the web, and many proper behaviors were “suggested.” Now it’s no-holds-barred, whatever it takes to get people to view your site, and all of those initial “rules” are a quaint thing of the past. Commerce has taken over, and commerce doesn’t care about anything except whatever it takes to do business.

In any case, we’re grateful for the internet. The social changes it has engineered cannot be overstated. It is taking out huge swaths of industries, from bookstore chains to travel agencies to newspapers to advertising vehicles of all kinds. It is even toppling dictatorships and forcing social changes around the world, the likes we may have never seen before. Prior to the internet, information was limited to the elite or well-educated. Today, anyone with electricity, a computer or the like and an internet connection has virtually the entire scope of human knowledge at his or her fingertips.

In our case, it’s also allowing us to interact with so many more folks out there than ever before. Thanks in large part to Apple, we are setting sales records continuously, and that means we get to talk to more and more of you. PowerMax is committed to remaining a “person-friendly” company, refraining from automating every last piece of our business just so you never have to talk to a human being. We think it’s important that we interact with each other and not just machines.

Lastly, in the spirit of being thankful, we simply want to thank all of our terrific customers out there for your business. You wouldn’t be reading this at all if we didn’t have enough of you willing to do business with us. We appreciate it very much, and are humbled by the many comments we receive via email or many of the rating sites out there. So… thank you very much indeed, and have yourselves a wonderful holiday season, in whatever fashion you celebrate it.

We’re already being hawked “pre-Black Friday” sales several weeks before Black Friday, and now retailers are jostling for position to open earlier and earlier on Black Friday as well, which now, for many of them, has drifted to the only place earlier than 12:01 AM on Friday you can go: actually being open on Thanksgiving.

So not only do all those store employees have to miss their own family Thanksgiving celebrations, apparently there are enough of you who will actually go out shopping on Thanksgiving instead of spending one lousy day with your families to simply be together and be thankful for what we all already have.

Personally, I’m getting so disgusted by this mad grab for dollars during a season that’s supposed to be about family, religious values and thankfulness that I’m making my own list and checking it twice. And that list is of the retailers who have absolutely no concern as to the well-being and happiness of their employees by forcing them to work on a day when they should be with their families. And that list will mean I will simply not shop there again. If enough people do that, maybe we can recapture the true holiday spirit in this country again.

If you agree with the above sentiments, feel free to note below any retailers you know of that are going to be open on Thanksgiving. A good old fashioned boycott should send a message to them if enough people join in.

Oh, and by the way, PowerMax won’t be open on Thanksgiving, and we’ll be closed Dec. 23rd as well so our employees can spend a good long weekend winding down and enjoying their families.

Amazon Price Check Scanner App

In my mind, that crosses a line. Certainly not a legal one, but an ethical one. It’d be the same thing if I was looking at a website and a competitor programmed the ability to pop up their ad in front of me saying, “but here it is 50 cents cheaper! Shop with me!” Actually that already sort of happens with pop up ads and another annoying mechanisms, all of which I can’t close fast enough.

Anyway, I sometimes shop with Amazon. But you know, I always want choice. I want local retailers. I want lots of competition. I don’t want 800 pound gorillas throwing their weight around. I respect the amount of effort and investment it takes to place products on the shelves for customers. For Amazon to take that investment and encourage customers to take advantage of it but send all the money to them, well, it just feels a little icky. I’ll be doing less shopping with them just because of that. They’re already big enough anyway. Other folks deserve a little of the green Amazon is trying to grab all for themselves.

Lastly, I think about the “99 Percent” movement (which has morphed from the “Occupy Wall Street” movement) and I wonder how many of those folks leave their encampments and on their way home stop at WalMart or Starbucks or Home Depot or McDonalds or God-knows-who-else that is part of the chain that leads to Wall Street and the 1% richest, just so they can save a buck.

When you shop only based on price, you’re not only shortchanging yourself, but you’re also feeding the mega-companies, which all tends to flow to that top 1%. Other than products that have to be made by large corporations, like computers, cars, appliances and the like, there are always lots of choices beyond the mega-guys. If we all suddenly frequented local restaurants and shopped with smaller, privately-held companies, the money wouldn’t be flowing so profusely to the 1%.

So protest all you want, but to effect real change, just think about where you’re spending your money. That’s the only real way you’re going to create actual change.

Just sayin’.

In my opinion, one of Steve’s greatest achievements was demonstrating that things can be done in a different way than what is generally accepted as the “right way.” He eschewed focus groups and research and data in favor of what felt right to him. In virtually every case, the new products Apple came out with were not brand new concepts, they simply took the previous concepts and made them work in a much more understandable way than their predecessors. He understood what we wanted before we even knew it, which was ultimately his greatest genius.

Steve created a culture at Apple that will continue on for many years. The risk for them is whether they gradually revert back to the ways of every other corporation and start listening to focus groups and pundits and so-called experts and power users, rather than continue on the path that Steve blazed for them. Obviously only time will tell, but his imprint was so strong and so deep that it’s hard to imagine that happening any time soon. Ultimately, he was just one man in what is now a very large company, and he hardly did everything by himself. But he successfully created a culture, and that culture will continue on.

Other than the products he helped bring to market, the biggest reminder he provided for me is that humanity’s collective ideas as to what is proper or needed or acceptable are not necessarily any more correct than our individual ideas of same. In other words, “everyone does it that way” is no more of a reason to do something than if your neighbor or crazy Uncle Bob does something in a particular way. Steve did things his way, and more often than not they turned out to be pretty damn good ways to do it.

Otherwise, what impacts me most about his death is the idea of what it all meant. Once a life is over, I tend to wonder what that was all about. Is there any meaning besides, “they were here, and now they’re not?”

My answer to that involves the word legacy. The human race is like a huge pyramid; one that is constantly growing upward, built upon all the people who came before us. Occasionally, someone comes along who impacts a far larger number of us than most. Steve was one of those. His legacy will be felt for a long time. And that, ultimately, is what life is really all about. We are all part of that great big pyramid. And we will all pass someday. So the only question is, what is the legacy you’ll be leaving? Is it something worthwhile? Is it something that will be remembered, whether by a few or many?

Steve is leaving a legacy of a size that is achieved by very few people. While he, like all of us, had his faults, you can’t ever take that away from him. And for that, we should all be grateful, and impressed.

In the end, however, he may have said it best about death in a speech at Stanford:

In the speech, Jobs told three stories from his life — including his feelings on being fired from Apple in 1985 — and mused on major themes like life, love and death. His comments on death seem particularly poignant:

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’”

“And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.”

“It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

If you are one of the few who upgraded to Lion 10.7, Apple just issued the first, much-needed, update. It consists of the usual round of bug fixes and no visible changes. I installed it immediately, did the usual repair-permissions thing, and am using it now.

It hasn’t been made any more compatible with PPC applications, and it never will. So I must continue using my dual MBAir/MacMini system so I can keep using Quicken, Eudora, Word 2008 and all the other stuff that Lion won’t run.

Lion Experiences, Part 3

But living with 10.7 for almost a month now has gotten me used to the new features. Last week’s PMUG meeting taught me more about the system than three weeks of dinking around did, and I find I like it more. The new backwards scrolling feels more natural now and it’s harder to switch back. I am also enjoying the new Mission Control feature that replaced Spaces, and the full-screen feature that I am using with Screen Sharing. In fact, Screen Sharing works so well now I could probably reduce using my KVM switch to move between systems. I still get bitten by forgetting to eject the USB drive before hitting the switch, which has the same result as unplugging without ejecting. I just wish the USB part of the KVM switch worked. It was the last hole in the system.

Setting the Shared Screen to the Mini while running under Lion gives me the best of both worlds. It feels just like I am running Eudora in Lion. Yes, I understand that Eudora is a shambling zombie, shedding limbs as it stumbles around the abandoned city seeking brains, but I have not found a program I like more. Price of being old, I guess.

I Now Take Plastic

Got an iPhone? Run a small business? If you never contracted with Visa/MC to take plastic before due to hassle and expense, there is a real alternative with Square. Visit the iTunes Store and hunt down the Square app. You download a small program to the phone, then go to their web site to register an account and tell them which bank they should transfer your money to, and then they mail you a little “square” device that plugs into the earphone jack on your phone. Open the app, plug in the Square, and you are ready to swipe a card. Its security is as good as any credit card system (faint praise, I know) but their service charge is half that of a normal Visa system. Fill out the customer’s email address and the dollar amount and the transfer is immediate. An email receipt is sent to the customer, and after a couple of days, the amount, minus 2.5%, is transferred to your bank.

So if you ever want to charge my service call, remind me if I don’t mention it.

Snow Leopard Update

As you may remember, I put the 10.6.8 update on the Don’t Bother list. It didn’t offer any advantages and did introduce serious bugs for a few people; enough to keep the Mac blogs hopping for weeks.

Someone at Apple was paying attention, because last week they issued an update to the update, 10.6.8 v1.1, which reportedly fixed a lot of the problems. So states the experience of people writing in. Me, I don’t know because I stayed at 10.6.7 and will continue to do so.

In releasing the update, Apple also repaired the downloadable Combo Update without changing the name. If you were to go to Apple/Downloads and get it, the new version contains the fixes and Software Update would not offer the 1.1 updater after you installed it. About This Mac would still say 10.6.8.

If you ever do decide to go Lion, you can use 10.6.6 or later to get it from the App Store. When you do, the Lion installer will take you directly to 10.7.1. It couldn’t hurt you to wait for 10.7.2, which is now being seeded to developers to test their own programs against. See it by September.

Leopard Updates

There are still updates issued for Leopard 10.5. The final version is 10.5.8 and that is required for the latest iTunes and a few other things, but if you don’t need that and are using 10.5.7, stay put until you leave Leopard for good. There are security updates being issued and they are important now that there is actual Mac malware around. Do get those.

iTunes 10.4

It works. No bugs. I am pleasantly surprised. Usually the dot-zero version of any upgrade is problematic. Every Mac I have run it on has demonstrated normal behavior. Good job, iTunes team.

Speaking of iTunes

Most people use the Migration Assistant to move their data from an old Mac to a new one. Sometimes, when that isn’t possible or desirable, I manually move the appropriate files, preferences, picture and movie files. That usually works out fine, but there is a problem with iTunes that has not been fixed since the first time I experienced it, three or four years ago.

iTunes is the only application that makes non-standard use of the green button. All other apps will toggle between full size and previous size whenever you click it. iTunes, however, switches between mini-player and normal window. The only way to change the size is to grab the lower right corner and manually resize it. But what do you do if the window is too big for the screen and you can’t reach that corner because it’s below the bottom? Nothing. You’re stuck. This happens if you copy the iTunes Folder from Music on a big screen to a small one, like a MacBook. The program thinks it’s still on the big screen and the bottom is down below the bottom, in unreachable-land.

The first time it happened, when I realized what it was doing, I went back to the older Mac, opened iTunes, and shrunk the window so it would fit the smaller screen. Then re-copied the whole folder over again. Well, that takes gigs and I thought there had to be a better way.

So I called Apple and although they had other reports of this problem on file, they had never issued a fix that their support people could tell you to do. Sure, you could throw out everything but your iTunes Music folder and then re-import, but you’d lose all your playlists. So Apple escalated me to a level-2 tech and they couldn’t fix it either. They sure tried; tossing out com.apple.itunes.plist and similar files, zapping the PRAM, Safe Booting, all for naught.

While waiting on hold I went back to the old Mac and did the window resize, and then copied everything in the iTunes folder except the actual music files, brought that over to replace the squirrely ones and then just put the music in its place. I launched iTunes, and presto, the new size was remembered and it fit the screen. So the answer was somewhere in that folder. I hoped it wasn’t the iTunes Music Library.xml file because I thought that is where the playlists are stored. It turned out to be the iTunes Library.itl file because it was the only other one that seemed to have no other use.

This is important to know because maybe the old Mac no longer runs, although the drive, or a clone backup, is accessible so going back and resizing the window is impossible. I went home to my Mac and tried simply removing that file to see if that is all it would take. Nope, the bad news is the playlists, as well as the entire library index, are stored in that file and not in the iTunes Music Library.xml file as I had thought. Removing that one and not the other makes no apparent change to the iTunes window.

So the bottom line is everything important is stored in that .itl file. Remove it and the window opens to the default size for your screen, but your playlists are gone and the library is empty. Your only option at that point is to choose Add To Library… from the File menu and choose your iTunes Music folder so it can re-index all the music, apps and videos you have in there. Playlists are gone for good.

This is a rare bug because most people rely either on the Migration Assistant or physically copying files from their backup drive. Also, most people seldom move from a big screen to a smaller one. Another fix would be plugging in an external display that’s big enough to show the large iTunes window and then resizing it. This bug also reappears if you have the window sized to fit your big display and then unplug it to view the laptop screen alone.

Every other window resizes itself when you do that, or resizes if you press the green button. Apple could fix this by moving the window-size information to the .plist file in Preferences. I hope they do that in the next update. If you know anyone on the iTunes development team, please forward this story to them.

Recently I had my first repair call for a OS X Lion installation gone bad. Recovery from this is much worse than I imagined. First the warning:

DO NOT DO THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE MADE A CLONE BACKUP OF YOUR SNOW LEOPARD DRIVE!

Even a TimeMachine backup is not sufficient because full recovery from them is very difficult. You want to be able to boot off of your backup drive and clone it all back, killing Lion completely.

This client had broken all the rules. He left his startup items in place (System Preferences, Accounts, Login Items) instead of deleting them all. Each restart automatically launched incompatible apps, causing crashes. He did not do a Repair Disk and Repair Permissions with Disk Utility first.

He did this on his production Mac Pro, without a clone backup. All of this made his Mac’s Murphy chip glow hot with excitement. If he had the clone, the chip might have let his installation succeed, but due to the other factors he would still have had problems. Without a clone it is impossible to return to Snow Leopard without erasing the drive before installation, and since TimeMachine had already run, all he could have recovered were his documents.

Lion installs an emergency recovery partition on your drive that contains a copy of Disk Utility and a minimal system. You access this by holding down the Option key at startup and choosing it from the icons that immediately appear. At the moment that is the ONLY repair program available; DiskWarrior will need an upgrade to work on a Lion system.

Oh, the icing on the turd: his drive was 98% full. You should never let a startup drive go beyond 80% because the rest of the space is needed by virtual memory for swapfiles, printing for temporary spool files, caches and the like. I was able to get him down to 92% full, which helped, and set him about clearing off the rest of the space hogs to an external drive. Then I had him go buy another drive for SuperDuper and get that running. I believe, but am not certain, that SuperDuper’s latest version is compatible. (2.6.2 is not.)

Disaster story

Speaking of that Murphy chip, another client has suffered hard drive failure on a production iMac with NO backups. This is not repairable due to actual disk damage. I am able to rescue files with DiskWarrior, but that particular iMac does not use industry-standard drives (special heat sensor built onto the drive) so I could NOT keep the old one for later recovery (which I had started to do using DiskWarrior). To fix under warranty Apple wants the dead drive back immediately as an exchange or they want $340 cash for the new one. They give only 48 hours slack for the old drive to be returned. Mac shops do not keep extras of this drive in stock. Oh, and she had deadlines to meet. Those deadlines are now dead.

Most of you already know this and are doing it now, but for those of you who are not, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Would you feel badly if your Mac woke up dead and you lost every document on it, including your email, web bookmarks, Documents folder, iTunes music, etc.? Some people only use their Macs for Web browsing and email and keep the email on the server (Gmail, for instance) so they could lose their data without worry.

Do you use your Mac for production? Could you do without it for a week? With a clone backup you can boot from the clone and finish critical work before taking your Mac in for repair, or move it to a 2nd Mac, if you have one. That 2nd Mac would need to be able to boot from the same drive, impossible if your main Mac is Intel and the other one is PPC. You might have problems launching applications from the clone on the 2nd Mac if the registration is tied to the machine (Adobe is the killer here).

Do you have a lot of documents you do not want to lose, but can do without your Mac while it’s being repaired? A TimeMachine backup is sufficient for you. A daily clone is much more convenient because a TimeMachine backup will still require you to reinstall your applications. If you have CS5 purchased as an upgrade from an earlier CS version, you will need the older disk, or at least the serial number, to install the upgrade. Can you find it?

The answer for all Mac user except the extremely casual user cited above is this: Go buy an external drive now. If you want to combine TM and Clone on the same drive, it should be a terabyte, partitioned into two volumes. Check your internal drive now – how much data is on it? Highlight it with a click and type Command-I. It will tell you the capacity of the disk, how much data is on it now, and space remaining. If you have a 500Gb or 1Tb internal drive but less than 100Gb full, a 500 will do you.

The clone volume can be 200Gb with the other one serving TimeMachine, which does not delete older versions of documents, needs more space. Powered drives are usually 1Tb and are cheaper than unpowered portable 500 drives, but if you have a laptop and want to take your backup with you, the portable is better. Be aware that both could be stolen! Better to leave the backup drive at home or have ANOTHER cloned backup stored elsewhere. Hardcore paranoids rotate backup clones each week, keeping one in a safety deposit box.

It’s your data. DriveSavers charges $1500 and up to recover a dead drive. How lucky do you feel?

Michael Pearce is a friend of PowerMax and can be found at
www.moonlightmac.blogspot.com or www.moonmac.com.

My original intention was to just forget about OS X Lion for a few months, letting others do Apple’s field testing for them. Then I realized I should go ahead and do it because I need to learn as much as possible, in preparation for those clients who will need help with it. But to give it a go, I had to do a lot of preparation.

A Twin System

The recommended way is to make a clone backup of your Snow Leopard (SNL) system so if things fall apart, one can just boot from the clone and copy it all back, wiping Lion off the map. This is always good, and I always run a clone (Super-Duper) backup in addition to my TimeMachine backup.

Since so many of my necessary programs die under Lion I decided I need to have a 10.6 system always around, which is easy to switch over to. Programs I lose under Lion include Eudora, AppleWorks, Word 2004 and Quicken 2006 (and 2007). The only Quicken that runs under Lion is Quicken Stripped Of Any Usefulness, aka “Quicken Essentials.” Intuit doesn’t care; they are in the business of helping Microsoft sell as many computers as possible and they couldn’t care less about their Mac clients.

I already have a keyboard, mouse and 24″ Asus display. I also have a Mac mini that serves the TV set. So I bought an IOGear KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) that supported DVI plugs, which both Macs do, with an adapter. Price: $88.07.

This one also has sound ports, so I can, with a single button press, switch screens, sound output and USB devices. That’s the idea, anyway. Setting it up I learned that while the video and sound switches flawlessly, the USB would not switch. I called the company to find out why, and the tech, who didn’t really seem to know much, told me that their device did not support USB hubs, powered or otherwise, contrary to the page in the manual which shows how to set it up. He even tried to convince me that the mouse had to go in the mouse-marked port and the keyboard in the KB port.

With a lot of trial and error I finally managed to plug the keyboard in and get that switching, and then got the mouse to work plugged into the keyboard. Since the Air has only two USB ports I did not want to use them both to feed the KVM switch because I could get the hub to work by manually switching the plug between the two Macs when I wanted to print something or run the backup drives.

So I almost got what I want and it works well enough to use. That is good because KVM switches that have DVI are uncommon; most of them are VGA, which costs a quarter of what the DVI one cost. Projectors, the most common market use for KVMs are perfectly happy with VGA output since they are not capable of high resolution images.

Downloading Lion

It was the first day, so there was no other way but to buy and download it from the App Store. It took almost 10 hours because my house is located in 2001 where the best DSL signal I can get is 1.5 Mbps. One mile north and I am in 2011 with 20Mbps. I could, of course, hand over 33% of my soul to Comcast and get a good signal from them, but I’d rather have my eyes sucked out by lampreys. (Using Comcast’s TV costs another 33% of your soul, with the final third going for their phone service. You are allowed to keep 1% of your soul for other purposes.)

Any-whilst, late that evening I had the Lion installer on the drive of my MacBook Air, so I quit everything and started it up. I violated several of the rules I and other techs insist on, just to see what would happen. I did not remove my start-up items from Account Preferences, and did not repair permissions first. I had already run Disk Warrior so I knew the Air’s “disk” was okay. Installation took just 20 minutes.

By the way, Apple claims that you need 10.6.8 in order to get Lion from the App Store. That is not true. You can do it with 10.6.6 or 10.6.7. All that is necessary is that you be able to access the App Store, which was introduced with the 10.6.6 update. People on Leopard 10.5 will not be able to get Lion until Apple makes it available on a Flash drive, rumored to be out in August some time.

Using Lion

I was pleased to learn that a lot of my most important utilities (Dropbox, SMC FanControl, Little Snitch, You Control) worked fine. I did have to give up Remember, which popped up reminder messages when configured to. The one that comes with iCal does not work as well.

The other issue I had trouble with was actually on the SNL Mini. I could not get screen or file sharing to work, even though both Macs were on the Internet and all the IP addresses were correct. I called AppleCare, and after an escalation to a network specialist, we found the problem was actually incorrect preferences in Network. There were two AirPorts, one of which had an Ethernet icon. She had me clear them all away and create new ones, one for Ethernet connection and one for AirPort.

That fixed it. Screen sharing works perfectly now.

For those of you who have never used it, screen sharing allows me to display the screen from one Mac on another, and operate it remotely. (I wish that worked well enough over the internet that I could use it with my clients!) But since I now have a laptop that will not run the primary programs I have on the Mini, Screen Sharing means I don’t have to go to the desk and run the Mini to enter something in Quicken or read/write mail in Eudora. This was the last barrier to using Lion full time.

I can always use Safari to access my email when on the Air, which is what I do anyway when I am away from my Mac but have access to another one.

The differences in how Lion works compared to SNL are pretty interesting. Scrolling with fingers on the trackpad or using the arrows (or the Apple Magic Mouse) are backwards. Instead of dragging in the direction you want the scroll bar to go, you instead drag in the direction you want the page to move. It’s more intuitive once you get used to it. Scroll bars disappear when not being used. Check your own use of scroll bars: When you want to move up screen the text is actually moving downward as you drag upward. Bet you never even thought of it as being backwards before.

Windows that always have a scroll bar, like your Documents folder, work the same way when you drag the bar, but to drag downwards with two-finger dragging on the Pad, it moves the opposite way. It’s difficult to visualize and describe, even when I have one hand on the Mini’s slider and the other on the Air’s. Get used to using the arrows on the keyboard more; in Safari and reading email, among other things, they make it much easier.

Sites you should visit to learn more about Lion, including reader reports include the Lion section of Macintouch; the App Compatibility Table; the Lion FAQ on Macintouch;
and MacUpdate, State of the Apps;.
For others, Google is your friend.

New Macs

Along with the release of Lion, Apple shipped two new Macs: an upgraded MacBook Air with the i5 and i7 chip that is in the rest of the MacBook/iMac line (almost twice as fast as the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed) and a new Apple Mac mini. Both have the ThunderPort that can drive an external display (not including Apple’s current model) and various external storages devices which will begin to show up in the stores soon. The new Air, with the biggest SSD and most RAM appears to be $100 cheaper than the last model.

If you have an older Mini now and you have the software that you need to use upgraded to Lion compatibility, this looks like a great buy. It does not have an optical drive, like the Air, so you will need an external USB drive for that. Apple’s is $79 and works only with the Air and the new Mini. The Mini can have either a 500 (standard) or 750Gb hard drive, or the 256G SSD that the Air uses and is unbelievably fast. The base model is $599 but has only 2Gb RAM, so you would want to expand that, at least. It will take up to 8Gb. (4Gb add $100; 8Gb add $300.)

Michael Pearce is a friend of PowerMax and can be found at
www.moonlightmac.blogspot.com or www.moonmac.com.

Which leads a whole lot of people to ask what in the world Apple was thinking, and why?

Keep in mind that I haven’t used Final Cut Pro X yet (although I’ve used Final Cut Pro a fair amount over the years), and I’m no professional video editor. But I’ve read various articles and wandered through the lambasting FCP X has received in the App store, and in doing so, it’s pretty clear that Final Cut Pro X easily could have been called iMovie Pro.

So why didn’t Apple do that and just keep Final Cut Pro available?

My answer, which of course like everyone else’s is based purely on speculation, is that Apple’s decisions are often based on the personality of the company, as opposed to the traditional business reasons most companies consider when making their choices. At the core of Apple’s very essence is the DNA that says, first of all, we won’t be swayed or guided by public opinion, whether it be the experts in any given industry or the public at large. We will make cool products that are as easy to use as possible, and hope that a lot of people buy them.

The second aspect of this personality is that they almost never look back. Once a new product is out, the product it replaced is relegated to a sort of virtual garbage bin. To be sure, Apple is financially successful only as long as folks continue to buy new products on a regular basis. I think this idea has permeated their DNA, and guides a whole lot of what they do.

We also have to understand that the idea that Apple is obligated in any way to continue offering anything just doesn’t hold water with Apple. In the case of Final Cut, they want everyone to be thinking about Final Cut Pro X. Any previous version is yesterday’s news. And that’s even if a group of professionals says “harumph” and goes running off to Avid or Adobe Premiere. You have to hand it to Apple, they adhere to a financial model I have preached to individuals for some time: Don’t spend your time scrabbling around on the ground for pennies and nickels when there are dollars flying over your head. Avid and Adobe are surely delighted at the influx of pros into their business. And there’s nothing wrong with that, because some companies make a very nice living taking care of the pennies and nickels.

Apple stands up and grabs the dollars. The pennies and nickels scream and whine and complain, but Apple can hardly hear ‘em, because they’re standing straight up and grabbing the dollars. In this case, the dollars are the far larger group of people who play around with video, or are getting a bit more sophisticated with video content creation than iMovie can handle. What with the huge amount of video being shot, often via cell phones and inexpensive digital cameras, not to speak of the gigantic forums of YouTube and the ability to post videos other places online, that segment is growing exponentially larger than the professional editing market, which is probably shrinking as a result of the same dynamics.

Whether or not Final Cut Pro X is a better program than previous versions is almost irrelevant. If only judged by the lower price and ease of use, it is in fact far more accessible to the masses.

Apple doesn’t follow markets, it likes to create them. They then ignore the markets that very creation sometimes tramples, even if there were still a few pennies and nickels to add to the bottom line. They are profit driven to be sure, but that’s trumped by being personality driven. I assume they believe that the profits come if the personality gets it right, which, for the last decade or so, it certainly has.

Despite all the derisive comments printed about Final Cut Pro X, it’s really hard to second-guess Apple about anything of late, because more often than not they seem to understand the future better than most. Like a savant, they don’t always communicate the whys and wherefores as to what they’re doing, they just do it and let history take care of itself…

Today a variant appeared that bypasses the security patch. You can protect yourself, though, by first installing the update (go to Software Update under the Apple menu) and the next update by going back to Software Update again, then going into Safari preferences and unchecking the box marked Open “safe” files after downloading. Unchecking that box is the first thing I do whenever I set up a client’s new Mac, but sometimes upgrades and reinstallations recheck it. Go there now and make sure it isn’t checked.

Second, if you get a hysterical-looking popup window that says something like “Viruses detected! Click here to fix!” close it immediately. If it won’t close, next type Command-Q to quit the program. If that fails, go to the Apple menu, choose Force Quit and then quit Safari from there.

Unfortunately, Firefox does not have an “Open Safe Files” checkbox to uncheck. That’s another reason I use Safari as my primary browser.

Finally, periodically visit System Preferences, Accounts, Login Items and become familiar with the list of automatic startups. If a strange one appears you did not ask for, remove it.

As far as all the other System Updates that you may have been ignoring, it’s okay to allow them to update. Just make sure you Repair Disk Permissions with Disk First Aid under Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder) before and after you update. The only exception is for Leopard users: If you are currently running 10.5.7 and have not been told by some other program that you have wanted to install that it needs 10.5.8, keep on skipping that one. It is the one update that has caused the most problems for most people over the years. If you do need it, probably best to have me come out and make sure it goes all right.