Leander Kahney's Blog, page 1507

It Just Got Really Easy to Install Mac OS X Lion on Your Hackintosh

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It just got a whole lot easier to install Lion on your hackintosh, thanks to Tonymacx86′s new "UniBeast" bootable USB drive utility. In case you didn't know, a hackintosh is basically a PC that's been modified to run OS X, and some people create pretty sweet hackintosh setups for half the price of an Apple-branded equivalent.

UniBeast is a new tool that makes it easy to install Apple's newest desktop OS, Lion, on your hackintosh. Not only does UniBeast get rid of the need for an iBoot CD, but it also creates a bootable Lion USB flash drive.

Once you have a copy of Lion from the Mac App Store, UniBeast creates all-in-one bootable Lion USB drive that can even be used for system recovery. After you use UniBeast to boot into Lion on your hackintosh, MultiBeast is used as a post-installation tool that lets you find and install your needed drivers and enable boot from hard drive.

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Because UniBeast is designed for a 8GB flash drive, you don't need an optical drive on your hackintosh to install OS X anymore. The instructions for setting up your hackintosh with UniBeast are fairly straightforward. You have to format your USB drive with the Master Boot Record partition scheme and then run the UniBeast installer. The rest, as they say, is a cake walk.

My first laptop was a Dell hackintosh, and I absolutely loved tinkering with that thing. It was always difficult to upgrade OS X when a new version of Leopard came out, and you always had to be super conscious of your drivers and iBoot CD compatibility.

It's great to see tools like UniBeast and MultiBeast make hackintoshing easier. Tonymacx86 has a full and detailed tutorial on how to use both tools on his blog.

(via Gizmodo)

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Published on November 02, 2011 16:01

Mike Elgan on Macbreak Weekly: Jobs Wasn't Evil, He was a Work in Progress

Technology columnist and occasional Cult of Mac (CoM) contributor Mike Elgan was on Macbreak Weekly Tuesday talking about his recent CoM piece, "In Defense of Steve Jobs." The story led to an interesting dialogue between he and Leo Laporte, one with a Jobsian twist I'd never heard before.

Essentially, Mike says many of the horrendous grievances Jobs affected on others, the ones we hear about like him ripping off Steve Wozniak, were the cause of youth and ignorance. Elgan argues, Jobs' infamous lack of empathy, his selfishness in business dealings, these are the traits of many 20-something males and certainly not exclusive to Jobs.

Elgan's point, in my words: Steve may have started life as a jerk, but the years changed him; his family; his cancer; changed him. And by the end, though obviously not perfect, he was not the mean spirited, penurious Steve from those stories of legend we so often hear.

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Published on November 02, 2011 15:15

Apple Releases iOS 5.0.1 to Developers, Fixes Battery Life Bug and Adds More Gestures for First-Gen iPad

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Apple has seeded iOS 5.0.1 to developers in the iOS Dev Center. The beta adds enhanced multitasking gestures for the original iPad, fixes the battery life bug that has extensively plagued iPhone 4S users, and adds several other fixes.

Apple also issued a statement prior to seeding this developer beta saying that it was aware of the battery life bug in iOS 5. The public 5.0.1 update is expected to drop in a few weeks.

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Published on November 02, 2011 15:04

Google Has Already Pulled Their Crappy 'Native' Gmail App

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Well, that didn't take long. Just three hours after Google released their official Gmail for iOS app, they've already pulled it.

Why? Well, despite our initial enthusiasm, it kind of sucked.

How did it suck? Well, for one thing, there was nothing native about the app: it was just Gmail in a web window. None of the supported features, like push or badge notifications, actually worked. And when you loaded the program up, the first thing you got was a big error.

Totally dumb. A piece of crap. It was actually worse than loading up Gmail in Mobile Safari. Let's hope that Google just released the wrong app by mistake.

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Published on November 02, 2011 12:04

Siri Hacked To Accept Custom Commands

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Siri's a smart little moppet, but she can't do everything for you. You can't ask her to find you a picture of a dog from Google Images, or see if the guy you have a blind date with that night is a registered sex offender, or really do anything that Siri and Wolfram Alpha aren't already programmed to do.

The good news is that Siri hacker chpwn has teamed up with GitHub hacker Aman Gupta to figure out how to add custom Siri commands. The bad news is it's quite complicated, and there's no way to do it right now for yourself.

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The example Gupta used on Twitter was showing Siri recognizing and responding to a custom command, "Hubot image me iPhone." It seems to be working for him well enough, but don't expect to be running custom Siri commands anytime soon: not only will it require a jailbreak of your iPhone 4S, which is far off, but the method the hackers are using is by no means ready for mass distribution.

[via iDownloadBlog]

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Published on November 02, 2011 11:30

Retrospect 9 for Mac Makes Secure Backups More Painless Than Ever

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If you've been using a Mac for any real length of time, you probably know Retrospect. They've been releasing great backup tools to Mac users since the Metazoic age of MacOS 6, and despite coming under the thrall of various corporate overlords from time to time, Retrospect's still hard at work making great software… and Retrospect 9 for Mac might be their best backup client yet.

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What's new? Growl notifications and AES-256 encryption, for one, making Prospect 9 a corporate level backup solution. Task workflows and WebDAV support are now in the mix, as well as a network backup option supports all flavors of machines, including Mac, Linux and Windows, and the whole software package has gotten a shot in the arm to run even faster and prettier than ever before.

How much? $129 for five users, or $479 for a single-server, 20 seat license. Pay $1699 and use it on as many servers and as many users as you want. Or just download the free trial.

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Published on November 02, 2011 10:47

Steve Jobs Bio Nets 379,000 Sales in First Week

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Jobs biography on Amazon's top-selling list.

Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is catnip for Mac lovers, selling 379,000 copies during the first week. Although it doesn't compare to the 4 million iPhone 4S handsets sold during its first weekend, the book's sales were enough to leave best-selling fiction author John Grisham in the literary dust.

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks retail, online and ebook sales, the highly-promoted biography of Jobs sold three times as many copies as Grisham's The Litigators, but failed to beat the record sales of former U.S. President George W. Bush's memoir, which racked up 430,000 copies.

Isaacson has made the rounds of television talk shows, promoting the 656-page look into Jobs' largely-unknown personal life. Online, the Kindle e-reader, hardcover print and audio versions are ranked No. 1-3 on Amazon. In October, a spokeswoman for the giant Internet bookseller said trends indicated the Jobs bio could become the top seller of 2011.

The only item missing from the sales campaign is Jobs, in his iconic jeans and black turtleneck pacing a stage, talking about 'just one more thing.'

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Published on November 02, 2011 10:09

Google Releases Official Gmail App For iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

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Remember that 'fantastic' native Gmail app that Google was on the 'verge' of releasing? They've done gone and released it, and it's available now as a free download for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 4 or above.

We've yet to check it out, but here are some of the features in the App Store description:

● Receive notification badges for new messages
● Read your mail with threaded conversations
● Organize your mail by archiving, labeling, starring, deleting, and reporting spam
● Keep track of important messages with priority inbox
● Auto-complete contact names as you type
● Send and receive attachments
● Search through all your mail

As someone who has tried all the alternatives and made a conscious decision to live in Gmail on my Mac, a native app is fantastic news. I can't wait to give it a try.

You can download Google's Gmail app

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Published on November 02, 2011 09:36

Google Releases Awesome Official Gmail App For iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

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Remember that 'fantastic' native Gmail app that Google was on the 'verge' of releasing? They've done gone and released it, and it's available now as a free download for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 4 or above.

We've yet to check it out, but here are some of the features in the App Store description:

● Receive notification badges for new messages
● Read your mail with threaded conversations
● Organize your mail by archiving, labeling, starring, deleting, and reporting spam
● Keep track of important messages with priority inbox
● Auto-complete contact names as you type
● Send and receive attachments
● Search through all your mail

As someone who has tried all the alternatives and made a conscious decision to live in Gmail on my Mac, a native app is fantastic news. I can't wait to give it a try.

You can download Google's Gmail app

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Published on November 02, 2011 09:36

Czech Carrier Won't Offer iPhone 4S Due To Apple's Terms

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Telefonica Czech Republic has rejected sales of the iPhone 4S and other versions of Apple's smartphone due to a dispute over reported business terms. Two other carriers will offer the new handset instead, which has sold at a record pace since a mid-October introduction.

Although a report by Hospodarske Noviny contained only sketchy details from a Telefonica spokesman, Apple is rumored to demand the carrier subsidize the iPhone's selling price by up to 40 percent, a marked increase over other smartphones.

The report isn't unexpected, given Telefonica and Apple had failed to reach an agreement as late as last week. The Czech Republic was part of a 22-nation iPhone 4S rollout Apple announced October 28. According to the Wall Street Journal report (subscription required) , the Czech unit of Telefonica "will focus on already much higher volume sales of smart phones based on rival operating systems, including Google Inc.'s Android and Nokia Corp.'s Symbian."

While still available from Vodafone and T-Mobile International in the Czech Republic, the announcement that Telefonica is dropping the iPhone is a departure from the usual courting by carriers.

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Published on November 02, 2011 09:24

Leander Kahney's Blog, page 1507

November 2, 2011