Mac-Techs.com

The arrival of Apple’s newest operating system is another amazing accomplishment by our favorite fruit-based computing company.

• Once again, Apple manages to eke out more speed, optimize the OS, and introduce new technologies in one operating system upgrade on the same hardware. Translation: faster, better, uses less disk space.
• The installer will apparently work on any Intel Mac regardless of whether Leopard/10.5 is installed.
• Some minor changes have occurred to the user interface, such as the dock, column views and Expose.
• The gamma point for monitor display has been set to Windows standard 2.2, so the screen looks a bit more saturated than the previously.
• Snow Leopard signals the end of PPC support, so if you were seeking to upgrade your PPC Mac, get a Leopard 10.5 installer now. Rumor has it that Apple has discontinued sales of 10.5, which is a PPC Mac’s only way to upgrade.
• The installer removes carbon libraries, so typically an install will give you more disk space than before.

On my Mac Mini, the installation left me with 18 gigs (!) of free space, a totally unexpected bonus. I don’t know whether to think that my disk had some errors that were resolved, or there was just a lot of unnecessary OS files.

If you want to learn more about Snow Leopard, check out this great review by John Siracusa on Ars Technica. All you wanted to know about Snow Leopard but were afraid to ask.

Many creative professionals have storage needs that dwarf the utilization of everyday folks. A typical home user might have 10 gigs of data for their OS X installation, plus some photos, some music, some video clips…..15-20 gigs max is pretty typical.

If they start getting into digital photography or downloading .mp3′s, their storage needs will consequently go up as well, perhaps into 20, 30 or 40 gig range.

Working creative professionals, on the other hand, are another type of user entirely. A photographer, videographer, or graphic artist can routinely create, manipulate and store projects in the gigabyte range. Having terabytes of storage (1000 gigs per terabyte) is normal these days.

While the larger storage capacity of terabyte drives is welcome, the ability to move data back and forth between volumes hasn’t expanded at the same rate. Mac users are using Firewire 400 and 800, and USB 2 as built-in options, plus tower users can add an e-SATA card. Higher speeds would be dependent on high outlay protocols like fiber optic.

Most small business professionals are using their built-in ports for transfer of data. A recent client of mine has two Terabyte drives with Firewire 400 ports. Merely copying them would take hours.

In all practicality, to maintain a backup of these types of arrangements would mean going to a RAID mirror plus backup. With RAID mirroring, two volumes are exact copies in real time, meaning if one volume breaks for any reason, the other one is still online. Mirrors are not a backup, they are added redundancy.

If this RAID mirror was backed up to single or multiple terabyte drives periodically, you would have a fairly good backup scheme. The mirror provides redundancy and robustness file service, the backup provides disaster recovery.

A typical scenario I might set up for a client would be to duplicate the boot drive onto another bootable volume updated nightly. In this fashion, the working environment would be replicated and easily accessed if the boot drive failed for any reason.

The data is kept on another volume entirely, one that is in a RAID configuration either RAID 5 or RAID mirror. That volume and the boot volume are backed up to a final leg of the backup, one which hopefully goes offsite after completion.

The main concern is to get this set up and operating right away. Drive failures have a way of happening at very inconvenient times like when deadlines are pressing due. The last thing you want to do under pressure is to restore from backup which could take hours to do, hence the utility of the duplicated boot volume plus RAID’ed data volume.

This is a nice article discussing some of the competitive aspects of Apple’s and Microsoft’s upcoming OS updates. The really good thing about the article is this graphic:

‘No Justin Long’….a great reason to buy Windows 7!

I’ve been using this new program that is a replacement utility for Activity Monitor, the Apple created software for tracking resource on your Mac in real time. AtMonitor is Activity Monitor times ten. Very useful, very cool. Here is an excellent review of AtMonitor on MacFixit. Probably explains this better than I’m willing to do on my blog. You can download AtMonitor direct from the developer website.

  Below video looks best in full screen view.

Mac users who have been using their Macs for some years are probably familiar with the Windows Media player application. This small, poorly supported Microsoft application ran on OS X with the sole function of playing .wmv video clips. It usually ran pretty poorly and looked pretty buggy compared to Quicktime player.

In the past couple of years, Microsoft gave up on supporting Windows Media player and licensed their player rights to Flip4Mac, which now produces the Flip4Mac player which can also play Windows media files. Real Player is another media player, once somewhat ubiquitous, now becoming a sidenote in media playback that also handles .wmv files.

When you want really robust media playback, VLC Player is the application to download.

From their site:

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, …) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.

It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn’t need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.

So, do yourself a favor and download this freeware application.