With Apple having launched OS X Mountain Lion to the public today, reviews of the company's latest Mac operating system have begun pouring in. Many of the reviews are quite extensive, but we've selected a few choice excerpts to highlight general reaction to the release.
- John Siracusa, Ars TechnicaThe Mac is a platform in transition. In Lion, OS X began shedding the well-worn trappings of traditional desktop computing at an accelerated rate. This trend continues in Mountain Lion. Where Lion stumbled, Mountain Lion regroups and tries again—while still forging bravely ahead in other areas.
As the second major refinement-focused release, it's easy to view OS X 10.8 as "what 10.7 should have been." The flip side of this argument is that the real-world mileage we’ve all put on Lion has helped Apple make the right kinds of adjustments in Mountain Lion. If we'd had to wait for two years after 10.6 for the next major release of OS X, chances are good that the worst of the missteps in Lion would just be landing on our doorsteps today. I'll take 10.8, thanks.- Jason Snell, MacworldAll told, I found Mountain Lion to be a stable, solid release. Even prerelease builds were far more stable than I’ve come to expect from OS X betas, leading me to wonder if Apple’s new annual schedule is leading to more careful incremental updates (with fewer bugs) rather than great leaps (with more, nastier bugs).- Nilay Patel, The VergeUltimately, this is pretty easy: you should spend the $20 and upgrade to Mountain Lion, especially if you have a newer Mac. You’ll gain a handful of must-have features, and everything will get faster and smoother. I haven’t really missed Snow Leopard at all since upgrading, which is remarkable considering how much I disliked Lion.
- Brian Heater, EngadgetTaken as a whole, the features mark a fairly aggressive bid to fold the best of OS X and iOS into one product -- a strategy we first saw with the introduction of the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard, and with the arrival of Launchpad last year in Lion. [...]
That said, it seems time for Apple to make a bold new pronouncement on the desktop front. The company appears to have most of its resources invested in the mobile side -- and there's no question as to why: the iPhone and iPad have reinvigorated the company, making it a computing player on a scale that no one (save, perhaps, for Jobs himself) could have predicted a decade ago. Still, it might be hard for OS X users not to feel neglected -- many of the latest new features feel a bit like iOS hand-me-downs. When and if Apple rolls out a new operating system this time next year, hopefully we'll be seeing a very different side of Mac OS.- Jim Dalrymple, The LoopThere will be tens of thousands of words published on Wednesday when Mountain Lion hits the Mac App Store, but let’s face it, what you really want to know is whether Mountain Lion is worth the upgrade. Let’s get that out of the way now — yes, it is definitely worth it.
Mountain Lion costs $19.99 and comes with more than 200 new features — that’s a bargain at twice the price.
- Jesus Diaz, GizmodoIf Apple doesn't want Microsoft to steal their innovation crown with Windows 8 Metro, they urgently need a new vision that breaks with this unholy mix of obsolete 1980s user interface heritage and iOS full screen skeumorphism.
It feels like Apple has run out of ideas. Or worse, that Apple is too afraid to implement new concepts, fearing it will kill the company's golden goose. Too afraid to change the world once again, as Steve Jobs used to say, one desktop at a time.- MG Siegler, TechCrunchIt must be said that Mountain Lion isn’t really all that different from Lion — hence, the variation of the name (even though mountain lions are technically cougars — insert joke here). But unlike the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which focused on performance and tightening code rather than features, the jump from Lion to Mounta read more..
Thursday 23 August 2012
Roundup of OS X Mountain Lion Reviews: 'Faster and Smoother', 'Incremental', 'Bargain at Twice the Price'
Saturday 11 August 2012
Kim Kardashian-Y Combinator-Yao Ming-Library-Itunes
You know that frustrating feeling when you order clothes online and they fit really poorly, like the target demographic is some weird mix of Kim Kardashian and Yao Ming?Vastrm, a Y Combinator summer 2012 company founded by Jonathan Tang, hopes to give you the perfect, customized fit, starting with polo shirts. read more..
Use TrackSift to tidy up your iTunes library
No matter how hard you try to keep your iTunes library tidy, sooner or later you’ll find cobwebs growing in its corners. TrackSift deletes non-existant files, isolates tracks that lack album art, consolidates genres, and more. read more..
President Barack Obama-Health Care Law-Tax Changes-Tax Hikes
Who gets thumped by higher taxes in President Barack Obama's health care law? The wealthiest 2 percent of Americans will take the biggest hit, starting next year. And the pain will be shared by some who aren't so well off — people swept up in a hodgepodge of smaller tax changes that will help finance health coverage for millions in need. read more..
Honey-Cough
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A spoonful of honey before bed may help little kids with a cough - and their parents - sleep through the night, a new study suggests. Parents also reported that after giving honey to kids, their coughing was less frequent and less severe. Coughs are one of the most common reasons kids go to the doctor, said Dr. Ian Paul, a pediatrician from Pennsylvania State University in Hershey. But, he said, "The therapies for cough and cold symptoms… have problems in that they're not very effective, or not effective at all, and they have the potential for side effects. ... read more..
Thursday 9 August 2012
Diabetes Researchers-Tuberculosis Vaccine-Experimental Cure-Type 1 Diabetes-Human Study
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A controversial experimental cure for type 1 diabetes, using a tuberculosis vaccine invented a century ago, appears to temporarily vanquish the disease, according to a study in a handful of patients led by a scientist long criticized by her peers. There is no guarantee the results from this early-stage trial, published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, will stand up in larger studies, which are now under way. Other diabetes researchers criticized it for going beyond the evidence in its claims about what caused the observed effects. ... read more..
Showrooms-Poshmark
Poshmark, the startup that makes an iPhone app for posting, buying, and selling women's apparel and accessories, has rolled out some new features to accommodate its growing user base. The update its launching today -- curated 'Showrooms' -- aims to help users more effectively sift those items into what is most appealing or interesting to them. read more..
Antipsychotic Medications-Antipsychotics-Healthday News
TUESDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Use of powerful antipsychotic medications such as Abilify and Risperdal to control youngsters with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other behavior problems has skyrocketed in recent years, a new study finds. read more..
More Kids Taking Antipsychotics for ADHD: Study
TUESDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Use of powerful antipsychotic medications such as Abilify and Risperdal to control youngsters with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other behavior problems has skyrocketed in recent years, a new study finds. read more..
Wednesday 8 August 2012
Ibooks Author
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can you add enough value in an iBooks Author presentation to justify leaving out a large segment of the ebook market? Using proprietary formats, the iBooks Author app allows you to lay out your books and add custom elements in ways that go well beyond the EPUB standard. Your books look exactly as you intend them to; you can build interactive widgets that leverage the power of HTML and Javascript for new kinds of interaction. This extended standard means that iBooks Author excludes Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms, and it also cuts away anyone who might purchase and read your ebook on an iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks Author in its current state is Apple only and iPad only. [Note that you're free to repurpose your text, images and other content for those other platforms if you want to build Kindle/Nook-friendly editions. The iBooks Author licensing agreement says you can't sell the output from iBooks Author anywhere but the Apple iBookstore, but your content is yours and you can use other tools to build for other ebook platforms. -Ed.] That's not the entire picture, however. For some authors, specifically those creating highly-interactive titles, their choice hasn't really been about Amazon-or-iBooks, since standard EPUB represents a fairly static output technology. Their decision is more about choosing between an iBooks Author ebook versus a custom, standalone iPad app. I have encountered book creators who have gone in both directions. iOS development house Tapity chose to go iBooks. Founder Jeremy Olson told me, "To build an interactive digital book, our choice of platforms was really straightforward. Kindle doesn't yet allow the kind of rich interaction that we were looking to build so it was really between building an app versus building an iBook. When iBooks Author was announced in January, the choice was a no-brainer: It's pretty simple: cost to build, time to build, price you can charge, and less competition." Tapity's first entry to this field was Cleaning Mona Lisa. An interactive iBook, it introduced readers to painting techniques and the need for restoration. Host Lee Sandstead offers a series of enthusiastic lectures about the topic through embedded videos. Interactive widgets guide readers through virtual "cleaning" exercises, revealing the hidden colors and details hidden by the debris of time.
"As a team of creatives, building Cleaning Mona Lisa with iBooks Author cost us next to nothing but our time," Olson said. "Just a few thousand dollars. I expect building an app with the same kind of user experience could have cost us close to a hundred thousand dollars to contract out the programming. This makes building iBooks far less risky than building apps."
He pointed out how effective this choice was. "Programming a project generally consumes half or more of the development time. With iBooks Author, we design it and it's done (apart from just a few small HTML 5 widgets we had to program). This also cuts out the process of designing something in Photoshop and exporting it for use in an app."
Going iBooks also helped sustain the book's bottom line for sales. "With apps, $2.99 is a premium price. With books, folks expect to pay more and so $2.99 was an extremely reasonable starting price for our book. With future books we think that we can even charge much more. With higher prices we don't have to worry about the volume so much." Monster Costume CEO Kyle Kinkade opted for a custom app instead. Having debuted in the ebook scene with the highly popular Bartleby's Book of Buttons, Monster Costume is known for producing high-quality, extremely interactive titles with a strong atte read more..