Mac OS X

MacRyu’s Mac Setup 2014

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So in 2007 I posted my old setup based around my 2007 24″ Aluminum iMac and 12″ iBook on Flickr.

Then in 2011 I posted my revamped setup based on the same iMac but with a relatively new 2010 MacBook Air.

After another 3 years and spending the last 12 months not bothered with updating this site, I want to reboot this site with my first decent post – my current Mac setup.

And here it is.

2014 Mac setup - 1

The iMac, now in its seventh year of service, has been semi-retired and is only used sparingly these days. Its main duties have been taken over by the 2012 11″ MacBook Air, which is connected to a Crossover 27″ high resolution monitor (2560X1440, LG’s IPS panel, the same ones used in the current 27″ Thunderbolt Display) via Dual-link DVI, which I run in clamshell mode for the time being. It will be eventually replaced by the next Mac Mini, whenever that thing is refreshed, because running clamshell mode can be a pain in the arse for long term use.

2014 Mac setup - 2

The iMac is these days used as a BT machine, iTunes server or for casual file access when I don’t want to turn on 4 switches just to access or print a file. It has been upgraded with a OCZ SSD last year, and boots into Mavericks in about 6 seconds flat, which is extremely speedy for a 7 year old machine. It is also connected to my HDD docks for serious backing up duties.

2014 Mac setup - 4

The Harman Kardon Soundsticks III is the world’s favourite computer speakers (they are almost always in every celebrity’s home or desks, just watch TV!) and I finally saved enough to get them last year. The iPad mini stand was a real replica of the see-through acrylic ones found in authentic Apple Stores, and was a gift from my brother a few weeks ago. Also on the table are docks for my iPhones (the 5S is being used to take the photos, that is why it is not in its modified Belkin dock), iPads, and other pieces of tech toys including the PS Vita 2002, Cowon Z2, Nexus 4 and the Xiaomi Note+. Oh and I love my Starbucks Reserve Mug.

2014 Mac setup - 3

Yes, those are the Sony consoles hiding in the dark corner.

Hopefully this site will still be around in 2017, when I will (most probably) post my updated Mac setup again.

Follow me on twitter @ryuworks or @macryudotcom (official account for this site). And join MacNet at http://sgmac.net for all Apple related discussions on FB!

WWDC 2013 predictions?

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Sometimes I wonder why people even crave for such posts when everything is out there in the open, but I guess there are some who would not bother with the research.

I am just going to rehash everything that is already all over the web, adding some of my opinions if necessary.

1. Completely new UI (User Interface) for iOS 7

Honestly, I do not know what to expect. Jony Ive has designed the majority of the Apple hardware we know and love today, but his take on UI is still uncharted territory. As far as we know, he was, to quite an extent, involved in the original iPhone’s UI design back in 2006/2007 but everything after that was under Forstall. The whole “flat look” rumour thing that has been reported widely sends chills down my spine – I absolutely will hate iOS losing most of the fun elements it is known for.

However, if looking the gradients and gloss means a much slicker and professional looking UI (think Tweetbot, think Reeder), I am all for it. It is highly unlikely the hordes of software engineers will let Jony Ive change iOS into something as tasteless as Windows Phone 8, after all. Besides, the Brit has impeccable taste. A clean look, less gloss, less gradient, but with lots of colours and fun elements will be the hallmark of a modern iOS. Besides, change just for change’s sake, for once, is something that iOS needs to keep a majority of their bored customer base from “looking for a change”.

2. Mac OS X 10.9

As with iOS 7, OS X 10.9 must be the most well kept secrets in Cupertino right now. Rarely in the past two years has information about the two new operating systems been so tight-lipped that even now, less than a week from WWDC 2013, there has been no leaks, no screenshots of new features or the new UI (in the case of iOS 7). Rumour-mill has it that engineers have been taken from 10.9 development to help speed up iOS 7’s development pace, and that has resulted lesser changes to 10.9.

Like many of the traditionalists I am more interested in OS X than iOS, and a much improved OS X will perk me up way more than a completely revamped iOS. That said, though, OS X is extremely mature and with much of the underlying changes needed for a modern desktop OS already done in Snow Leopard and Lion, all that is left to do for the next few years is tweaking OS X to perform better, and address the outstanding issues still present today.

An improved Finder (as rumoured) will be welcomed, and hopefully the UI for Calendar and Contacts will be changed to something slicker. Mail.app is in crazy need of a refresh after many years of bloat, though most peeps these days run Sparrow, or more recently, Airmail, as a replacement for Mail.app. I really doubt a new file system will debut anytime soon to replace HFS+, definitely not in 10.9. There is also some speculation that widgets and Dashboard might be discontinued, but I hope that they do keep Dashboard as I still use it everyday for currency conversion.

What other changes do OS X need? You tell me. I am really happy with how everything works so far.

3. New iPhones and iPads?

NO. NO NEW IPHONES AND IPADS. PLEASE. THESE ARE COMING IN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER.

I am going to slap anyone who tells me that he or she is disappointed because there is no new iPhone/iPad at WWDC.

4. New Macs?

Haswell is just released. So new Retina MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs are definitely coming. There are rumours that the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro will go on a diet and get slimmer (thanks to crazy power efficiency in the new Haswell platform), and that will be definitely welcomed. The current rMBP 13″ is not that much lighter from the old 13″ MBP (non-retina) right now, and is not tempting enough for anyone to switch.

Oh ah, and a price drop across the whole line of Retina MacBook Pros is much needed (will and probably come).

You can follow MacRyu at @ryuworks on Twitter and @ryu on App.net.

Thoughts about Lion – OS X’s evolution

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It’s been a while since I wrote something of (questionable) substance on MacRyu.com, and since Lion is just days away from us, I figured I should put something up.

No, I’m not going to detail the changes in Lion and give you some kind of a technical walkthrough. That job should be left to the pros, namely, John Siracusa.

What I want to write about is what I think Lion represents, in the grander scheme of things I call “The Evolution of OS X”. I personally believe that there are two very specific generations of OS X releases that ended and began at 10.5. I will be using the cat names and the version numbers interchangeably throughout the writeup, so if you are confused just google the cat names from 10.0 till 10.7. LOL.

Here goes.

If there’s one specific theme that Lion represents it will be “the next generation”.

Yes, I know Lion is the next OS X, I know Lion is new, but those are not why I think Lion represents “the next generation” of OS X.

One thing casual users and recent switchers do not understand about the last 2 OSes, Leopard and Snow Leopard, is how they represent a major shift in OS X’s development.

Read more

OS X 10.6 will be announced at WWDC

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TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) reports that OS X 10.6 will be announced and seeded at WWDC, and the Macrumor forums get flooded with stupid reactions saying that Jan 09 is way too fast to release 10.6.

Are these people morons or idiots? Or recent switchers?

10.6 for a Jan 09 release is just right. And the people who complained that Apple cannot make decent software in 14 months are dumb. Did we have a lot of problems when Tiger came out within 12 months after Panther did? Leopard was a different case scenario because much of the code base was modified and changed, and you can even consider Leopard to be a much different OS than previous OS X versions were. 10.6 will be a version that builds onto the foundation that was created with Leopard.

Now, I wonder which cat will 10.6 be named after?

Adobe should burn in hell

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Photoshop sucks. Adobe sucks. Everyone gets a kick out of pirating Adobe software, just like how everyone does with each pirated copy of Microsoft software.

No 64-bit Photoshop for Mac till CS5? You know what, Adobe? You can keep your CS5 for yourself and your Microsoft bitches.

Photoshop will become irrelevant in 2 years. Die. Photoshop. Die Adobe. Die Lightroom. Die.

Updates and more updates

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So 10.5.1 is finally out. Just installed on my iMac and am looking forward to see how it goes.

An update that the rest of the Mac sites have yet to report on so far is yet another firmware update for the 4th Gen Aluminum iMacs’ Ati Radeon HD2600 Pro Graphics. Installed it as well, and ran Openmark to see if there’s any diff in OpenGL performance.

Notch.

This sucks manz.

Here‘s the link for the update.

Updates – Leopard and my iPhone

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Sorry for the long hiatus. It will still continue for a while as I have been busy with lots of stuff.

Meanwhile here’s some updates.

Finally Leopard shipped. And I am the proud owner of a copy of Leopard, LEGALLY. Though it didn’t cost me the full 241 singapore dollars. Hehz. And you know? Leopard rocks. It’s rock solid and stuff.

One bad point: All the various cracks/hacks are broken, including my no-cd crack for Call of Duty 2!!! Darn.

Here’s a picture of my Leopard Desktop.

Leopard Desktop

And I finally got my iPhone. SMS is probably the weakest phone-related app. Instead of having SMS chats appear like iChat chats, it will be a lot more functional to make them like email, having the ability to forward SMSes and to send to lots of people at the same time. Yet Apple doesn’t get this. Freaking hell irritating.

And well the typing was irritating for the first 2 to 3 days. Now I type darn fast, but still with one finger instead of two.

And damn the 3rd Party Apps. They make the OS kinda crashy from time to time. And they don’t seem as cool and powerful the hackers have made them out to be. I have had better experience IM-ing with Meebo.com and Jivetalk rather than MobileChat and Apollo. (Edit: Turns out that Summerboard was the evil causing all the crap here.)

But I love my iPhone.

Just a short update here, will try to post more stuff when I have time.

Brand new Aluminium (silver and black!!) MacBooks in October!!!

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I am very very excited about this piece of news.

According to 9to5Mac, the same guys whom, with the help of their chinese spies, revealed to the world the shape of the new iPod Nano and the presence of the iPod Touch way before everyone else, Apple is preparing to ship brand new MacBooks in the 4th quarter of 2007, which starts in less than ten days!

The great points about these new MacBooks?

1. Aluminum Enclosure instead of the current Polycarbonate ones

2. 2 colours, Silver and Anodized Black Aluminum (Black Aluminum!!! This thing is going to be really beautiful!)

3. Priced AGGRESSIVELY (Which may mean even cheaper prices than today!!!)

4. Similar design to the current one, but with a smaller bezel and thus a smaller footprint

5. Considerably Thinner!!!

6. Lighter!!!

7. Special Touchpads!!!! (Multi Touch functions? Backlit Touchpads?)

As you can see, I have every single right to be damn hell excited about this piece of news. And according to 9to5Mac, their sources have already seen the MacBooks in physical form, which will indicate that production is already in progress, and that their sources are probably people working in the china factories.

The even more interesting thing here is, upon looking up some archives, there was a similar post by Cruchgear.com a few months back! They believed that the MacBooks are due for October. They were ready to ship them back in June together with Leopard, but now that Leopard is delayed, the MacBooks are delayed too.

So how accurate do I think this piece of news is? Extremely accurate. Looking by the products they have released in the past few months, it’s extremely clear that Apple is going to transit into using more aluminum for their production, as evident by the latest iPods and iMacs. And one does get the feeling that the iMac, the coming MacBooks and the iWork and iLife suites were actually planned to be released together with Leopard but did not managed to do so due to the delay of Leopard. iWork and iLife had to be released earlier, and to do that some code/library frameworks from Leopard actually has to be transferred into Tiger during OS X updates installation for them to actually work. Furthermore, the design focus of the recent iMac and iPod updates do prove that these new Aluminum MacBooks are coming. Remember the main points that Steve Jobs used to praise the new iPod Classics and the new iMacs (the MacBooks, iMacs, iPod always have the privilege of sharing the same design focus ever since the iMac G5 era)? “all-Aluminium construction” (okay for the iMac it was aluminum and glass, technically, but I guess you can agree with me that the glass was there to make the screen look glossy) and “they are thinner!”. Furthermore, the 2 colours of the iPod Classic fully explains the Silver and Anodized Black Aluminum colours of the new MacBooks!

Ahhh…. I can’t wait. This is so much more exciting than the iPod Touch. I totally forgot about that piece of iPhone wannabe crap already!

I should expect some of my friends will not be too pleased about the update since they have just purchased their MacBooks recently, but well, guess what? I think many girls will snap at the chance to buy what is possibly the last batch of lovely white polycarbonate MacBooks from Apple!

Life is great. And if you do remember, the first 30 years were really just the beginning. Welcome to 2007.

The Leopard Question

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So yeah, we know that Leopard is now due for June. The big question everyone is asking now is exactly, are there secret features in Leopard? Developers and techies alike are both complaining that the 10.5 developers’ seed is both buggy, and have questioned the missing “secret features” that Steve Jobs promised at the WWDC keynote last year. They were puzzled as to why the secret features have yet to be seeded for testing, and many even believed that the secret features were in fact non-existant, being nothing more than Steve Jobs’ marketing ploy.

Well, I for one won’t bet on that, Leopard with the current features are just too empty to require Apple spending more than 2 years developing it. As for secret stuff, there’s definitely something being held back by Apple. Well for one thing, Leopard was (I believed) scheduled for a 1st April release. A few weeks before Apple’s twenty-first birthday, some Apple trainers were apparently notified to be on standby for a 1st April release of Leopard. Then 2 weeks later the rumours about the delay to June was everywhere, and it seemed that Apple did have a last minute delay after all. As to what caused the delay no one seems to have any ideas.

Well for one thing we do know that at one point of time, Leopard was ready. Then

All of a sudden the above does not matter anymore. Apple just announced a delay for Leopard to October due to the need to transfer manpower over to the iPhone side until it’s released in June in America.

………….

Thanks ah iPhone. Now I don’t have my new Mac, I don’t have my new iWork, I don’t have my new Leopard, and I don’t have my new iPhone, thanks to Mr. Jobs’ “Asia 2008”. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!