Lion's New Recovery Partition

This morning, shortly after Lion hit the App Store for the general public, I posted a link to several notable reviews of Lion where you can read all about the nit-picky details that have changed or been added/removed. I won't attempt to write a comprehensive review of my own, simply because people like John Siracusa will do a much better job at it than I will. One notable new feature of the operating system that I would like to point out though, is the new recovery partition that Lion makes when it installs itself. Apple has posted an entire knowledge base article detailing how this process works:

OS X Lion includes a new feature called Lion Recovery that includes all of the tools you need to reinstall Lion, repair your disk, and even restore from a Time Machine backup without the need for optical discs. A lot of people noted that the new Mac Minis released this morning no longer contain optical drives built-in. Jim Dalrymple actually managed a brief interview with Brian Croll, Apple's vice president of OS X product marketing who told Jim: A new Mac mini was also released with faster processors, and surprisingly to some people, no optical drive. Apple said the popularity of the Mac App Store helped with that decision. “We found that the majority of customers don’t use the optical drive on a regular basis,” said Moody. “Things are changing. The primary use for the optical drive was to install software, but the Mac App Store provides a more efficient method for doing that.” Clearly Apple is not afraid to eliminate components that customers don't regularly use in order to take advantage of the extra space to add new hardware on the inside. They first did this with the MacBook Air, and now the Mini. As John Gruber says: Optical drives are the new floppy drives.

John Siracusa Reviews OS X 10.7 Lion - The Review To End All Reviews

John Siracusa has released his OS X 10.7 Lion Review. In case you aren't aware, John Siracusa is the king of Apple OS reviews. The PDF of his review is 105 pages long and has a table of contents for pete's sake. A Kindle Edition is available for $4.99 to get the article all on one page. Other notable Lion reviews that are out: 1. Shawn Blanc's review, "OS X Lion". 2. Benjamin Brooks, The Brooks Review, "Time for the Big Cat". 3. Jason Snell, Editor in Chief at Macworld Magazine, "Apple Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)". 4. Wayne Dixon, a friend of mine, reviews both Lion and Lion Server in a combined review. 5. Not really a complete review per say, but a brief commentary, Matthew Guay wrote on tech inch, "First Thoughts on Mac OS X Lion". In addition to Lion being released, Apple released new MacBook Airs, new Mac Minis, and a new Thunderbolt Cinema display. I've been using Lion since early May, due to the fact that I'm an Apple developer and I've had access to the developer previews since earlier this year. Developer Preview 3 and 4 were stable enough for me to run as my main machine, with the GM Seed (retail version) having been released 2 weeks ago, it was just icing on the cake. My system has been very stable, with perhaps the only app to semi-regularly crash being Chrome, which was the norm for me on Snow Leopard as well. I highly recommend Lion. Mission Control, Launchpad, Versions, the recovery partition, the new About This Mac panel, I could go on and on. This is a good upgrade. Get it.

Lion Tip: Quickly Enter 'Jiggly' Mode in Launchpad

From David Chartier at Finer Things Mac:

Quickly enter (and exit) “jiggly app mode” in Lion’s LaunchPad One of Lion’s new features is called LaunchPad, and it is essentially the Springboard home screen from iOS, adapted for organizing and launching apps on the Mac. Similar to iOS, you can click-hold on any app icon to enter app organization mode, also non-technically known as “jiggly mode”. But to get in and out of this mode even more quickly, you can simply hold the Option key. Icons will jiggle while the key is depressed, so you can move them between pages, drag them onto each other to create folders, and delete them. Let go of Option and your changes are saved. Someone with better video editing skills than I needs to cut together a short 30 second music video of the icons dancing to latin music by hitting the option key to time the icons' 'dancing' to the music. Free idea. You're welcome.

Clueless Commenter Of The Week

This morning I was attempting to read John Gruber's link to Daniel Bailey's article he wrote earlier this week entitled, "Apple, Is It Time To Shut Safari Down?". Apparently, due to everyone across the entire Internet pointing and laughing at Daniel over this absurd article where he almost goes a whole sentence at one point before getting a fact wrong, his article has been pulled down. It was pulled down at ConceivablyTech, The Motley Fool, Extremetech, and a few other places that syndicate his drivel. Luckily, Google still has the article cached. The article, as Gruber said on Daring Fireball, was as bad as I expected it to be. However, the comments were particularly bad. This one takes the cake though:

Justin Clements: I have never understood these "browser wars". I just want a browser that displays a web site. How hard is it to understand that? MS introduce IE8, because IE7 was bad? Firefox release 4 (or 5, i dunno) because 3 was awful? Safari 5 because 4 was so bad? I don't get it. No Justin, you do not.

Final Cut Pro X Released

Well. The day is finally here. Final Cut Pro X has been released. Already announced back in the spring, but just to reiterate the price has been cut from $999 to $299, a move that is sure to make Avid and Adobe nervous. You can buy it on the Mac App Store, right now. While no full featured reviews are out yet, Macworld has had an early release version for the past week or so and their excellent video guy Gary Adcock has written a first-look about the new application:

Apple has revamped Final Cut Pro's hands-on user experience in three major areas: Editing, media organization, and post-production workflow. New tools such as the Magnetic Timeline, Clip Connections, Compound Clips, and Auditions provide a smooth, intuitive editing experience. With the rise of data-centric workflows and tapeless video recording, organizational tools such as Content Auto-Analysis, Range-based keywords, and Smart Collections work in the background to automate formerly tedious and time-consuming manual processes. Post production workflows now offer customizable effects, integrated audio editing, color grading, and a host of streamlined delivery options.

New Futurama Icon Set Released From the Iconfactory

If you're a long time Mac & Twitter user, then you're probably familiar with The Iconfactory, makers of the original native Mac Twitter client, Twitterrific. Gedeon Maheux, Principal/Designer, at The Iconfactory just released Volume 7 of their long running freeware Futurama icon cet. This latest set is called 'Extras' and is comprised with many of the supporting characters of the show. This icon set has been long in the making, with Volume 1 having been released back in August of 2005. Each icon set is available for Mac or Windows. Also, if you own a license to The Iconfactory's Candybar App, you can download the icon set in a Candybar compatible container file. If you want to download all 7 volumes of this set, you can do so on their Web site.

Horrible, Almost Unforgivable Dropbox Authentication Bug Yesterday

Christopher Soghoian emailed Dropbox, posted over on Pastebin telling them how he had discovered a massive security vulnerability on Dropbox in the wee hours of yesterday morning. If you want to read the entire email thread of how he discovered it, do so, but the short of it is, for a period of 4 hours yesterday, anyone could log into any dropbox account without having to know their password. Any password worked for any account. Dropbox says they've fixed the issue, patching the bug just 5 minutes after they found out about it, however that doesn't change the fact that this happened. If you, like me, are worried about if anyone logged into your account during that period, check your Dropbox account event log.

The Price Of "Free"

Richard Muscat, writing at Serious Simplicity:

My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles. I think this piece hits it out of the park. Why should you price your product as a pay-for-service or good? This article lays out all of the reasons and why free should never be your decision.