macOS Archive

Via Ars Technica: "After almost 10 years of testing, Quicksilver lays the beta tag to rest (if the lack of an eszett brings a tear to your eye, you can always reminisce by hitting option+S on your keyboard). What does this release mean? It means more than just a change in the version numbering system - it signifies a maturity of Quicksilver and a sign of what's to come." Quicksilver is fantastic for those of us for whom command+space and the dock combined is not enough. While I personally don't use Quicksilver (I use Spotlight through command+space to launch applications), I know of quite a few Mac users who swear by it.

"Since Apple has announced the Fusion drive, people have wondered if it's possible to use the fusion drive on older machines with a SSD and HDD." Fun with Core Storage (via John Siracusa).

How this passed through Apple's Mountain Lion testing is beyond me. "If one edits a document, then chooses Save As, then BOTH the edited original document and the copy are saved, thus not only saving a new copy, but silently saving the original with the same changes, thus overwriting the original." Just goes to show: do not mess with my ability to save my stuff. There is no one-size-fits-all for this kind of delicate stuff.

Apple has just released Mountain Lion to the Mac App Store. For a measly $20, Lion users can move to the new release right now, and honestly, at that price, there's little reason not to for the Mac users among us. It's not a huge or massive release or anything, but if you're a fan of iOS, you're going to love all the OS bits and pieces that are being transferred to your desktop. Have fun installing, and, as always, be sure to read the only review that matters: John Siracusa's 25000 words long review (that's almost as long as the thesis I wrote to earn my master's degree, holy cripes!). I know what I'll be reading today on my brand new Nexus 7. If you can, please support Siracusa by buying the ebook version on Amazon (currently stuck in the review process, should show up any minute now). Why? Because Siracusa's kind of technology writing is something we need to cherish, because we have less and less of it.

"I've lost track of the many reasons that have been given for the switch to Intel, but this I know for sure: no one has ever reported that, for 18 months, Project Marklar existed only because a self-demoted engineer wanted his son Max to be able to live closer to Max's grandparents." Amazing.

Adam Fields and Perry Metzger have been investigating the serious performance issues people are experiencing with Lion. "Frequent beachballs, general overall slowness and poor UI responsivness, specific and drastic slowdowns on every Time Machine run, high memory utilization in Safari Web Content, mds, and kernel_task processes, large numbers of page outs even with a good deal of available RAM, and high amounts of RAM marked as inactive which is not readily freed back to other applications, with page outs favored." Apparently the issue is that the "virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk". I won't make myself popular with a certain part of our readership, but really, is this considered a new problem? Mac OS X has always had terrible memory management, and where Windows has continuously become better at it, Mac OS X seems to have been stagnant and even getting worse. This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else.