Girly 'n' Geek

DiscImageChef and the Lisa operating system source code recovery

2017-12-31T21:15:00.000+00:00

In 1983, Apple launched the Lisa computer, one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface, setting up the first stone to user interfaces as we know them today.
On 24th December 2017, Al Kossow announced he recovered the source code (that is, the computer code used to create the Lisa operating system and user interface), using the DiscImageChef tool.

What is DiscImageChef?
DiscImageChef is a multifunctional manager for all kind of dump images of computer storage. It can do the most common functions usually done with dumps of floppies, hard disks, optical discs, etc. It also allows dumping such media to images.

What was the function of DiscImageChef in the Lisa source code recovery?
One of the functions of DiscImageChef is, for supported filesystems, to extract the contents of a dump. And in the case of the Lisa, DiscImageChef is the only tool supporting its filesystem thanks to my reverse engineering of it.

Reverse engineering?
Yes, that is the process to analyze some software to learn its inner workings, to be able to document that, or to create another software that is interoperable with its documents. In the case of the Lisa filesystem, there was no documentation of it; it was only known that it had some structures called MDDF and S-Record, but there was no information about how those structures were formed. So for several years I studied all known dumps, and created lots of test dumps using Ray Arachelian's emulator, LisaEm. Then, through testing and analysis of these dumps, I finally got enough knowledge of the Lisa filesystem structures to be able to add support for it on DiscImageChef.

So that's why you created DiscImageChef?
No, indeed, DiscImageChef started in 2011 as a personal tool designed to identify and show information about filesystems called FileSystemIDAndChk, that I used to check the integrity and correctness in my collection of operating system dumps. From that, it evolved organically. As dumps came in different formats, I added support for format plugins. In 2014 I renamed it the a more appropriate DiscImageChef. And from then on it has gained the ability of extracting files, creating dumps, comparing two dumps even with different formats, etc.

Why that name?
When talking about storage media, we say that their contents are raw when they represent what is in the media itself, while the contents are cooked when they contain only the data a user has wrote to them. And a chef is someone that takes a bunch of raw ingredients, and not only cooks, but makes magic with them. And disc image is because at first it was oriented for optical discs only, that by convention are spelled with C, contrary to other media that is spelled with K, as in disk. Also, "swiss army knife" is a term that's used so much, it has known became a common thing, losing its uniqueness. So join all, and you have The Disc Image Chef.

So, is it DiscImageChef or Disc Image Chef?
Both can be used. I just prefer to use DiscImageChef when no article is used, and separate when it is, like The Disc Image Chef.

And what can it do today?
Well, the last stable version, it can analyze, checksum, compare and verify 46 different image formats, identify 73 filesystems, list and extract files from 5 of them, and get information and create a dump from almost all devices, as long as they are attached to a ATA (aka IDE), Serial ATA, FireWire, USB, SCSI or SDHCI bus, from 3 of the major operating systems: Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

Why does it not support macOS?
It does! The only thing it is not able to do is to dump media from a device connected to macOS. All the other functions work perfectly. The problem with macOS is that it doesn't allow any application to arbitrarily read devices attached to it; only from CD and DVD recorders. And I intend to add support for doing that soon.

So what's the future of DiscImageChef?
Well, for start I'm adding support for writing in any of the dump formats currently supported. That will allow people to convert a dump between two formats, or create a new dump from real media in their favorite format. The next thing I'll add is support for dumping floppies, with a standard floppy drive, or using one of the flux dumping hardware cards, like SuperCardPro, DiscFerret or KryoFlux. Also I intend to add the ability to list of extract for as many filesystems as possible.

Is a graphical interface coming?
Yes. I will add a graphical interface to DiscImageChef when all the other functions are stable. With barebones support for floppies, and only 5 filesystems fully supported, I feel it is not currently the time for adding a graphical interface. Also I'm pretty bad designing graphical interfaces, so if any designer is up to it, help is accepted.

About help, how many people work on DiscImageChef?
From time to time a collaborator sends new code, or someone asks for a feature, but it's mostly me alone, and I will be very grateful to have some help, specially when designing new parts of DiscImageChef, a little discussion of different ideas is always welcome.

To end, where can we get more information, or news, about DiscImageChef, or ask for a feature?
You can follow my work on Twitter, @DiscImageChef, or you can follow the project on GitHub, https://github.com/claunia/DiscImageChef.

Natalia Portillo,
31st December 2017

iTunes 12.2 or how they frack'd up iTunes...

2015-07-26T18:38:00.001+01:00

The reason to be of iTunes 12.2 is the new Apple Music feature. You can like it or dislike it.

But under the hood, this feature introduced changes that basically, frack’d up iTunes in every way.

First of all, there is no more iTunes Match. While the service and the feature still exist and work, it’s no more listed as an option, in any menu.

There’s a new thing called “iCloud Music Library” that seems to supersede it. And I say that because, if you disable it, you’re disabling iTunes Match.

But enabling it enables something more than only iTunes Match, it enables a new way of removing songs from your iTunes Library.

Trying to delete a song from your library shows this new dialog.
According to common sense seems that deleting the item should keep the file in your computer.
According to the explanation seems that removing the download will do that. Neither do.
“Remove download” means removing the file only, keeping the song in iTunes Match. “Delete item” removes it both from iTunes Match (sorry, the iCloud Music Library) and the computer.

But take care, because it can happen, even if you disable Apple Music, that the song converts, by itself, from “Matched” to “Apple Music”, and then downloading it will download a DRM’ed, encrypted copy, instead of the DRM-less song that iTunes Match provided before.

And while disabling the iCloud Library from the preferences returns to the old remove dialog,

it only works when you select 9 songs or less at the same time,

showing this when you choose 10 or more,

A really confusing and alarming dialog that’s telling you it will remove all items.
Thankfully continuing will show the previous dialog where remove from library and from computer are different options.

Sincerely in my opinion this just frack’d up iTunes.
It’s not just trying you to consume Apple Music, it’s choosing from you. It’s choosing what you want to do with your files.
Time to search for another music manager it seems...

ZFS on read-only devices

2014-02-17T04:11:00.001+00:00

On my last post I described my experiments to get along the best way to archive ROM sets with the biggest space saving.
In a nutshell, ZFS got a best-for-money status, except for the RAM usage.
My idea after the tests was to check if it was possible to mount a ZFS pool recorded in a read-only device, like a CD/DVD/BD.
Why here?
They’re cheap, small, and usually, more durable (quite depends on disc quality, but most of the failures are bitwise not full disc, and this can be solved with error recovery algorithms).
But ZFS was not designed with these discs in mind, so some magic was expected.
All of this is done on Linux. Should be doable on BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X with not many differences.
First of all, I did not test ZFS on packet writing, if it works at all optical drives seeking time and speed will be a hell.
So, first of all, I created a dummy file to act as the writable zpool before recording it to disc, with the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=zpool.bin bs=2048 conv=sparse count=<sectors>

<sectors> being size as following:

333,000 for 74-min CD-Rs and CD-RWs
360,000 for 80-min CD-Rs and CD-RWs
2,298,496 for single-layer DVD-Rs
4,171,712 for double-layer DVD-Rs
2,295,104 for single-layer DVD+Rs
4,173,824 for double-layer DVD+Rs
12,219,392 for single-layer Blu-rays
24,438,784 for double-layer Blu-rays
48,878,592 for triple-layer Blu-rays
62,500,864 for quad-layer Blu-rays

Once the dummy file is created you need to create the zpool. While you could create a RAIDZ pool for error recovery, it would require you to have 3 optical drives with 3 discs inserted, at the same time, at least, so I suggest for another solution (I’m still searching one, you can comment your ideas).
For the zpool creation:

zpool create -o comment="Put some disc identification here" -o ashift=11 -o failmode=continue -O mountpoint=/mnt/myzfsdvd -O checksum=sha256 -O compression=gzip-9 -O dedup=on -O atime=off -O devices=off -O exec=off -O setuid=off myzfsdvd zpool.bin

Explaining each options:

comment=“Put some disc identification here”, as it’s for a removable disc you need some description of what you’re going to store on it. You can set it up later
ashift=11, this means that the underlying block device (that is, the optical disc) uses 2048 bytes/sector
failmode=continue, not a good idea for the system to panic or stop when something happens to the optical disc!
mountpoint=/mnt/myzfsdvd, good to tell a mountpoint. You can change this on mount, but setting a default prevents security risks
checksum=sha256, this is just personal taste
compression=gzip-9, optical discs are only written once, so let that writing time be used the best
dedup=on, same as above, deduplicate blocks
atime=off, no sense to store access time on read-only discs
devices=off, to disable support of device nodes
exec=off, to prevent executing code from the disc, you may want to do, but I didn’t
setuid=off, to prevent setuid

Once this is done, ZFS will automatically mount the pool on the specified mountpoint, so you can start copying things.
You may be tempted to change recordsize (block size) to equal hardware sector for optical discs (2048 bytes), DO NOT DO IT, it will make ZFS be marginally slower, and compression and deduplication work worse.
And for RAM usage on deduplication, don’t worry, with the disc out RAM will get freed, and even using quad-layer Blu-rays, the deduplication table will never be bigger than 1Gb.
Time to unmount the ZFS file so we can record it to disc
zpool export myzfsdvd
Now recording it. If you’re going to record on CD (really? sure? ok, as you wish) be sure that it is recorded single-session, mode 1, data, finished. Following line works for CD, DVD and BD:
cdrecord -v driveropts=burnfree -dao -data zpool.bin
Once it is recorded, you’ll be tempted to mount it, and if you do, you’ll see the failure:

~ # zpool import -a

~ # zpool list

NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT

~ #

So, where’s the pool? Let’s try it specifying our pool name:

~ # zpool import zfstestdvd

cannot import 'zfstestdvd': no such pool available

~ #

It took me a couple of minutes to find what the problem of that unspecific error was, as it clearly was trying to mount it. It is trying to write!

~ # zpool import -o readonly=on -a -d /dev/

~ # zpool list

NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT

myzfsdvd 4.34G 1.90G 2.45G 43% 2.09x ONLINE -

~ #

I used /dev because sometimes it decided to not mount it from the DVD-ROM drive (/dev/sr0).

Now the pool works perfectly, except for some secondary effects:

zpool scrub denies to work, because pool is read-only, instead of checking without correcting.
zdb is unable to find the pool at all.

Cold-storage and live-storage of ROM and ISO sets, or "compression vs deduplication"

2014-02-17T03:24:00.001+00:00

This weekend I’ve been thinking about cold storage of my software archive, that include some ROM and ISO sets. The idea was to find the better way to store them in Blu-ray recordable discs.

Considering how usually two sets can contain almost the same data (for example “Tomb Raider” for Saturn and PlayStation can contain same audio, movies and maps, differing only on the small executables), or even the same set (all of the “Super Mario World” clones differ only in a small part of the ROM), both solid-mode compression and deduplication offer really high promises.

So, for the purposes of checking how promises behold, I took two systems, Nintendo Game Boy and Nintendo Game Boy Color, along with all the sets I have from them: Cowering (aka GoodTools), TOSEC, no-intro and NonGood.

For compression I used torrent7z, that given the same files (and filenames) will get the same compressed file exactly using 7zip (and, from it, the LZMA algorithm), and GoodMerge, a tool that takes all the clones from the Cowering set and compresses them together (merges) with 7zip at maximum, to get the maximum space savings.

For the deduplication, first I got theoretical estimations using an application I developed specifically for that (DedupStat, you can get it here, GPL, open source) and then created ZFS (a highly complex and feature-able filesystem available on Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux and Mac OS X, but not Windows, at all) pools with both deduplication and compression enabled.

Cowering set contains 7,930 ROMs, TOSEC contains 135 ROMs, no-intro.org contains 2,980 ROMs and NonGood contains 138 ROMs.

They make 11,183 files for a total of 7,598,579,214 bytes (~7,246Mb).

Test computer is an Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.13Ghz, Linux 3.9.0-server (Sabayon), 8Gb DDR2-800 RAM, torrent7z 0.9.1beta (7zip 4.65), ZFSonLinux 0.6.2-r3, on a Maxtor/Seagate STM3320820A.

First of all, let’s test compression.

Cowering (GoodMerge7z + torrent7z) + TOSEC (torrent7z) + no-intro (torrent7z)
5,394 files for a total of 1,407,450,696 bytes (~1,342Mb, 18.52%), took 4,813.013 seconds, approx. 0.27887927590956 Mb/sec

Cowering (GoodMerge7z + torrent7z) + TOSEC (torrent7z) + no-intro (torrent7z), deduplicated on 4096 bytes/block (typical filesystem)
5,394 files for a total of 946,782,208 bytes (~902Mb, 12.46%), took 4,972.689598 seconds, approx. 0.269924264109135 Mb/sec

This of course gets us a lot of space savings, compression alone makes the sets be only about 18% of the original size. But making this (only compression speed is tested, but decompression speed is not blazing fast either) takes a lot of time, almost an hour and a half. Deduplication over the compressed sets can still give more savings, because there is repeated data between sets (compression is per-ROM), and in the same set (only Cowering merges clones and hacks).

The next test I did was deduplication estimations only, using my tool.

Cowering + TOSEC + no-intro, deduplicated on 2048 bytes/block (CD/DVD/BD blocksize)
11,186 files for a total of 1,746,548,736 bytes (~1,665Mb, 22.99%), took 480.059208 seconds, approx. 15.0939714919498 Mb/sec

Cowering + TOSEC + no-intro, deduplicated on 4096 bytes/block (typical filesystem blocksize)
11,186 files for a total of 1,871,421,440 bytes (~1,784Mb, 24.63%), took 513.864285 seconds, approx. 14.1009994496893 Mb/sec

Cowering + TOSEC + no-intro, deduplicated on 131072 bytes/block (typical ZFS blocksize)
11,186 files for a total of 3,480,354,816 bytes (~3,319Mb, 45.80%), took 425.701966 seconds, approx. 17.0212979472122 Mb/sec

On the smallest blocksize, more duplicate blocks are found, giving biggest savings, but still quite far from compression. However, in any case, it’s about 10 times faster.

As Cowering contains lots of hacks, clones, and bad dumps, that may not be interesing for some people, I tested both compression and deduplication with the other sets alone.

TOSEC + no-intro, uncompressed
3,256 files for a total of 2,685,937,612 bytes (~2561Mb)

TOSEC (torrent7z) + no-intro (torrent7z)
3,256 files for a total of 795,382,502 bytes (~758Mb, 29.61%)

TOSEC + no-intro, deduplicated on 2048 bytes/block (CD/DVD/BD)
3,256 files for a total of 1,412,812,800 bytes (~1,347Mb, 52.60%), took 181.490064 seconds, approx. 14.1109653253525 Mb/sec

TOSEC + no-intro, deduplicated on 4096 bytes/block (typical filesystem)
3,256 files for a total of 1,491,755,008 bytes (~1,422Mb, 55.54%), took 168.831435 seconds, approx. 15.1689760855258 Mb/sec

TOSEC + no-intro, deduplicated on 131072 bytes/block (typical ZFS)
3,256 files for a total of 2,127,953,920 bytes (~2,029Mb, 79.23%), took 248.102553 seconds, approx. 10.3223444057023 Mb/sec

Things seem worse here for deduplication, being twice as big as compressed sets.

But all of this, is highly theoretical, so better test with a real life scenario. I created three ZFS pools, all of them with deduplication and compression enabled, for the three block sizes (2048 as in CD/DVD/BD, 4096 as typical by other filesystems and real sector size of Advanced Format hard disks and 131072, default ZFS blocksize). Note: ZFS calls its block size “recordsize”, and dynamically uses a bigger or smaller than the configured one, depending on the stored data.

Cowering + TOSEC + no-intro, ZFS device, dedup=on, compression=gzip-9, recordsize=2048
11,188 files for a total of 1,904,936,848 bytes (~1,817Mb, 25.07%), took 10,986.604 seconds, approx. 0.659580853138233 Mb/sec

Cowering + TOSEC + no-intro, ZFS device, dedup=on, compression=gzip-9, recordsize=4096
11,188 files for a total of 1,515,458,176 bytes (~1,445Mb, 19.94%), took 8,865.023 seconds, approx. 0.817432017876539 Mb/sec

Cowering + TOSEC + no-intro, ZFS device, dedup=on, compression=gzip-9, recordsize=131072
11,188 files for a total of 1,493,678,664 bytes (~1,424Mb, 19.66%), took 1,185.156 seconds, approx. 6.114430201097515 Mb/sec

While compression is called gzip, it should really be called deflate, as that’s the name of the algorithm, used in ZIP files, and theoretically, marginally faster and less powerful than LZMA (the 7zip algorithm). “-9” marks maximum compression.

Clearly ZFS does not behave very well when the recordsize is made smaller than the default, getting worse deduplication, worse compression, and marginally slower speeds (8 to 10 times slower).

Before achieving a conclusion, a thing about RAM usage must be noted. 7-zip RAM usage depends on dictionary size (and so, compression power), and only happens once (on compression). On decompression, RAM usage is marginally lower. On the contrary, deduplication ram usage depends on total blocks (unique and duplicate, with duplicate counting only as 1 block), and its usage is more or less permanent as long as the deduplicated volume is attached.

In case of ZFS, each block takes 320 bytes of RAM. For this set, meaning:

3710244 blocks of 2048 bytes each, taking 1Gb of RAM.

1855122 blocks of 4096 bytes each, taking 566Mb of RAM.

57972 blocks of 131072 bytes each, taking 18Mb of RAM.

Fortunately you can use a SSD to store the deduplication table, so instead of 1Gb/566Mb/18Mb of RAM it would be 1Gb/566Mb/18Mb of SSD.

More than a conclusion, a list of advantages and disadvantages should be noted:

Advantages of 7zip

Biggest space savings
RAM usage is not permanent, only when working with the archives

Disadvantages of 7zip

Slow as floppy drives
Merged archives need to be traversed and uncompressed fully before accessing one of the ROMs it contains
Not supported by any emulator afaik, and not completely supported by any ROM manager (Romcenter does not support them, Romulus says it does but it does not work, CLRMAME Pro does if not solid-compressed so defeating merging benefits)

Advantages of deduplication

Faster
Depending on deduplication software used (if it provides a live volume) it can allow ROMs to be accessed by emulators and managers

Disadvantages of deduplication

RAM usage MAY be permanent, depending on deduplication software

Advantages of ZFS with deduplication and compression enabled

Best of both worlds, space savings almost as high as 7zip and speeds almost as fast as deduplication alone
Supported in practically every operating system (but Windows)
Allows live access, so supported by emulators and ROM managers
RAM usage can be moved to SSD, that’s several times cheaper and bigger.

Disadvantages of ZFS with deduplication and compression enabled

Contrary to what deduplication alone can give, smaller blocks give less space savings and speed, and higher RAM and CPU usage.
Not supported at all by Windows
RAM usage is permanently 320 bytes per block

Comparing advantages vs disadvantages, ZFS seems the best solution for archival right now. While other filesystems may get same features in the future (btrfs for example), currently they don’t support them or are experimental or vendor-locked (btrfs is Linux-only)

Hands-on: Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks Developer Preview (up to DP2)

2013-06-30T18:04:00.001+01:00

On 10th June 2013, Apple introduced the next major revision of their Mac OS X operating system, 10.9, and stopping with the tradition of naming them like big felines, this one gets called "Mavericks" like the surfing location on the state of California.

First impressions

At a first glance it seems that the design is being flatted a little, like what is happening to iOS 7. It's not as radical, there is still that metal theme along all the system, but for example, now the login screen has a single flat background color, and you can also notice it on the dock and the System Preferences window.

Maps

In last year's iOS iteration, Apple decided to break free of Google and put their own mapping solution. And this resulted in an ill-fated situation with an insanely high number of users complaining about the maps quality. In my own experience, it's as good as the others, and this means, all mapping solutions have huge errors. But I clearly welcome the change, as Google solution was limited compared to what they offered on other platforms, limiting the experience and putting Apple devices in a disadvantage.

This new Mac OS X iteration brings the Apple maps to the desktop, and while having the same errors (and corrections, because the maps are corrected server-side), it seems like a good idea.

While most of the times you will need the maps while on-move, you will also set routes, and search for places, in your desktop. And Apple though about that. You can share your share or route via Messages, saving it as a PDF, or, sending it to your iCloud-connected iOS device, so you just take the device, unlock it and start following Siri's driving directions.

Or walking! Because they also added support for walking directions (present also in iOS 7).

And finally you can get business information shown in separate windows with photos, open hours, so on, taking this information from Yelp. But for some strange reason, even if in all the places shown in the previous screenshots there are plenty of places registered in Yelp, it seems this functionality only works in the US.

What I miss from this application is the ability to download offline copies of the maps to be used internet-less and the support of GPS dongles, something that is easy to add and will make it useful for traveling people.

Calendar

Another place of visual overhaul is the Calendar application. No more trying to imitate a real-world one, it returns to the basics, showing a flatter interface with pastel colors that resembles Mac OS X 10.5's.

One of the simplest but most "why wasn't this here before" features is continuous scrolling. Using the touchpad you just scroll and scroll and scroll until you arrive the date you were searching. Simple, but powerful.

Another feature is the integration with Maps,

so you can add a place based on the real location, and see at a glance a minimap, and if near enough, a weather forecast (from Yahoo Weather).

Also you can use the travel time, knowing the exact location, from your current location. Only from your current location. Quite a limitation considering that you maybe going two places, one first, then the other, without returning home.

Also Facebook events will appear here.

Safari

Under the hood Safari gets faster, less memory hungry, and over the hood, it gets a "Shared links" feature.

"Shared links" shows you in the sidebar (while Apple says it's new, it was already there with Reading List, it's just got new features) all the links posted by the Twitter users you're following. Not a heartbreaking feature, but I find it quite useful.

You can also get a password generator for sites you're registering, that automatically saves your freshly created hard-to-remember password in the keychain. And from the keychain it can take and fill all the credit card data, but the verification code.

iCloud

iCloud's only new feature is the iCloud keychain, and yet it's not new. It was already present in MobileMe.

At least this time they're making it more secure. Instead of plainly syncing your keychain with any device that gets added to your iCloud, it will request authorization to an already existing device, or via SMS, or the newly added device will not get the keychain.

Multi-display

Not kind of a feature but a "this is how things should have worked", they corrected the ugly "feature" that blocked all but one of your displays in a multidisplay setup as soon as you were using a full-screen application from Mac OS X 10.7 onwards.

Also you can now use your Apple TV connected television not just as an AirPlay Mirror, but as another display.

Finder

Finder gets tabs, something power users like me will definitively like.

You can use tabs to have origin-destination windows for copying, to have all the places where a project's files are located opened in a single window, and you can drag&drop to the tabs themselves.

The other new Finder feature, is not exclusive to it, but a system-wide feature that gets easily managed thru Finder: Tags.

While at first glance it seems just like the good-old labels, things are only similar.

Tags are infinite, freely-named, labels. You can name them the way you want, assign a color, search for them in Spotlight, or you can create a Finder tab showing all files in the computer with that tag. And if you drag&drop files to the Tag window, all that files will receive that tag.

Last but not least, a file can have multiple tags at the same time.

Server

I've not been able to test Mac OS X Server 10.9 extensively, but it also doesn't have much to say. They add support for iTunes Store and App Store (the iOS one) to Caching Server, that in 10.8 only supported the Mac App Store. This will make caching servers need quite a lot more of disk space for iTunes-intensive workplaces, and be a huge bandwidth saver for iOS-filled ones.

Also they add support for creating Xcode building farms, something that Xcode already had in previous versions.

They still have not returned the ability to be an Active Directory server that they took away in 10.7.

Advanced internals

Compressed Memory

A simple concept, compressed memory compress the inactive memory, that is the one that can be swapped to disk, just because that's faster than copying it to disk, and makes it faster to be copied to disk

App Nap

With App Nap, applications that are just sitting idle (no I/O, no sound) are slowed down, or completely stopped, to preserve battery.

Apple promises up to 23 percent less battery usage, but considering that the most battery hungry process is usually Spotlight, it's yet to see.

Timer coalescing

This is a more complicated feature. Instead of letting all applications request and do anything the time they want, creating a lot of spikes of CPU usage/idle times, Mavericks will group all applications usage of the resources (timers) so they go in big usage/idle pieces, allowing the CPU to idle more, and so, save battery.

Other features

Other features introduced in Mavericks is a minor rework of Activity Monitor, including a new Energy tab and new stats and graphs, privacy controls for applications requesting to control the computer for accessibility (not just a system-wide "allow all" or "deny all" but fine-grained by app), support for LinkedIn accounts, automatic installation of updates (take care with restart-required ones, as this will restart your computer and applications not yet enabled for the document saving feature introduced in 10.7 will lose their changes), "Enhanced Dictation" (that is, offline, continuous and realtime, without sending your voice to Apple but doing it all locally), OpenGL 4.1 (finally, but still outdated), don't-play-till-you-want plugin in Safari (Flash ads, say goodbye), interactive and web notifications (couldn't test as none appeared), better iTunes HD playback efficiency, full iBooks support (reader, store, server's cache, nothing appeared in Developer Previews 1 or 2), and not much else. Oh, wait, yes, a heavily modified, color-changed, wallpaper of a sea wave, to be thought it was taken surfing on Mavericks ;).

Also to note is that the documentation says that SMB file transfer protocol will be the default. But, what's "default"? AFP is still supported, present, configured and enabled by default, not to say it's needed to use Time Machine over the network...

Conclusion

I like the new features. But I feel they're not enough.

They're not huge, life changing features like Mac OS X usually gives. They're not even so many as usual.

This feels more like a 10.8 Release 2, than a 10.9 system.

Also, I dislike "Mavericks", there're more big felines to be used, and using California places? No, I don't like it.

Finally I have taken a couple of benchmarks and 10.9 has been slightly slower and gave a lot less (more than 1 hour of difference) of battery duration than 10.8, but as this is a beta, not optimized, and full of debugging tricks, I will not publish the results.

Stay tuned till final release, this blog entry will be updated with every DP including changes, and differences, instead of creating a new blog entry per preview as I've always done before.

Hands on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Preliminary

2012-07-25T16:13:00.001+01:00

Today, just after the Q3 financial results presentation, Apple has officially launched Mac OS X 10.8, nicknamed Mountain Lion, and here it is, the hands on.

Differently from my other reviews I will do this one starting with installation and following the exact order and categories in the official Apple's feature list.

Installation

Like the previous Mac OS X (Lion), Mountain Lion is available through the Mac App Store, and unlike it, there will be no USB flash disk available from Apple for those that want to do a clean install, have it as a backup, etc. Price is reduced from Lion to $19.99, 15,99 €, £13.99, ¥1,700.

If you want to create one yourself, be it a USB flash disk or a DVD, you can follow the instructions I put for Lion, as they work the same (just use Mountain Lion installer), or use an automated application for that hassle, Lion Diskmaker from Guillaume Gète.

It is to be noted that any of the ways to install (be it directly from the Installer, the USB flash disk, the DVD…) Mountain Lion is able to update without problems systems with Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" and Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" conversing your preferences, applications, etc.

If you have any previous version, you will need to go to a physical Apple Store or to a friend's house and buy it (using your account, don't do piracy please), and then burn to USB or DVD. I have not tested this scenario so I don't know what happens with previous system versions when updating. You can, however, copy all of your files to another hard disk (I suggest you using Carbon Copy Cloner for that task) and then import that with the Migration Assistant that will be launched when installation is finished. This way guarantees your settings and files are conserved.

While Lion already left out 32-bit only (anything below a Core 2 Duo processor) Macs, Mountain Lion drops out any mac that needs 32-bit kernel extensions, leaving the list of supported Macs as follows:

iMac Mid 2007 or newer
MacBook Late 2008 (Aluminium), Early 2009 or newer
MacBook Pro Mid & Late 2007 or newer
Xserve Early 2009
MacBook Air Late 2008 or newer
Mac Mini Early 2009 or newer
Mac Pro Early 2008 or newer (however, if you put a supported graphics card and modify the installer you can still unsupportedly install Mountain Lion)

It is important to note that if you're trying to buy Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store and you receive a "product is not available" and/or "Error 100" message, just wait a couple of minutes and retry, that is happening because of the intense number of users trying to buy it at the same time. And when you get it finally, the download speed will be surely slow. Things will get faster as time passes.

Accessibility

The accessibility feature gets overhauled moved to a categorized and easier to access preference panel, made accessible anywhere using Option-F5 shortcut and adding support for 14 new braille devices.

AirPlay Mirroring

If you have a second-generation Apple TV and any of the supported Macs (iMac Mid 2011 or newer, Mac mini Mid 2011 or newer, MacBook Air Mid 2011 or newer, and MacBook Pro Early 2011 or newer) now you can mirror anything you're doing in your Mac to your Apple TV.

This is pretty useful for presentations, allowing people to connect an ATV to a presenter and just use any Mac to put the Keynote slideshow, a QuickTime movie, or show a game! Just click the AirPlay icon on the menubar, choose which ATV of all found you want to use, and let's go.

Or you can go to the Sound preference panel and get the sound output to be your ATV.

Your Mac automatically downscales the resolution to 1080p (or you can choose it to be your Mac resolution so no scale happens) and encrypts the data so it cannot be intercepted on the network.

Auto Save

Enhancing the revision system included in Lion, you can now rename a file from the title bar.

You also get keyboard shortcuts for duplicate, and the save as option make a return for all of us that missed it.

Also you can move a document to iCloud, and any unsaved (aka "Untitled") document is automatically saved on iCloud just in case.

Built-in Sharing

Share, share everything, share everywhere, share with buddies, followers, the police (just kidding)!

Finder can share by e-mail, iMessage and AirDrop, for pictures on Twitter and Flickr and for movies on Vimeo.

Safari can share to e-mail, iMessage, Twitter and also add as a bookmark or to the reading list.

QuickTime Player X can share to e-mail, iMessage, AirDrop, Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo and Flickr. Choosing a video on Finder does not give so much options, so you are forced to open the video first on QT if you want to share on YouTube or Facebook (to be added system-wide on Fall).

Unfortunately, contrary to Windows 8 xxxx and Android Intents, application developers cannot enable destinations for the sharing function.

Calendar (the application previously known as iCal)

Calendar gets a new sidebar listing all of your calendars, offers search suggestions, gets a new date picker and moves the notifications from the old centered alert message to the Notification Center.

Contacts (the application previously known as Address Book)

Groups are moved to a new column, repeated contacts from different services (Yahoo!, Twitter, Gmail, iCloud, etc) get automatically joined and shown in an unified view, and you can share contacts in vCard via e-mail, iMessage and AirDrop.

Dashboard

Now when you go to add a new widget, the widget lists is full screen, similar to Launchpad, includes a search field and supports the creation of folders.

Dictation

From the worlds of iOS, half a Siri has become.

Using the same voice recognition engine introduced with Siri for the iPhone 4S, now you can dictate anything on your Mac. For now, only English (AU, UK and US), French, German and Japanese are supported. And the same way as in Siri, your voice is transmitted over internet to Apple datacenters for recognition, something illogical considering that Macs are perfectly capable of running the recognition by themselves.

It supports basic commands like "all caps" and "new line", and autolearns. But unlike Siri, it does not give you any information or search but simply writing in text boxes (also, unlike Siri, any application's text box is supported).

And that's supposed to be "This is the new Mac OS X dictation, it only supports English, French, German and Japanese".

The real issue is that until all the sentence is dictated, sent, processed and incorrectly converted to text, you cannot see the failures, making you lose so much time correcting it that in some situations (or until Si… I mean, Dictation learns your exact accent).

Dictionary

Now Dictionary adds support for Simplified Chinese, Spanish and German.

Dunno about German or Chinese, but for Spanish using the Vox's dictionary instead of the Royal Academy (RAE) one does not give the official language definitions.

Facebook

In fall, Mac OS X 10.8 will add system-wide support for Facebook, including posting to the wall, reading your wall on Notification Center, sharing and syncing Facebook contacts on Contacts.

But till then, no trace of Facebook.

China

Apple is currently having a huge grow on the chinese market, and Mountain Lion includes a great list of improvements for it. However most of them only show when you're using the system in chinese, or setting your location as China.

Among them, there is a improved text input for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, dynamic word lists that update automatically from internet, fuzzy Pinyin input, autocorrection, better handwriting recognition, automatic saving of your Pinyin user dictionary on iCloud, Emoji and facemarks, support for the Sina Weibo microblogging service system-wide, as well as for the Youku and Tudou video sites, Baidu search in Safari, support for QQ Mail, 126 and 163 mail services and new and improved fonts.

Finder

Finder includes a couple of small but appreciable changes. Apart from the previously mentioned sharing, the most useful new feature is that when you're doing a copy a progress bar appears in the destination folder as well as a small cancel icon.

Now you can also encrypt any volume using Finder, just double click it and choose encrypt (that is, FileVault 2 is no longer restrained to the boot volume), without the need to use Disk Utility or Terminal.

A small novelty is that you can open Quick Look not just pressing space, but also tapping on the trackpad with three fingers.

Game Center

Game Center comes to the Mac, with all the features from iOS. It also supports cross-platform (iOS-MacOS) games, both for just achievements and leaderboards as well as for multiplayer gaming.

Something not included in iOS' Game Center is in-voice chat.

Gatekeeper

Probably, the most controversial feature from Mountain Lion. Gatekeeper is a protection that allows the system administrator to choose which applications can be installed and run.

By default, the configuration only allows applications coming from the Mac App Store (that is, controlled and inspected by Apple to prevent them from doing nasty things to your system) or signed by an authorized developer (one that pays Apple for a developer certificate, so in case that an application does a nasty thing it can be revoked). You can change the default to allow only applications from the Mac App Store, or from Anywhere.

In the case you're an administrator, pressing the Option key while you open/install it asks you for a confirmation in case the application does not fall under the current setting.

Personally, I see this as a good move, because it lets administrators the same power as before, while moving users to a safe default that helps preventing malicious software from spreading easily.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) on the Vodafone 858 Smart (Huawei U8160)

2012-04-14T05:30:00.001+01:00

NOTE: This procedure will void your warranty.
NOTE: This procedure refers to a third party modification (aka Custom ROM) that's in beta (aka UNSTABLE / DANGEROUS) status.NOTE: This is a simplification guide on how to use Custom ROM made by another party (neither me, neither the manufacturer <Huawei>, neither the distributor <Vodafone>).NOTE: None of the parties implied here (me, Huawei, Vodafone, the Custom ROM creator) can be held responsible of any damage caused by you following this guide, included but not limited to, your phone breaking, your phone exploding, your house exploding, the whole planet exploding or the Universe collapsing over itself.
NOTE: Do a backup of ANYTHING in your phone to another place (not the phone or the SD card). The phone contents will be erased, and while the SD card should not, anything can happen.
NOTE: Some things (camera, Youtube, occasional crashes) don't work as expected or at all.NOTE: If anything goes wrong, none of the parties previously mentioned have any liability or the obligation to help you in any way.

IF YOU CONTINUE READING PAST THIS LINE YOU AGREE WITH THE ABOVE CONDITIONS

I got bored and searching searching I found a Custom ROM made by someone called subpsyke on the internet, and while his instructions (here) seemed to work for a lot of people, they didn't at all for me. So I decided to create this little guide.

Step one: Root the phone
This modification requires administrator privileges to the phone. But they come disabled by default. Enabling it is called "rooting".
Luckily, this comes easy on this phone. Just download z4root (Google It! or get it from here), install the apk, execute it, and continue to step 2.

Step two: Download the custom rom, and the Google apps.
The guide by subpsyke suggests you can do it all from the ROM Manager application. Forget about it, it's slow and gives errors when downloading the Google Apps. The easiest way is to go *** READ COMMENTS (I had to remove links and I forgot to tell you, my fault, sorry) *** and just download it. At the time of this writing the custom mod is in alpha 3 and the google apps is called 20120215-small.
When you have both ZIPs, put them in the SD card of your phone, and continue to step 3.

Step three (A): Installing ClockworkMod Recovery (the easy way)
The guide by subpsyke suggests this method. It's easier and fastest, but it didn't work for me. However mileage may vary so just try it.
Go to the Android Market (or Google Play Store) and get ROM Manager.
When you have it, open it and touch on "Flash ClockworkMod Recovery". It will ask if yours is Huawei U8160. It is, install it. Now, "Reboot into Recovery".
If it boots into recovery, move to step 4. If it stays with the hourglass for more than a couple of seconds, it's in fastboot mode, unplug the USB cable and the battery, replug them (phone will boot in Android 2.2 normally) and move to step 3B to boot the recovery the bad way.

Step three (B): Installing ClockworkMod Recovery (the developer way)
So after searching and searching and searching with a pretty hourglass, I found this other way that worked flawlessly for me.
First of all you need the Android SDK, that you can get here. If you don't plan developing for Android, just uncompress it anywhere, you can delete it later.
Once uncompressed, execute the android file inside the tools folder, and install the Platform SDK Tools. No need for anything else.
Download the file called recovery-clockwork-4.0.1.5-u8160.img from here and put it in the platform-tools folder. It doesn't matter the version installed by ROM Manager is newer, this works also.
Go to Settings->Developer on the phone and be sure that USB debugging is enabled.
Plug the phone to the computer, open a Terminal/Console/Command line and go to the platform-tools folder, then do "adb devices". If only one shows, it's working.
On the phone, go to ROM Manager, and choose "Reboot into Recovery". If now it does (whoa!) just skip to step 4. If it stays in the hourglass, don't touch anything, it's where we wanted.
Now do "fastboot boot recovery-clockwork-4.0.1.5-u8160.img", and the phone will reboot on ClockworkMod flawlessly. Continue to step 4.

Step four: Backup the current ROM, wiping the data, and installing ICS.
The recovery is controlled using the volume up (move option up), volume down (move option down) and power (apply chosen option) buttons.
First of all, go to "backup and restore" and make a backup of the system. This needs about 250Mb of free space on the SD card, I hope you left.
Now go to "wipe data/factory reset". This is the no-return point. Everything will be erased here...
Just to be sure, "wipe cache partition".
Now "install zip from sdcard" and chose the custom rom zip. When it is done, repeat choosing the google apps zip this time.
If everything went ok, choose "reboot system now" and be patient for the next 10 minutes it takes to do the first boot (next ones are as fast as original rom).

Step five: Enjoy. More or less...
As I said at the start of this guide, this is a beta software that will crash eventually (crashed only ONE time in 48h but your mileage can vary a lot so :p).

The camera does not work, don't try it, it just doesn't, period. I don't consider this a big loss. The 2 megapixel, fixed-focus camera is so bad, you'd better buy a single-use analog-film pocket-camera in the nearest store.
For some reason the Text-to-Speech engine isn't working for me, it just says "Google Text to Speech engine had to be closed" but the applications don't complain.
It may happen that the wifi stops working in some ocasions. Rebooting the phone corrects the problem.
Alongside with all the Android 4.0 new features, and the usual ClockworkMod ones (like under/over-clocking) this also enabled MULTITOUCH, something that for some strange reason, Huawei and/or Vodafone have disabled in their official rom, and makes the phone work more fluently/fast (not a big difference, but you'll appreciate it).
Youtube does not get installed by this procedure, neither it can be installed from the Market (Play Store). Bad, but...
If you want to restore the phone to 2.2 repeat the procedure but choosing to restore the backup you did (AFTER a wipe).
Thanks to subpsyke for working on this modification, now I have Android 4.0 before any of my friends but one! (he got a Galaxy Nexus)

More screenshots on my Picasa here.

Hands on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview 1

2012-02-19T03:56:00.001+00:00

In a press release that surprised us all, Apple announced the availability of Mac OS X 10.8 (dubbed "Mountain Lion", another kind of Puma, or the North American Panther) Developer Preview 1, for all Macintosh registered developers.

Less than a year after Mac OS X 10.7, this new operating system promises to include more than 100 new features, include more iOS improvements and designs, and be available to general public on "Late Summer 2012". No price information has been disclosed, but included strings suggest that it will not be free.

As this version includes some installation bugs, I'll dedicate a section specially oriented for installation.

Installation

Like Lion, Mountain Lion comes in a Mac App Store package. If you want to burn it to a DVD or to an USB, the procedure is the same as in Lion.

However, there is currently a bug in Mountain Lion installation, and when you install to a blank drive, something most developers will try, you'll find that there is no post-installation, and you get greeted with:

Don't try, it's not asking for a Mac OS X Server account, neither for a Lion account on another drive. It won't ask to create a user, and there is no user, so you cannot login. Funny, eh?!

So what to do? Install over the same drive that already has a Lion (update). So if you want to install on a new partition, install Lion there first.

It is able to update 10.7.0 (not tested 10.6) and it works flawlessly on VMware Fusion 4.1.0 or up, including VMware Tools. Don't try a previous version of VMware, the SCSI controller has some kind of bug and Mountain Lion is unable to found any drive.

If you install over Lion, it will ask for an Apple ID and the current timezone. Any new user you create will be asked for his/her Apple ID at first login (or to create a new one).

If you supply an Apple ID, it will ask to setup iCloud, and Find My Mac. However it's not completely setting it up as promished (iTunes and Games Center does not get set up, however contacts, calendars, bookmarks, Mail and the App Store get it).

Settings

There is one new setting "Notifications" that I'll explain below, and a few minor changes.

Accesibility gets moved to System (again).

For wallpapers, we lost the option to make the menu bar translucir, and we get a new default wallpaper, not just another galaxy, but the Milky Way Galaxy (it's where planet Earth, and then, most probably you also, is located). If you're not from Milky Way Galaxy, please leave a comment with your stargate coordinates ;)

For screen savers, the preference panel also gets a cosmetic change, with Slide Shows in a better category. There are only two screen savers (compared with 8 in Lion) and we lost the option to change it randomly :(

In Language & Text we get eight (8) new system-wide translations (Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, Croatian, Romanian, Slovak, Thai and Ukrainian), as well as support for the Chinese Lunar calendar.

In "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" (it should be named internet accounts or something else), we get new services: twitter (however my twitter account did not work), flickr, vimeo, and for the chinese, QQ, 126 and 163. Also Google accounts now get Notes synced, but no connection to YouTube (Google's equivalent to vimeo, supported under QuickTime, iLife and Aperture) or to Picasa (Google's equivalent to flickr, not supported in any Apple app by default).

Also iCloud now gets the option to syncronize Notes and computer User Accounts, so if your user is an administrator, all the accounts on that machine get created on all other machines. This is, in my humble opinion, quite useless considering iCloud is single-user.

In Security & Privacy you can configure Gatekeeper (the "Allow applications…", I'll explain it below).

Oh oh, where's Web Sharing!?!?!?! Dunno, but Apache is still installed and launched :S

In Date & Time, timezone can be set automatically depending on your current location. This, on desktop macs with no wifi connected, does not work (neither other location service), and personally I think that sending your wifi's MAC address (unique identifier for your router or access point) to get your current location is not so much private.

Accessibility gets a major overhaul, making everything more categorized, separated and cleaner, but no new options here.

So, it's time for "new things"!.

Notifications

If you're a Mac user, you probably have seen notifications from Skype, Outlook, or directly, you have Growl installed for that. Now, Apple includes a notifications system, taken directly from iOS.

A new circle with a circle icon right top of the screen, next to Spotlight, allows you to see the stored notifications. You can also access it with a swipe on your trackpad.

In settings you can set up, like on iOS, from what applications to get notifications, which kind (none, banner or alert), how many, with sound, sorted manually or by date, so on.

Messages

With iOS 5, Apple introduced iMessage, a new system that allows to send text, images and videos between any iOS device (iPod, iPad, iPhone) using your phone number and/or your Apple ID (iCloud)

Now, in Mountain Lion, iChat disappears, gets renamed to Messages, and gets support for iMessage.

That's me talking with my mom and a couple of friends (all of them with iPhone) over iMessage. I can continue the conversation (receive my messages and theirs) on my iPad and iPhone, however it only beeped on Mountain Lion, so it's not so annoying.

One thing I missed is direct access to emoji on the computer, but messages sent with them showed correctly.

You can get a beta version of Message for Lion from Apple, but take care, it deletes iChat and you can lose all ability to chat when Mountain Lion arrives!

Notes

Of course, Notes is not new, but here it gets more than an overhaul.

It is now, an independent application, and not just a list of lost items inside Mail. HOORAY!

That's really important when you have hundreds of daily mails like I do, and finding a note inside Mail is simply impossible.

Reminders

Reminders, the iOS 5 To-Do list, gets ported to Mac OS X, and gets the data from iCloud syncing :p

Share sheets

Share sheets is that little menu on iOS to share things by mail, message and twitter. And now, it gets in Mac OS X, for any account you have configures, for almost any content (webpage, text, photo). There is an icon in Safari, another in file dialogs, and even if you right click on an image inside of Safari, you get the options.

This is sharing a website on twitter, snapshot included automatically.

This is sharing the same website on Messages.

Sharing a photo from my Picasa album on flicker.

Available destinations depend on selected content (vimeo doesn't support photos, twitter doesn't support videos, so on).

Safari 5.3

More speed, better compatibility, ok these are the usual things.

As you've seen up, Safari gets share sheets, one next to URL (for sharing the web with a snapshot) and the other sheet in contextual (right-click/ctrl-click) menu.

Also, as you can appreciate in the previous screenshot, there is no more search bar.

Now, the address bar includes options for searching, in your default search provider (Google is the default first time), on your bookmarks and history, or on the current page.

Also you can get the list of website user and passwords stored, without having to go to Keychain Access.

And when you login on a Google account, you get asked to add it to your system accounts.

Game Center

Game Center is another thing that comes from iOS, and while currently no Mac game can be present on the App Store with support for Game Center, it detects any iOS game with a Mac version, and shows their options and achievements.

Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is probably what will be the most criticized function on Mountain Lion.

Gatekeeper allows you to set up, in Security & Privacy, what applications are allowed to be installed and run in Mountain Lion.

Options are three:

Only applications that come from the Mac App Store. These applications are signed by Apple, and checked that they don't do something they shouldn't (breaking your computer, for example).

Only applications that come from the Mac App Store or applications signed by identified developers. Identified developers are those who pay $99/yr to Apple and sign their applications. This is the default option on Mountain Lion, and provides you with security without much trouble.

Any application. This is how any previous version of Mac OS X works.

Very informative message, curiously it's from an Apple application.

However if you're an administrator, you can bypass the security settings by a one time option. Right click (or ctrl click) the application or installer, choose open, and:

Now you can force open it, and it will never ask again for that exact application or installer package.

Other little things

Supported applications (none currently, future iWork betas will) can access iCloud as if it was a disk, with a file dialog and the ability to create folders.

Address Book gets renamed to Contacts.

There is no support to ATI X1000 cards or to nVidia NV40. Also support for Intel GMA950 is dropped.

There is a new driver called "Apple Thunderbolt Audio". Thunderbolt until now presented everything over HDMI (audio included) or PCIe (an audio controller can be connected there), but this new driver, it is here, and I don't quite know what device it refers to.

Xgrid support vanished.

Rumors say, X11 is dropped, Carbon is deprecated. There is no official notice about Carbon deprecated, it is still there. X11 gets the same treat as Java. Trying to open it directs you to a download page, however, this is better. Lion 10.7.3 X11 version is older than the download page one, and as X11 is not something all users need, it's not so much of a problem here.

If you have an Apple TV, the system will detect it and offer you to broadcast your current screen to your Apple TV (this is called AirPlay). However I couldn't test this feature because I have no Apple TV.

For developers

There are a few changes in frameworks, both public and private.

New public (usable by ANY developer) frameworks: Accounts, AudioVideoBridging (AirPlay), CFNetwork, CoreText (it's not new, but now it's independent), CoreWiFi (includes functions to handle WiFi connections and cards, with some low level values), EventKit (for Notifications), GameKit (from iOS, for Game Center features), GLKit (from iOS, handles OpenGL, supposedly easier to use than AGL), MediaToolbox (video output and acceleration, audio and video formar handling, colorspace conversión, so on), SceneKit (was private in Lion, renders 3D scenes and objects from Collada files) and VideoToolbox (encodes and decodes video).

New private (sable ONLY by Apple) frameworks: AccountsDaemon, CalendarAgent, CalendarAgentLink, CalendarFoundation, CommsDiagnostics, CoreMessage (iMessage), CoreRecognition (see below), DeviceToDeviceKit, DeviceToDeviceManager, GameKitServices, GeoServices, GPUSupport, IMAP (used by Notes, an implementation of the IMAP mail protocol), MediaControlSender, MessageProtection (for iMessage), MMCSServices, NetFSServer, Notes, OAuth, ODServerTools, RemoteWebInspector, ShareKit (for the Share Sheets), TimeSyncKit, XPCObjects.

From the private frameworks I've discovered three things:

1.- iMessage goes encrypted with OTR system.
2.- There is a new feature for updating firmware over USB or Bluetooth, but this framework only shows Mac models and not iDevices. It is clearly called DFU.
3.- CoreRecognition recognizes faces using integrated webcams. There is nothing currently using this in DP1, but this can be useful for login using a recognition of the user's face :p

Microsoft returns customers to the past, ReFS, the Resilient File System

2012-01-17T21:11:00.001+00:00

Microsoft has just announced the name and features of his newest operating system, to be introduced with Windows 8 Server.

You can read the announcement in their official blog.

Here I will introduce some concepts and why this new filesystem, the Resilient File System (or ReFS) is not a next generation one, but a return to the past. Also I will compare current and "next generation" offerings from Microsoft (that's NTFS and ReFS) with competition from other filesystems (btrfs, HFS+, ZFS, UFS2, HAMMER).

Metadata: Data about the data, usually refers to timestamps, filename and the location of blocks where the data it's associated to resides.

Alternate Data Streams (ADS), Extended Attributes (xattrs): This is the name given to arbitrary data associated with the main data, mainly used for describing information about the data. It is extensively used by Mac OS X clients, as well as Windows Explorer. Some antivirus software also use this associated data to store information about last scanning of files. Please note that what UNIX/Linux and Macintosh call Extended Attributes are Alternate Data Streams in Microsoft nomenclature.

Extended Attributes (Microsoft nomenclature): These are a kind of alternate data streams limited to 64 Kbytes per file and consisting of name=value pairs. Introduced and extensively used by OS/2, they could be implemented as ADS or xattrs.

Resource Fork: Essential data for pre-Mac OS X applications and documents, contains data that is usually needed to describe the data part of the file (called Data Fork) or is the only data present for the file (like some document formats exclusive to Macintosh systems).

Finder Info: Essential metadata about files and folders for all Mac OS versions (up to and including X 10.7 Lion).

NOTE about the Resource Fork and the Finder Info as well as xattrs on Mac OS X: Traditionally Windows Server systems used ADS to store the Resource Fork and the Finder Info on volumes shared with Macintosh clients. The same is done for the Resource Fork, Finder Info and xattrs for all NTFS solutions existing on Mac OS X (Paragon NTFS, Tuxera NTFS and Apple's NTFS). When Mac OS X encounters a filesystem that does not support storing this information (like FAT32, or ReFS), it creates separate files for storing it, being "filename" the data fork, "._filename" the Resource Fork and Finder Info for "filename" and ".DS_Store" for the folder's Finder Info.

Object IDs, Catalog Node IDs, inode numbers: Is the name given in Windows, Macintosh and UNIX (incl. Linux) worlds to an unique identification inside a filesystem that corresponds to a single file, so in the case it is moved it can still be accessed using the same identification wherever it's new location (as long as it's inside the same volume).

Transparent file compression: This means the filesystem automatically compress the file data. While it is a slow operation when writing, is a lot faster while reading, and for files that are accessed mostly for reading and almost never for writing (that is, operating system and application files, but not documents) it can provide a speed up and alleviate space congestion, as the file takes really less space in disk (and so the disk reads it faster) and the decompression is still faster than the difference in reading the uncompressed data directly from disk.

Transparent file encryption: This allows files to be transparently encrypted with a key known only to a single user, so any other cannot access its contents. This is specially useful in shared volumes and servers where files can be stored in locations accessible by more people than those authorized to access a determined file.

Sparse files: A sparse file is a file where data is dynamically allocated. For example, an application can prevent it will need 1Gb for a file, and so it request that to the filesystem. If the filesystem supports sparse files the file will only take on disk the space that is really used, and not the whole reserved. Sparse files can also contain holes, so if a piece (cluster/block) of the file is never filled (is always 0s), it is never allocated with real space.

Symbolic links, Alias, Shadows: A symbolic link is a file that contains the location of another file. Mac OS calls them Alias and OS/2 called them Shadows.

Hard links: A hard links happens when to files are really, in disk, the same file, so the changes done to one affect the others, that can have a different location, name, timestamps, so on.

Differences between symbolic and hard links: Usually a symbolic link can point to files that reside in another volume, and they use not only the same blocks for metadata as the hard links, but also the blocks needed for the location of the real file (usually 4 or 8 Kbytes). Also if the real file is deleted, all the symbolic links associated with it become useless, while in the case of hard links, all of the links are "the real file" and it only disappears when all of the links are deleted.

Quotas: Quotas allow system administrators to specify that a user cannot exceed a determined allocation, so for example, if the system disk's is 2000Gb, the maximum each user can ever fill (his quota) is 100Gb, with 200Gb reserved to the administrator. This can usually be set per-user or per-group, and is really important in big corporations with hundreds of users sharing a same disk.

Data deduplication: Data deduplication is a feature that's offered by some filesystems and some third party enhancements for filesystems (it can be more or less implemented using hard links) where files that contain the same data are stored only once

Filesystem conversion: A feature almost never offered by any filesystem. It allows to automatically convert between two filesystems without losing any data in the process, neither having to copy/backup it to another drive and then again back. Was offered from HPFS->NTFS and is currently offered from FAT32->NTFS and from ext3/4->btfs.

Checksum: A checksum is a mathematically obtained number from a calculation over the data (or the metadata) that changes as long as any single bit (smallest piece of computer data possible) and is unique to that data. It allows us to find corruption and deduplicate identical files.

Journaled filesystem: A journaled filesystem is a filesystem where any change to the metadata is first done in the journal, which is then slowly applied to the real location of the metadata. If anything prevents the change to be written in the journal the old metadata still is present, and if anything prevents the change to be written in its real position the journal still says the change must be applied, so we never loss anything (we get the change, or we get nothing, no middle points, no corruption).

User defined transactions: Similar to how a journal works with metadata, a user defined transaction allows changes to the data be only finally committed when specifically marked as finished by an application.

Bootable: Means that the operating system can be installed and boots from this filesystem, taking full advantage of its features.

What is then offered by ReFS?:

ReFS adds copy-on-write allocation for metadata, that is, metadata is written to another location, and if time allows, the old location is deprecated. The same that a journal does without the journal.

It adds mandatory checksum to metadata and optional checksum for user data, all of them "scrubbed" to check if they are still valid, recovering from correct copies (if they exist) or sending a fail event to the system log (if they don't exist) on a failure.

Integrates with upper layer Windows 8's Storage Spaces to stripe (part, separate, piece) data for enhanced performance.

It removes support that was present in NTFS for: Alternate Data Streams (xattrs, Resource Forks and Finder Info) as well as OS/2's Extended Attributes, transparent file compression and encryption, sparse files, hard links, quotas, filesystem conversion and boot abilities.

Oh, and it removes support for storing separate "8.3" filenames for DOS network clients (no one cares).

It also allows for bigger volumes, files and directories.

Comparing with competing filesystems:

Please note in this comparison bootable means only on the native system, and while some features where added lately (like transactions to NTFS and journaling to HFS+) the comparison counts all of the currently as of 17th January 2011 implemented ones (stable or beta, but not just "planned"). Also partially implemented features (NTFS sparse files for example) are counted as a Yes.

	*btrfs*	*ext4*	*HAMMER*	*HFS+*	*NTFS*	*ReFS*	*ZFS*
Manufacturer	Oracle	Theodore Ts'o	Matthew Dillon	Apple	Microsoft	Microsoft	Sun (Oracle)
Native system	Linux	Linux	DragonFly BSD	Mac OS X	Windows	Windows	Solaris
Year of introduction	2007	2006	2008	1998	1993	2012	2005
ADS/xattrs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Object Ids	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
File compression	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
File encryption	Planned	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Sparse files	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
Symbolic links	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hard links	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Quotas	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Deduplication	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Conversion	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No
Metadata checksum	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Data checksum	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Transactions	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Journaled	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bootable	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Integrated data striping and recovery from failure	Planned	No	No	With XSAN	No	With Storage Spaces	With Zpools
Max file size	16 EiB	16 TiB	1 EiB	8 EiB	16 EiB	16 EiB	16 EiB
Max volume size	16 EiB	1 EiB	1 EiB	8 EiB	16 EiB	16 EiB	16 EiB

Conclusion:

Microsoft's new "Resilient File System" is nothing that cannot be implemented on top of NTFS. It's just a huge lost of features that's giving nothing new and taking a lot of features that users, developers and administrators use, plan to use, love and want.

When I read the official MSDN blog post about it I though "yeah Microsoft good joke" while I checked the calendar to see if today was April's Fool. Seeing it's not, my conclusion is that I will stay with NTFS as long as possible and if I somehow want the only interesting feature about ReFS (resilience) I will move to a serious filesystem like ZFS, btrfs or even, HFS+.

Star Wars The Old Republic, 2011/11/25 to 2011/11/29 weekend beta test

2011-11-30T00:07:00.001+00:00

A long time ago in a computer not so far, far away...

(ta tatadaaaaa yeah it's the music)

From 25th August 2011 to 29th August 2011, me and a huge number of people, got invited to test the new videogame based on the Star Wars franchise. Presented by BioWare, Electronics Arts and Lucasarts, Star Wars The Old Republic is coming to our shelves.

This new videogame, presented officially and vaguely on 2007, and scheduled to launch on 20th December 2011, sets us approximately 3640 years before the Battle of Yavin (for those not so informed, the Episode IV movie ends with the Battle of Yavin) and is a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (in the same sense as World of Warcraft, Aion, etc).

So let's analyze it, but please note this is a beta, so things are subject to change anytime.

The Choices

The galaxy is divided in two factions: The Republic and the Sith Empire. Each one has about half of the galaxy and sustain in a difficult peace, not so different from the Cold War, with skirmishes and warlike conflicts on their borders. And this is the first selection you can make.

Your allegiance chosen, should you choose a root class. This is quite inverse the usual, because, some races cannot access some classes.

So set up on a simple to understand table things go as following:

Races	Classes
	Galactic Republic				Sith Empire
	Tropper	Smuggler	Jedi		Imperial Agent	Bounty Hunter	Sith
	Tropper	Smuggler	Consular	Knight	Imperial Agent	Bounty Hunter	Inquisitor	Warrior
Chiss	✘	✘	✘	✘	✔	✔	✘	✘
Human	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Miraluka	✘	✘	✔	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘
Mirialan	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘
Rattataki	✘	✘	✘	✘	✔	✔	✔	✔
Sith pureblood	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘	✔	✔
Twi'lek	✘	✔	✔	✔	✘	✘	✔	✘
Zabrak	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘

Depending if you have chosen a force-sensitive class (Jedi or Sith) or a one that's not, you start on a different planet, for a total of four starting planets.

Also on level 10 each class gets specialized in two classes, making a total of 16 playable classes.

A lot to choice from, but meditate on it you should, my young padawan.

About character personalization there are not a lot of choices, and all we hope that BioWare enhances this in time to release.

Finally, in common with other Star Wars games, sometimes you have to choose from the good act, getting Light Side points, or the evil one, getting Dark Side points.

The Quests

After you have chosen your root class and your race and your character is created, you'll see the first and not last cinematic.

Contrary to traditionals MMORPGs, in this one each time we talk with a non-playable character, we are immersed in a cinematic-style view of the conversators, with full voice-acting on all the participants. This absolutely makes you feel like you're inside a Star Wars movie.

First of all you have the story quests, where you character progresses in the storyline, and then you also have the secondary quests that NPCs are gladly to give you at sight. But also, you have bonus quests, those are, quests that appear out from nothing in the middle of a main or secondary quest to give you extra experience on completion. You also have group quests designed to be done in group, heoric quests that require killing elite monsters (and so, almost always, require groups) and flashpoint quests (whatever this means).

You'll soon find yourself imbodied in so many quests you won't get bored at all.

But the most innovative feature introduced by BioWare is, out of doubt, the multiplayer conversation. While you are in a group and in quest, when you talk to the NPC all of the group can decide what to answer. All of them choose their option and dice rolls, the bigger one is the used one.

It's marvellous to see how all your group wants to save the guy and get light points, and you want to kill it, giving dark side points to all your group. And none of you will know who chosen light or dark option until the dice are rolled.

Not only that, the quests storyline is marvellously conceived to maintain you entertained and in the RPG part of the MMORPG word.

The Locations

The galaxy is far far away. Ok not so far when you're inside it.

In SWTOR there are a total of 19 playable planets. Some are only accesible for your faction and some only for your root class.

You have also boarding of enemy ships as well as space combat. However I did not have time to test the last one.

The available planets are also separated on level, and are Alderaan, Balmorra, Belsavis, Corellia, Coruscant, Dromund Kaas, Hoth, Hutta, Ilum, Korriban, Nar Shaddaa, Ord Mantell, Quesh, Taris, Tatooine, Tython and Voss.

Each of them contains a big and immense map, full of quests and heavily detailed.

Approximately on level 16 you get your own ship where you can rest while crafting, engage in space combats, or choose a destination to continue your travel.

However when you are in the farthest place of a planet it can get quite difficult to get to your ship, making movement between planets difficult sometimes. Planets are also instanced, trying that any planet is never underpopulated or overpopulated.

Player vs Environment

In the PvE section of the game you have the usual experience points system, and a social points system that augments depending on your behaviour in group (including group conversations) as well as a companion system.

The companion system means you can have up to two companions (unluckily it seems you cannot choose). One of them is combat-capable, like some pets on other MMORPGs, and both of them can be sent to "crew skill" missions, like resource gathering and crafting. Or you can send them to sell the useless stuff in your inventory.

Skills are rich in numbers and features, getting easily 24 skills before level 20.

You can also modify armor and weapons with enhancements, or some personalization, like for example making your lightsaber color be red, blue, yellow, so on, put an endurance augmenter, etc.

Player vs Player

Gaming will be divided in two kind of servers, PvE and PvP. However the PvP features are still incomplete so the rest of this section may get heavy changes.

In planets shared by both factions you can get attacked anytime (if you're in a PvP server) or if you and the attacker are pvp-flagged (if you're in a PvE server).

Also, independently of the server type, you have warzones, that introduce new modes of PvP combat like "capture the flag" ones.

Of course, there is a PvP ranking system as well as PvP oriented gear.

The Graphics

SWTOR is absolutely and marvelously rich in graphics, and lights, but nonetheless, the hardware requirements are not huge.

Tests in my gaming rig with a GeForce GTS250 gave me an almost constant 25 fps rate with medium graphics and at a 1920x1080 pixels resolution.

Each planet contains it's carefully designed vegetation and monsters, with an animated sky that interferes with the lightning of the scene.

Also weapons and skills change the enviromental lightning.

The user interface is futuristic, and clear, not intrussive at all.

The editions

SWTOR will come in three editions, Standard, Digital Deluxe and Collector's.

The Standard edition comes with nothing more than the game.

The Digital Deluxe edition, exclusive to Origin, includes the following in-game elements:

Flare Gun
Training droid
HoloDancer
HoloCam
STAP

The Collector's edition contains the same of the Digital Deluxe edition, plus the following in-game elements:

Exclusive mouse droid
Exclusive Collector's Edition in-game store (which items will it contain is yet unknown)

along with the following physical items:

Exclusive gentle giant Darth Malgus figure
The Journal of Master Gnost-Dural as annotated by Satele Shan
A map of The Old Republic galaxy
A CD containing the game's music score
A custom security authentication key (similar to RSA SecurID)
A metal case containing the game disks

all inside a high quality collector's box.

Additionally and independently of the chosen edition, if you pre-order it before release, you'll get a special pre-order crystal in-game, that allows you to change the color of your laser blasts or your lightsaber to black with yellow border (seen in the photo).

Conclusion

I've enjoyed playing this beta like I've not done in a MMORPG ever.

The storyline, the quests, all together make a marvellous game. and even being a beta, bugs are almost non-existant (compared to other games that are years-old and still bug-filled) and none of them is a stopping bug.

I have preordered it, and if you like MMORPGs for their beauty, their storyline, and/or for Star Wars, you should do the same.

More screenshots are available in my Picasa web album.

Graphics: 5 / 5
Sound: 5 / 5
Gameplay: 5 / 5
Quality/cost: 4.5 / 5

Overall score: 4.875

Hands on Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" with LG Optimus 7

2011-10-09T20:13:00.001+01:00

In this article I'll take about two things, first about the LG Optimus 7 (aka E-900), a Windows Phone device, and second about the first major update of Windows Phone, called Mango.

I've chosen this already old device because of a couple of things. First of all, the first releases of Windows Phone were incomplete, even in Microsoft's words. Second, while it's a year old, newer ones don't offer breaking-through improvements. And third and last, because it's almost the same hardware as the still only available iPhone, the iPhone 4 (4S has been presented, but not yet available), same as my main all-time-used smartphone.

Also I want to ask for apologies for the screenshots. Windows Phone does not offer any solution for screenshot that doesn't involve jailbreaking or paying for the development program, neither of which I'll do (at least, right now), so I had to use a camera with far from perfect results. But I did my best.

The hardware:

All first wave Windows Phone devices come with almost same hardware, just differing on camera, keyboard presence and storage and screen size. And the incoming second wave ones don't differ much either. This is because Microsoft, contrary to Google, demanded manufacturers to create Windows Phone devices with a minimum set of hardware.

Manufacturer: LG
Model: E900
Operating System: Windows Phone 7.0 (Windows CE 7.0.7004) upgradeable to Windows Phone 7.5 (Windows CE 7.10.7220)
Processor: Qualcomm QSD8650 @ 1Ghz with dynamic underclocking, ARMv7 instruction set
RAM: 512Mib
Storage: 16 GiB internal flash
Display: 3.8" multitouch screen at 480 x 800 pixels driven by Qualcomm Adreno 200 GPU
Wireless networks: GSM (850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz), CMDA (850 Mhz), UMTS (2100 Mhz), Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and WiFi 802.11 (b, g and n)
Ports: 4-pin 3.5mm miniJack, microUSB-B 2.0
Sensors: Accelerometer, FM receiver, A-GPS, photometer, proximity
Camera: 5 Mpx, auto focus, digital zoom, flash, 1280x720@24 fps video
Included accessories: USB charger (4.8V, 1A), micro-USB headphones (with microphone), two pairs of latex earbuds

Windows Phone:

Windows Phone (WP) is the successor of Windows Mobile, both of which use Windows CE at their core.

While Windows Mobile has existed from long ago, it has always been oriented to the enterprise market, and this has changed with WP.

First launched on November 2010, it offers a redesigned touch oriented user interface called Metro, breaks compatibility with all Windows Mobile applications and enters on the user market, then, now and still dominated by Apple's iOS and in second place Google's Android operating systems.

Contrary to all the other smartphone operating system, WP is not oriented to which applications you have, but to the information they give.

The home screen on Windows Phone, the "Start screen", is full of squares with information, each corresponding to an integrated or installed application. This squares are called "Live Tiles", and are updated automatically, and the applications are called "Hub".

You can change the background to white or black, and the foreground color to whichever you prefer from a list of options.

Also by design Windows Phone requires all device to integrate, at least, three hardware buttons: Back (left-sided arrow), Start (Windows symbol) and Search (a loupe).

The Phone on Windows:

The Phone Hub is a really clear and easy interface to do, what a phone, Windows or not, does, calls.

At first you're shown with History, because of where WP is oriented (content, people, not tasks), with a menu where you can choice a visual Voicemail (on available carriers, elsewhere it will simply call the voicemail), a Keypad so you can manually enter the number, a Contacts button (will move you to the People Hub, see below), and a Search button (that will search in history).

In a not so good design decision, the hardware search button moves you to the Search Hub (Bing), not doing the same as the button on the application bar.

My accounts:

Before talking about the next Hub, I'll talk about the type of account you can add, because each one is important for the following Hubs.

Windows Phone supports accounts from the following services: Windows Live, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Exchange, Office 365, Yahoo! Mail, POP3 and IMAP.

Windows Live accounts are the main kind of account for Windows Phone, specially the first one you enter, that you cannot modify, delete, or change it's preference (say, you use more than one Windows Live account, as I do, a mess). If you use Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Xbox Live or Games for Windows Live, you already are using this account. The first one you enter is connected to the Messaging Hub, the People Hub, the Music + Videos Hub, the Marketplace Hub, the Calendar Hub, the Pictures Hub and gets its own Mail Hub (you'll see all about this below). The other ones you use get only, and optionally, connected to People, Calendar and Mail Hubs. They are also the ones used for SkyDrive, a cloud-storage service by Microsoft that's used by the Office Hub.

Google accounts can be Gmail accounts or Google Apps accounts, and every one you use connects to the People Hub, the Calendar Hub and creates a Mail Hub.

Facebook accounts are the second most important ones on Windows Phone, being the basis of the socialization it pretends, getting connected to the People Hub, the Calendar Hub, the Messaging Hub and the Pictures Hub.

Twitter and Linkedin are newly introduced in Mango, and get only connected to the People Hub.

Exchange are the accounts for those enterprise with Microsoft Exchange Server installed and gets connected to the People Hub, the Calendar Hub and the Mail Hub. Office 365 is basically the same, but instead of having your enterprise install the expensive server, you rent it as a service paying Microsoft monthly, gets connected also to the Office Hub and offers you web-based office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, so on).

Yahoo! Mail accounts are any Yahoo! account you have (if you have a Yahoo! account pre-mail, attach @yahoo.com at the end of your account name), and get connected to the People, Calendar and Mail Hubs. Even if your Yahoo! account is connected to Flickr, it won't get connected to your Pictures Hub (sadly).

And finally POP3 and IMAP accounts are simply the industrial standard protocols for emails, so any other email account you have is one of these (or both) and will get connected to (and only to) a Mail Hub.

Socializing with the People in their Hub:

The People Hub is where all of your contacts, from all of the supported accounts, get connected in a single place.

It's not just a list of contacts. When you choose one contact you're offered things to do with it, not just it's information, like phoning, sending an email, tweeting or seeing the address in a map. Also you see their last updates on Messenger, Twitter and Facebook, their pictures and an history of your interactions with it.

The People Hub also shows a resume of the newest things of all contacts (like Facebook's wall, but from all the supported accounts), allowing you to comment on their updates.

It's a clear an centralized "all the people I know" service, and saves you a lot of time checking different social networks, giving all the information at once.

Its Tile gets dynamically changed with the photos of your contacts, and you can link the same contact from multiple accounts so you know that "Natalia Portillo" in Facebook is the same girl as @girlyngeek in Twitter.

More socializing, the Messaging Hub:

The Messaging Hub, sends and receives messages.

As with any decent smartphone, from here you access to the SMS and MMS, but also, Facebook Chat and Windows Live Messenger.

Unfortunately only one account is supported, the first Windows Live you create, and another one from Facebook.

Also Facebook Chat is unreliable, I've tried for three days until finally it recognized that I have online friends.

Meeting people, the Calendar Hub:

In the Calendar Hub you get a view of the current day, and optionally of the month, containing all of your appointments, as well as the Facebook events.

You can create new appointments (but not Facebook events), confirm your assistance (Exchange and Facebook), see the comments on the Facebook event, and see a sorted list of future appointments.

Its tile shows the first next appointment, or just the day.

Catched in the web, the Internet Hub:

As with all Microsoft operating systems, Windows Phone comes with Internet Explorer (surprise!).

Ok, don't run, while Windows Phone 7.0 comes with Internet Explorer 6 (run! run!!!!), Mango updates it to IE 9.0.

It's pretty decent, fast, unbloated, adds latest HTML5 and CSS technologies.

ACID3 passes 100% (same as desktop IE 9.0, iOS 5 Mobile Safari, while Android's Chrome gives only 95%).

Peacekeeper browser test gives 120 points with 1/6 HTML5 capabilities (5 of them are different codecs so no one cares).

Messages everywhere, the Mail Hub:

For each mail account you add on Windows Phone, one new Mail Hub is created.

Here you get a list of the messages in your inbox, threaded, you can read them, reply them, search on them, the usual.

You can also link two different accounts so they appear in the same Hub.

The missing things are encryption, so forget about encrypting or signing your messages, and that the IMAP protocol only supports the insecure "don't use in public WiFis" ClearText password system.

Its tile shows the new messages (not just unread, but arrived after the last time you checked).

See the world, the Pictures Hub

The Pictures Hub stores not only your pictures, but everyone's.

It's divided in section, the first and most important of all, is the Camera Roll, where you have the photos and videos you've taken with your phone.

Then you have the Albums sections, where you can see again the Camera Roll and all the photo albums you have on Facebook and Skydrive, but you cannot create new ones.

Next is the date, where all your photos and videos are sorted by date.

Then favorites, where all the photos you flag as that, will appear.

Next, people section, where you can access to the albums of your contacts just selecting who.

When you choose a photo we have a couple of choices to do with it. If the photo is online (in Facebook or Skydrive) you can save it to the phone, set as wallpaper, tag people in it and view or add comments.

If the photo or video is on the phone, you can send it via MMS, share it on Facebook, Twitter and SkyDrive, send it by mail and, if an installed third party application adds that option (like Flickr or WhatsApp) send it to the application. You can also delete it, mark as favorite, set as wallpaper, and try to autofix it.

Finally you get to the What's new section, that like the same on on the People Hub, lists in a wall manner all the updates of your contacts and yourself, but here, only the ones that include photos or videos.

Get me contents, the Marketplace Hub

The Marketplace Hub, also called Windows Marketplace, is more like an iTunes Store than like an App Store or Android Market.

You have three options to search on (one more courtesy of LG): apps, games, music

In apps we can check all the third party applications available for Windows Phone, and if we come from Android or iOS we'll miss a couple of. The list of applications is nevertheless growing in a fast pace, so sooner than later this gap will be filled.

The games section contains third party games. Most of them have "XBOX LIVE" written in the icon, meaning the game supports and embraces the Xbox Live service (same as in Xbox 360 and Games for Windows Live, similar to iOS' Game Center). One notable, not good, thing here, is that games are expensive, the most expensive of all the mobile platforms.

You can see, for example, the Fruit Ninja game on Apple App Store at $0.99, Google Android Market at $0.99, Nokia Ovi Store at $0.99, Samsung Bada Apps at $0 and Windows Marketplace at $2.99. The only reason I can think about this difference of cost is Microsoft imposing some rules. Of course this is not good for their market.

The last section, music, is the same as the Zune Marketplace you can see on your Zune devices, or in the Zune application. Here you can browse a huge list of music and buy albums or separate songs, or you can subscribe to Zune Music Pass, that with a monthly payment will allow you to hear to unlimited music.

Courtesy of LG (not on other Windows Phone devices) you get also a section of free apps, that are not free for non-LG devices.

Entertain me, the Music + Videos Hub

Shown with the Zune logo, here you get up to the music and videos you bought in the marketplace or synced from the computer.

You can also access to Podcasts, but it's not worldwide yet, and to the integrated FM Radio receiver. Also you get a shortcut to the Marketplace Hub.

You also get an history of the last things you've played (including FM radio stations) and new things in the Marketplace.

Finally if you install the Youtube application (does not come preinstalled) you get a shortcut to it.

You get all the usual music player options, like rating (3 ratings, open heart, broken heart, full heart), repeat and shuffle, and as an addition, the Smart DJ system, that will play a mix of related songs that are on your phone.

Who am I, the Me Hub

The Me Hub is a centralized wall, where you can see all the last notifications of all the social networks you configured, the last things your friends posted, posting a message to all or a choice of them and setting your chat status (Facebook and Messenger only).

Finally you get an option to Check in, that will show the places near to you so. It's currently not as complete as competing Check in services (like Gowalla or Foursquare) but you can always create new ones as needed. Your check ins can appear on your Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts.

Find find find find, the Search Hub (Bing)

The Search Hub is absolutely hidden, until you press the hardware search button.

At first you get a simple search bar, with four buttons below. Anything you write on that bar, is like searching on www.bing.com, nothing new.

Buttons meaning are somewhat cryptical nonetheless.

Scout uses your location to find near places, restaurants, events and attractions, shops and highlights. The number of results of course depend on your location. Mine, being an island, is somewhat forgotten, and misses a huge number of great places in less than 1 mile around me.

Music uses the integrated microphone to hear and recognize music (like third party applications Shazam and Soundhound), but it's accuracy needs to be heavily improved. In my tests songs usually give different, unrelated at all, results.

Vision uses the integrated camera to recognize barcodes, QR code, Microsoft Tags, and searches for it automatically, continuing the recognition until you stop and choose a particular result, or check the history of recognized ones. It can also scan, OCR, translate and search text documents, but doesn't allow you to save the text as a document.

Voice uses the integrated microphone to do a voice recognition, and automatically search what it recognized.

Turn right, left, straight, stop in the Maps Hub

The Maps Hub, not by default in the Start Screen, shows you a map of your location, thanks to the Bing Maps service.

The Maps Hub allows you to see near places (same as Scout on Search Hub), get directions to an address, see your location, your favorite places, and search for a particular address. You can also change to an aerial view, and in some places, you can get information about traffic.

Be productive, the Office Hub

Integrated in Windows Phone are included mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

OneNote is a simple notes application (that stops being simpler when it's just an option inside the Office Hub). Notes can be simply texts, to-do lists with checkboxes, contain indentation and be bold or highlighted. Also you can store pictures or audio on the notes. All your notes are synced to Skydrive or your Office 365 account.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint are heavily reduced versions of their desktop counterparts, mostly allowing you to a fast check or edit of a document you've created on your computer, or creating an urgent "just came to mind" one to be then enhanced on desktop. All of them sync to Skydrive or Office 365, and you can also send them via email.

Compared to the competition (the iWork suite on iOS and Documents To Go on other platforms) their functionality is severely limited.

Non hubs, but apps

On the Start Screen you have a little arrow pointing to the right, and touching it you get the list of all the applications, including the Hubs I previously talked of, and the third party ones you install. Included ones following

Alarms does simply what it name suggests, allows you to set alarms at a particular time.

Calculator gives you a simple calculator on portrait and a scientific one on landscape. Curiously, the portrait mode is bugged (2+2*5 gives 20, instead of 12) and the landscape is not (gives 12).

Settings allows you to configure system or application settings, simply that.

Voice to text, gives you shortcuts to destinations where voice recognition is applicable, like Messaging, email, memos, or Twitter.

LG exclusives

In the old world of Windows Mobile, manufacturers did have a lot of hardware choices, and also, were allowed to personalize the interface. Android, allows the same.

However, Windows Phone, as well as iOS does, prevents manufacturer or carrier personalization of the interface, and restricts the hardware choices to a few ones.

So what can manufacturers offer? Better exterior design, bigger cameras and screens. Ok LG thought that was not enough, so they offer three integrated applications, and a whole selection of free applications in the market (that, as said before, are available at a cost for other manufacturers).

First of all this is a DLNA certified device, and LG includes a "Play To" application, that allows you to choose one DLNA device to stream the pictures, music and videos you have on your phone to.

ScanSearch is an augmented reallity. When facing front, it overlays places in your camera view, so you know what are you pointing to. You can select a category, but not all at the same time. If you point down, it shows you a radar-like view with you in the centre and all places rounding you. And if you point up it shows you the weather forecast for your current location.

Information can be taken from Google or Bing services, at your choice, but, unfortunately, as this device lacks a compass, you won't have too much precision.

The last integrated application courtesy of LG is Panorama shot, that guides you on creating a panorama taking 5 shots automatically just moving the phone. However as you can see on the above shot, needs a lot of improvement.

Systemwide

Systemwide information, like network coverage, battery charge and wifi status, is always hidden, appearing only when you swipe your finger down from the upmost part of the screen.

Notifications, when they arrive, appear briefly there, and if touched, open then application that generated them.

But the most information is on the Lock screen.

When the screen is locked you have a view at a glance showing you the network coverage, wifi status, battery charge, current day and time, unread messages (email, SMS, whatever), nearest appointment (only if today or tomorrow) and current playing song (with review, play/pause and forward buttons).

Another systemwide feature (or almost, see below) is speech recognition. There is an option accessible pressing the Start button for a few seconds that allows you to give orders ("Call mom"), as well as a dedicated Speech-to-text shortcut application, and full support in the Search and Messaging Hubs.

Syncing, the Zune and the Windows Phone Connector

Windows Phone, contrary to Android, and similarly to the rest of mobile operating systems, including its parent sibling Windows Mobile, is designed to support synchronization with computers.

And for first time in a Microsoft mobile operating system, they provide a sync tool for Mac OS.

For those using Windows computers, Zune is the companion (and not ActiveSync like on Windows Mobile). Sorry for the screenshot being in Spanish, Zune did not allow me to choose.

Zune is a centralized media player, like iTunes, giving us access to our collection of music, videos and podcasts. Contrary to iTunes, it uses the predefined Windows folders (Music, Video and a new one, Podcasts), showing you anything stored inside them, added or no manually to Zune.

It also allows us to explore the whole Zune Marketplace, including Windows Marketplace (the applications one) from our computer to acquire new items.

It allows us to choose which of all these items sync with our Windows Phone devices, as well as any picture (those stored on the computer in the predefined Windows folder called Pictures) we have on the computer or stored/taken in the phone, and last but not least, to download and apply software updates to Windows Phone.

Mac OS X users are offered Windows Phone Connector in the Mac App Store.

Windows Phone Connector seems quite integrated on the Mac ecosystem, allowing us to sync with our Windows Phone the music we have stored in iTunes (by album, genre or artist, as well as single songs), photos and videos from iPhoto or Aperture (by album/project or face), and movies and podcasts from iTunes.

It also filters songs from our iTunes library that are small enough to be used as ringtones (and you can easily cut a bigger one in iTunes in two simple steps) allowing us to send them to our device.

We can also explore the content inside of our device and import, delete or preview it.

Finally, it also offers the same updating experience as Zune, and only lacks support for DRMed content, because the Zune DRM is not Mac compatible, and the iTunes DRM is not Windows Phone compatible. Luckily for us, iTunes music is not DRMed at all (except on Japan as I've heard of) and neither Zune music is (as long as it's in MP3 format).

The missing bits

Windows Phone 7.0 was a premature start, and while Mango added supposedly more than 500 features, making it an enough mature player in the smartphone market, it is still missing things.

The most important thing that's missing the that speech recognition seems to be systemwide, but it isn't. I cannot use it in emails, or to create system wide documents, neither in third party apps, and it would have been great to because Microsoft Tellme (how they call their speech recognition system) is really good doing its work.

Another missing bit is the applications ecosystem. Of course it will grow, but at which cost? People that buy applications and games in a smartphone expects prices cheaper than the ones offered in Windows Marketplace, and this will hurt Windows Phone adoption, no doubt.

And for me the most annoying thing are the limitations in accounts. Only the first Windows Live account will be used for Messenger, Xbox Live and the Marketplace. Ok, but I've always have three. One as Microsoft developer, one for Xbox Live / Games for Windows Live, and one for messaging the friends. Not only that, only one Facebook and Twitter account can be added, and same happens, because I have one for Claunia.com and another one for my personal things.

A lot of people will also see that both syncing solutions (Zune and WPC) are missing synchronization of data. Microsoft expects you to relay on Windows Live, Outlook or Office 365 to do that, but you can always do the same as I did, use a Google account as the mixing piece between everything (my contacts and calendars are created on one Mac, synced via iCloud to the rest of them, via iTunes to my iOS devices, via that Mac to Google, via Google to Android, Windows and Windows Phone and via Windows to Nokia. Yeah, bit messy, but works).

Conclusion

This is a great phone, accompanied by a great operating system.

Budget apart I wouldn't have clear which one to get, an iPhone or a Windows Phone device. Android gets out of the decision.

And while there are other Windows Phone devices, I really like the LG Optimus 7.

The screen is clear and bright, the phone seems well constructed, the back piece of metal gives it a luxury point, the buttons are easy to access but difficult to press without intent, the camera is good (and will be reviewed extensively in another article).

The only bad thing about this LG is that the integrated earphones are micro-USB instead of the standard jack connector.

Rest in peace Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T01:29:00.001+01:00

Today, on October 5, 2001, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, one of the fathers of personal computers, and a model to so many people, has passed away.

If you're here, probably you know something about him, and if not, you can always check Wikipedia.

This is my dedication, to this man, that made so many things for me, even without knowing it, how his ideas, his brilliantness and his products, influenced my life.

Long ago when I were still a little girl, my father talked to me about the existence of a computer, one without DOS, one called the Macintosh.

The Macintosh is a computer, that Steve Jobs worked to design, guided the people to achieve, a computer that serves the people, not the reverse.

And it was beatiful, and simple to use, and it worked. It made a revolution, he made a revolution.

Years after he made the Macintosh, he departed Apple and founded NeXT, stablishing the basis for a new revolution.

One day, he returned, and showed the industry, the iMac, in my opinion, the most beautiful computer ever made. And then things started to be not only beatiful or useful, but both things at the same time.

I still own one, and I still love it.

Years later he presented Mac OS X, creating a revolution on the operating systems, using the bases created on NeXT. An operating system so useful, stable and beauty, it's almost perfect.

And not stopping here, he showed us the iPhone. Another smartphone, but one that made all the world, manufacturers and users in equal degree, to want one smartphone.

And then the iPad, a tablet, a world that noone ever conquered no matter how much they tried.

Today, for me, and surely a huge lot more of people, will always be the Steve Jobs' Day, because, what I am, Natalia Portillo, multi-platform desktop-and-mobile developer, administrator, blogger, tester and technician, I am who I am, thanks in part to him.

Thanks Steve Jobs, thanks for your geniality, thanks for your ideas, thanks for your products, and wherever you are now, my heart is with you, rest in peace and happiness.

Blessed Be,
Natalia Portillo

UPDATE: Please send all of your condonlences to rememberingsteve@apple.com and see Official Apple Statement.

Hands-on Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8 public beta build 8102)

2011-09-16T22:55:00.001+01:00

Coinciding with the celebration of the //BUILD/Windows conference, Microsoft has released a public developer preview of their next generation operating system, codenamed "Windows 8".

This developer preview comes with a bundle of new applications, the preview of a new Visual Studio, and in two flavors, user and server, for x86 and x86-64 (amd64, em64t, x64, choose your alias).

System requirements are quiet low:

1 Ghz x86 or x86-64 processor (nothing said about ARM)
1 Gb of RAM for x86 or 2 Gb of RAM for x86-64
16 Gb of free hard disk for x86 or 20 Gb for x86-64
DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

And yes, you read ARM. That little processors that populate our pads, stales, tablets, phones, cameras, life.

Because, in Microsoft words, Windows is reimagined. It now pretends to be an operating system able to run from the smallest little thing in our desktops (winds say "wPad"), to our biggest twelve-core gaming rigs with 60" plasma screens.

So, let's boot it.

Redactor's note: I installed it in VMWare Fusion 4 first (crashes on VMWare Fusion 3) and then do a reinstallation in real hardware. It should be able to update Windows 7 but I have not tested that yet.

Installation is pretty much the same as Windows 7, few choices, no headaches, and it's faster than 7's.

Things differ on the pre-usage questions. Now you can choice to answer nothing, or to be asked of everything.

If you choose the second, questions are the typical, how do you want to have updates installed? Is this a secure or public network?

Then the funny start, creating a user, or not. Now you can use your Windows Live ID for login (or create a separate user that then you can link to a Windows Live ID). If you do so, your password for login is the same, and your settings get synced between all of your machines that use that Live ID.

And so this is. "Start menu" dies and becomes "Start screen", filled with tiles.

If you have a Windows Phone, this will sound not just similar, but identical. It's the same UI used there, and here it's called Metro.

Windows Developer Preview comes with a huge bunch of test Metro applications, and misses a huge bunch of classic Windows applications.

And you'll miss a touch-screen or multitouch device, because, Metro is horizontally aligned, and using a mouse scroll does nothing, so you have to manually move a scroll bar to the right to see what's hidden.

Internet Explorer 10

One of the first Metro apps you can see is Internet Explorer 10, with a simplified "goes to the point" interface.

Navigation is moved to the down, with a back button, a "site button", the address bar, refresh button, pin button (that will create a tile to directly access this webpage from Metro), favourite button and forward button.

No mess, this is all, nothing more. Flash is not included, and rumors say it won't never be.

A new feature is that the site button is able to detect if a site belongs to an application you have installed.

For example, the //BUILD/Windows conference webpage recognizes you have a BUILD application installed and allows you to launch it directly just clicking the "site button".

Tweet@rama

This new applications is just a Twitter client, nothing more.

At first start it will present you with the Twitter webpage to authorize an external application, and then you have your timeline, your posts, the people you're following and your followers at a glance.

Simple to use, gets to the point, and lovely to use.

Stocks

Simply what it says, shows you the stocks you want, with a detailed view, market news and graphs.

Oh yeah, Apple keeps growing :p

Weather

This tile shows you a weather forecast of the city you choose, in Farenheit.

This is a beta and they have forgotten all the people in the world that uses Celsius scale, there is no option, nowhere, to change it.

By default the city it shows is Anaheim, CA, the city where //BUILD/Windows conference is done.

You can choose it to detect your current city.

And then it will fail. Because location is disabled by default. I enabled it but it was unable to find my city even then, so I had to manually input it.

At the time I tested it, it was day on Anaheim, and it showed an animated beach photo behind the forecast, and my city was night, and it showed an animated Moon.

Control Panel

There is a new Metro-based control panel with things in a manner that remembers me of the iPad control panel. Probably the Windows Phone one is similar (I have yet to test a device, donations welcome).

Things are sortered by category, with enable-disable toggle buttons.

This things affect all Windows, not just Metro things, but are mostly Metro oriented.

You have the option to go to the old-and-good Control Panel from here with just a click, sorry, touch.

If you see the screenshot you'll see that I captured the Notifications panel. Yes, because, now, applications can send notifications while suspended or closed, so if you receive a message on Facebook, it will show up.

Socialite

Oh, did I say, Facebook?

Included also between the Metro apps is Socialite, a Facebook application.

Again, for accessing your Facebook data, it opens the Facebook permission webpage, and voilà.

At a glance you can see your wall, your profile, your photo albums, your friends (and their things) and the checkins.

Indeed I love it quite more than the real Facebook page.

News

News is a feeds reader. By default it comes with a lot of feeds categorized, or you can add your own.

I added this blog, however...

There are some failures in the rendering (ugh!), but remember, this is a beta, shit happens.

Windows Store

Coming soon!

Windows Store is ala Windows Marketplace, ala Android Market, ala Apple App Store and Mac App Store.

It is simply a place where developers can put their applications so they are sold in a centralized site, all the payment shit handled by Microsoft (that will gain a percentage).

It's great for users, it's great for developers, and it's a must for Metro applications.

Metro applications cannot be installed other way, so you're forced to use Windows Store.

Metro revisited

Now that I have setup my twitter and facebook account, that I've chosen my favourite blog and that I selected my city and some stocks, Metro is alive!

Yes, every tile gets updated live, even if their corresponding applications are closed.

Socialite shows photos of my facebook friends, News shows random articles from this blog, Stocks shows how Apple keeps growing, and Weather says me I'm at 72ºF (I don't know if this is heat or cold).

And, by some reason I don't understand, Tweet@rama is showing things I'm not following.

This is, along with notifications, one of the things taken from smartphones world to desktop with metro. The same as Windows Phone tiles update live with the newest information, does Metro.

Other example applications

So that were the most important Metro applications bundled with this developer preview.

There are a bunch of other ones but I'll mostly do a small resume and some screenshots.

BUILD is a Metro application that gives you at a glance access to the sessions of the //BUILD/Windows conference

5 in a row is a Metro based Go game

Piano is a touch-oriented piano. While you can play it with a mouse you can see me playing it here and check by yourself is not easy to do.

Paintplay is a touch oriented paint program with not much options. Funny for kids, useless for anything else.

Labyrinth is what the name says, a labyrinth game, nothing more.

Mopod is a podcast browser and player. However there seems to be no way to add podcasts not included in the default directory.

Tile puzzle must I say more?

Picstream shows a stream of photos from Flickr chosen by popular tags. You cannot login in your account, you cannot browse, you cannot choose any tag (only ones shown randomly between the most popular ones), quite useless.

Zero Gravity is a simple game where you have to get the astronaut to his ship.

MeasureIt is... ok, 24 hours later I'm still trying to figure what the hell is it for.

Alarms are just that, alarms, so your Windows 8 "device" can wake you up.

Treehouse Stampede! is a word game. It gives you three letters and you must form a word with all of them to launch a ball to the enemies so you kill them before they arrive the tree. Yeah the graphics seem done by a kid.

CheckM8 is a simple chess games, with graphics glitches that made it unplayable.

Memories Your Life Book is an application that allow you to create digital photo albums with any photos you have on your computer and then show them in slideshows to your friends, family, so on.

Tube Rider is a game where you have to construct a tube using pieces to arrive the goal in time.

Word Hunt is a game where you must form words of 3 or more letters using adjacent pieces.

Notespace is an application where you can create post-it, handwritten, using keyboard, or capturing a photo/video from an integrated camera.

Flash cards is a simple game for little kids that shows a question and a list of possible answers.

Ink pad is a notepad with handwritting recognition.

Sudoku talks for itself.

Copper is the classic movement puzzle where you have to move block to access the goal with a limited number of movements.

Air Craft shows you how to make a paper aircraft.

Bit Box mixes up different sound files you have on your computer to create that composition that will make you famous (or not).

The missing bits

First of all the most important thing missing is the Start Menu. It's nowhere, don't search it like crazy because you won't find it.

So where have all the things not Metro-enable gone? Good question.

While Windows 8 still comes with things like Microsoft Paint, Wordpad, Windows Mail, Windows Media Player, they are not accesible unless you go to their location with Explorer.

And what will happen with applications that I install myself and are not Metro enabled? You can create a shortcut on Metro, but it will not appear there by default, so, again, manually going to where it is installed.

Also the Metro-enabled Internet Explorer does not support Adobe Flash. If you install it, it will simply do nothing. You still have the non-Metro-enabled Internet Explorer, just in case, as a shortcut in the Desktop.

The only two new confirmed things that were not present in my previously analyzed Windows 8 Milestones is "Windows To Go", that allows you to create a bootable USB disk with Windows 8 and your configuration, and the inclusion of .NET Framework 4.5.

So, this is all, from an user perspective.

If you are a developer, visit //BUILD/Windows conference webpage and start checking the talks. There are a lot of new things to do with applications, Metro, and all of that.

Personally I don't dislike Metro, but I think that it's a huge change from what users expect from Windows. It needs polishing, it needs a way to access the old and good Start Menu applications, and it needs more native applications.

Windows has been reimagined, and if it is for the good or for the bad, time will say.

Comparison of NTFS drivers for Mac OS X

2011-08-30T09:14:00.001+01:00

In this article I will compare the three current NTFS drivers for Mac OS X Lion as well as give a little definition about filesystems and about the major ones that can be used for interoperatibility between Windows and Mac OS X.

What's a filesystem?

A filesystem is the way that files are organized in a disk. Every major operating system comes with its own one, incompatible with the others. Windows comes with NTFS, Mac OS X comes with HFS+ and Linux with ext4.

This articles centers on comparing how to interchange files between Windows and Mac OS X so only the filesystems that can be commonly used by both will be discussed. Those are NTFS, FAT32, exFAT and HFS+.

There is also another filesystem, UDF (from Universal Disk Format) that was created to be universally compatible with all operating systems. It's the one used by DVD and Bluray discs, but its usage outside this kind of disks (like for example in hard disks or flash drives) requires deep knowledge of the operating system, as for example, Windows won't allow to read a UDF formatted hard disk unless tricked to do so, and Mac OS X doesn't offer an option to format anything this way easily.

What's FAT32?

FAT32 (also known as File Allocation Table, 32 bit) is an evolution of the original MS-DOS filesystem, introduced in 1995 with Windows 95 OSR2. It's a fragile filesystem with severe limitations (maximum filesize is 4Gb, Windows cannot format drives bigger than 32Gb on it, it does not support user security/permissions, fragments heavily, etc) but however almost every operating system out there can read and write it perfectly. It's also used extensively in any kind of device using mass storage (phones, digital cameras, DVRs, etc).

What's NTFS?

NTFS (also known as NT File System) is the native filesystem introduced with Windows NT. It's a very clever filesystem, that introduces compression, alternate data streams, security, etc. However its specification are a secret, and just only in the recent years enough of it has been reverse engineered to allow drivers to fully support it.

What's HFS+?

HFS+ (also known as Hierarchical File System Plus and Mac OS Extended) is the native Mac OS X filesystem, first introduced with Mac OS 8.1. It supports features unique to Mac OS like FinderInfo and the Resource Fork. It added new features from UNIX (permissions, links) and alternate data streams, security, etc, over its predecesor, HFS.

What's exFAT?

exFAT (also known as Extended File Allocation Table) is a new filesystem designed for Microsoft to be used on flash drives. It overcomes the most important FAT32 limitations without the complexity of NTFS, and is mandatory to any device claiming to support the SDXC and Memory Stick XC cards to support it. However, its specification is secret, patented and require a paid license to implement a driver (I still need confirmation from a lawyer that this applies in the EU). Currently only Mac OS X and Windows Vista or 7 support it out-of-the-box.

A little filesystem terms glossary

Alternate Data Stream (aka Fork): An ADS or Fork is a piece of data that comes alongside the file's data, but is independent of it. It should not be confused with metadata, that can be stored inside the data, and can be stored as ADSs. It can contain things like image thumbnails, URL where the file was downloaded from, the instant messaging contact's name who send it, so on.

Resource Fork: The Resource Fork is a special ADS that Mac OS previously depended extensively on (not anymore on Mac OS X, but files from previous versions and its applications can be simply broken if they lose it). It's specifically designed as a database of data types, like application pieces, rich text style, so on. NTFS stores it as an ADS called "AFP_Resource", and HFS+ stores it independently. Mac OS X stores them in filesystems that don't support it in separate files prepending "._" to the filename.

Extended Attributes (aka EA or xattr): Extended attributes are small alternate data streams usually limited in size. Its concept was first introduced in OS/2 to store things like the file icon, the filename, etc. FAT versions precious to FAT32 supports them natively (only on OS/2 and Windows NT), NTFS stores them as ADSs and Mac OS X 10.4 calls its ADSs so (but it doesn't limit the size). They are also supported by most Linux filesystems.

Finder Info: Finder Info is a collection of attributes that were required by Mac OS versions previous to Mac OS X. They store the icon positions in a folder, provide support for the Aliases, and stores which application created the file and what kind of file is it (Mac OS previous to X required this to know that a JPEG is a JPEG and it should be opened with Photoshop, X can live without this). NTFS stores it as an ADS called "AFP_AfpInfo".

Alias: The Alias is a Mac OS feature, where it creates a shortcut to a file that works even if the file is still moved to another place (it stores the file and volume unique identifiers to always find the file wherever it is). They are implemented using the resource fork, and OS/2 provided a similar feature called Shadow using EAs.

Symbolic link: A UNIX feature, a file is created that shorcuts to the exact location of another file, so if you move the original file the link is broken.

Hard link: A UNIX feature where a file information is duplicated but not its content. That's, there are two files that are really just the same (you modify one, both get modified), and until all hard links of the same file are not deleted the file isn't either.

The tests, explained

In this article I'll test the three NTFS offerings for Mac OS X that are currently available and supported under Mac OS X Lion, as well as the exFAT, FAT32 and HFS+ filesystems, for features and speed.

While Mac OS X Lion comes with an NTFS driver of itself, designed in-house by Apple, opensource and programmed by the guy that did most of the NTFS reverse engineering, it's as of today, unsupported. Drives are not writeable unless you do some command line tricks (that I will not explain in this article), and even if you do this nothing is warranted to work. If it makes your hard disk burn, or you lose all your data, or an alien abducts you for using it, Apple will say "we told you it's not supported". However, it passed all my tests without a single corruption, so, at your own risk!!!

Paragon Software offers us, among other filesystem drivers, with Paragon NTFS for Mac, compatible with Lion from 9.0, however they do some things I don't like. They exaggerated their features comparison saying that the Apple driver doesn't support NTFS features it does however supported even before Paragon did.

Finally Tuxera offers us Tuxera NTFS for Mac, a commercial solution that evolved from the opensource NTFS-3G widely used for NTFS support on Linux. They still support PowerPC macs (my PowerBook G4 is happy) and were the first to support storing the Resource Fork how NTFS is designed to store them, inside an ADS and not a "._" file.

For the test I basically did two things. The first was creating a separate folder inside the volume, copying different files. One is a Mac OS 7 application, that heavily relies on its Resource Fork (it's data being 0 bytes indeed) and its Finder Info. Then I copied a disk image file that contains four different Mac OS X extended attributes. Then I created some plain text files with names that are not supported by Windows (but they are supported by NTFS, see below). Then I created a symbolic link of a JPEG file and a hard link of it.

Finally for the speed tests I used Bonnie++, with this command line: bonnie++ -d /Volumes/Test/test/ -s 4095 -n 100 -m fat32 -u claunia -f -b

Test machine is a MacBookPro5,4 with 4Gb of DDR1066 RAM, Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C26), and a Samsung 2.5" IDE hard disk inside an Alcor Micro USB 2.0 case. Tests were done with all applications closed and through a network shell so the GUI is in background and not consuming important foreground memory and cycles.

Note on filenames

NTFS supports ANY character in a filename but the NULL one (byte 0x00). Windows however does not support characters from 0x00 to 0x31, "<", ">", ":", " " " (no spaces, double quotes character), "/", "\", "|", "?" and "*". It also doesn't support files that are end on a space or a dot. More information here. While those files can exist in NTFS volumes, no Windows application will ever be able to do anything with them (access, rename, move, copy, delete, open, close, say it, won't work).

UNIX system supports ANY but NULL and "/".

Mac OS supports ANY but NULL and ":". Mac OS X stores files containing "/" as ":" in HFS+ but shows it to you as "/" (tricked!). Also Mac OS includes the Apple logo character "" (you won't see it unless you're reading this article under any Mac OS version), that's unsupported anywhere else.

Microsoft designed Windows NT to be interoperable in networks containing Mac OS clients, and to serve files to them (with the now deprecated Services for Macintosh product), so they created a way to store filenames unsupported by Windows on NTFS, so Windows will be able to access ithem, and Mac OS will be able also, showing the correct filename to Mac OS network clients, and a fake one to Windows machines. It's described here.

Feature comparison

	HFS+	Apple's NTFS	Paragon NTFS	Tuxera NTFS	FAT32	exFAT
Resource fork	Supported	Supported	Partial	Supported	Partial	Partial
Extended attributes	Supported	Supported	Partial	Supported	Partial	Partial
FinderInfo	Supported	Supported	Partial	Supported	Partial	Partial
Hard links	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported	Unsupported	Unsupported
Symbolic links	Supported	Partial	Supported	Supported	Unsupported	Unsupported
Filenames	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported	Unsupported
Cost	Free	Free	$19.95 / version	$36.25	Free	Free

Partial support means it's stored in "._" files, supported that it's stored as the filesystem designed them to be stored, and unsupported that they simply, won't work.

On links there is a curious difference between the three NTFS implementations.

The Tuxera symbolinc link seems to use the POSIX interface of NTFS, and it's not directly accepted by Windows explorer. However, it's the way NTFS was designed to. Paragon does the same. And Services for UNIX will recognize it as a symbolic link.

Apple's implementation however stores it a a simple file containing the path to the destination, and neither Windows explorer or Services for UNIX recognize it as a link.

Tests

So the Bonnie++ tests outputs shows the following.

Version 1.93c			Sequential Output						Sequential Input				Random Seeks			Sequential Create						Random Create
Concurrency		Size	Per Char		Block		Rewrite		Per Char		Block				Num Files	Create		Read		Delete		Create		Read		Delete
			K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	/sec	% CPU		/sec	% CPU	/sec	% CPU	/sec	% CPU	/sec	% CPU	/sec	% CPU	/sec	% CPU
HFS+	1	4095M			24722	4	11657	2			35292	2	274.3	3	100	18243	77	44878	99	9321	58	253	2	52737	99	107	1
HFS+	Latency				344ms		518ms				35023us		257ms		Latency	99931us		1438us		16793us		858ms		1187us		1066ms
Apple's NTFS	1	4095M			24663	6	12276	2			35382	3	288.9	17	100	401	60	1558	22	839	16	327	68	172	2	71	1
Apple's NTFS	Latency				425ms		619ms				58872us		291ms		Latency	99838us		73278us		346ms		468ms		46196us		692ms
Paragon NTFS	1	4095M			24760	4	11675	2			35400	3	295.0	5	100	206	81	3203	33	455	12	186	77	275	3	42	1
Paragon NTFS	Latency				296ms		530ms				22544us		161ms		Latency	587ms		36047us		119ms		424ms		76842us		596ms
Tuxera NTFS	1	4095M			20470	5	11094	6			31946	4	170.2	4	100	410	68	3875	18	1120	15	95	19	22	0	12	0
Tuxera NTFS	Latency				180ms		382ms				193ms		4658ms		Latency	79166us		138ms		1395ms		36988ms		37577ms		848ms
FAT32	1	4095M			24342	2	11708	2			35293	3	264.3	7	100	56	89	440	93	119	47	69	87	619	90	79	43
FAT32	Latency				528ms		586ms				74162us		3436ms		Latency	286ms		34503us		343ms		368ms		20362us		440ms
exFAT	1	4095M			24665	2	11305	2			35095	3	254.2	23	100	51	79	305	85	69	53	49	79	399	80	56	50
exFAT	Latency				363ms		514ms				262ms		1456ms		Latency	323ms		69381us		333ms		356ms		55743us		443ms

Lots of data to interpret so let's put it in pretty graphs.

This is the bare speed test. Here all the filesystems work quite at the same speed, with a little slowdown on Tuxera NTFS when writing or reading files. Not too much to discuss it, they are all as fast so it's just your choice of flavour.

Things get different when you're treating with folders filled with files. When you copy a folder full of files (say, the iTunes folder, your photo library, so on) you're creating it. When you open it in the Finder, you're reading it. And when you empty the trash you're deleting it.

So this matters more than a single file speed, shown in previous test, because you will do these operations more commonly.

Clearly, HFS+ comes to a huge advantage here.

Of the three NTFS offerings, Apple's one clearly needs more optimization, and Tuxera's gets the lead, being the fastest when multiple file operations are done. Nowhere near of HFS+ however.

FAT32 and exFAT clearly show their design flaws here, being desperately slow in multiple files operation.

Conclusion

This is not a choice that can be simply left to speed tests, it's a complex matter.

If you have a Mac computer, you have bootcamp, and it includes HFS+ drivers for Windows, so clearly this should be the choice isn't it?

However, your friends, university, college, so on, probably won't, cannot, don't want, to have this driver installed. So you're forced to choose between one of the natively supported by Windows filesystems (NTFS, exFAT or FAT32).

FAT32 is not an option, it's not just slow, you will never be able to store any file bigger than 4Gb, that's it, forget about it, simply, erase from your mind, let it be only used by your digital camera and bye bye.

exFAT may seem the future, however it's just an evolution of FAT32 (supports files bigger than 4Gb, but anyway, same internal design), but it's still slow. However it's free to use on Mac OS X and if you don't care about the annoying "._" files that will be created all the way, just use it.

On NTFS, clearly Apple should end it and make it easy to use, integrated, free, writeable. Ok, we've been waiting years for this to come, so sit and wait, and on the meantime decide between Paragon and Tuxera.

Tuxera seems more expensive (but you pay just once per all versions in the future), slower on single files, but handles multiple files faster, and stores things the way they should be stored.

Paragon seems cheaper (you end paying more as every release you pay again), faster on single files, slower on multiple files, and creates the annoying "._" files everywhere.

So Tuxera and Paragon are quite equalled, it's up to you which one to chose.

Personally, I chose Tuxera, because I want to have the confidence that what I write on a NTFS drive using Mac OS X will be correctly identified by Windows applications as what they are (not only Services for Macintosh, Windows explorer recognize AFP_* ADS and inform you will lose them when moving to a filesystem that does not support them) without the annoying "._" files.

Virtualizing Lion with VMWare Fusion

2011-07-26T02:16:00.001+01:00

Long ago when Leopard was launched, the end-user license agreement allowed Leopard Server to be virtualized. Same applied for Snow Leopard Server.

However now with Lion's launch, things have changed:

(iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software.

As extracted from Mac OS X 10.7 end-user license agreement, that you can read here.

So now, beside that legal sentence is the meaning that you can run up to a maximum of three copies of Mac OS X Lion, one running real on bare hardware and two running inside a virtual machine.

VMWare Fusion added support to Mac OS X Server as a guest with Leopard Server, however it still has added no official support for Lion.

In this guide I'll explain you how to install it correctly.

First of all you need to be sure you have the lastest version (3.1.3 as of this writing) installed. You can get it here.

I have tested this on both Snow Leopard and Lion hosts.

Second of all you need the Lion Emergency Startup Disk, in image, USB or burnt (you can see where it is, called InstallESD.dmg, here).

Third of all we'll create an installer image, so go to Utilities (Cmd+Shift+U on Finder), open Disk Utility and create a new image with the following parameters:

Now insert or mount Lion ESD. We need now to go to the Terminal (open it in Utilities) and start with command:

hdiutil mount "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD/BaseSystem.dmg"

Now a new drive will appear mounted, called "Mac OS X Base System" and we return to disk utility to copy this volume to the disk image we created earlier.

Be sure to have marked "Erase destination". After a couple of minutes we will have two disks called "Mac OS X Base System", that should be unmounted. Then double click the LionVMInstaller.cdr image and go to Terminal.

First we will copy the kernel cache from ESD to our installer image:

sudo cp /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/kernelcache /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System/

And now we instruct the prepared image to use it, editing boot parameters, using nano, a text editor in Terminal:

sudo nano /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

And we write

<key>Kernel Cache</key>
<string>\kernelcache</string>

Just before </dict> so it ends like this:

Now with pressing Ctrl+X keys it will ask to save, we press Y as in Yes and it's done.

Next step is copying installation packages from the ESD to the prepared image with the following two commands:

sudo rm /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System/System/Installation/Packages/

sudo cp -Rv "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD/Packages" "/Volumes/Mac OS X Base System/System/Installation/Packages"

And now we create a file to make VMWare Fusion think this disk comes from a Server version, as it will expect.

sudo touch "/Volumes/Mac OS X Base System/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist"

And enough of the terminal for now. We unmount everything, start VMWare Fusion and create a new virtual machine.

We choose LionVMInstaller.cdr as the image to install from, and in case it does not detect it's Mac OS X, we choose as operating system "Apple Mac OS X" and as version "Mac OS X Server 10.6 64-bit".

Be sure to customize settings, then it will ask for the name. I named it "Mac OS X 10.7 Lion". Now choose Hard Disks and uncheck "Split into 2 Gb files" and Apply.

Go to Processors & RAM and put at least 2048 Mb and as more as you want and can.

Boot it.

It will crash, this is expected. For some reason the NVRAM values VMWare writes by default don't allow Lion to boot. Download a prepared NVRAM here.

In VMWare right click the virtual machine, "Show in Finder", right click it, "Show Package Contents", and replace the NVRAM file there with the one you just downloaded.

Go to VMWare Fusion and boot it again.

Now follow the installation instructions. When it finishes and reboots VMWare will complain it's not a server version, it's ok.

Reboot the virtual machine and as soon as the vmware logo appears in grey press the ESC key FAST!.

A menu will appear, and here we will choose "Boot Manager", that will present us with a list of detected boot devices, mostly the HDD and the prepared image.

Taking note that the first item "Mac OS X" contains the device path of the hard disk, we choose the "EFI SCSI Device" were PCI number or SCSI numbers changed (most probably, "EFI SCSI Device 1").

It will boot the installer again, but this time we will enter on Terminal. Utilities -> Terminal. Now here we write:

touch "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist"

IMPORTANT EDIT NOTICE: Some updates, specially Java runtime, will crash if you did this step. Doing this other one will solve it, and can be done in an already installed Lion VM:

sudo cp "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist" "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist"

When done, Apple menu -> Restart.

Now, enjoy it!!!

Fourth iOS 5 impressions, beta 4

2011-07-23T02:19:00.001+01:00

Today, iOS 5 beta 4 has been released to developers.

Mostly it includes bug corrections, huge stability corrections and the long awaited: iTunes Wi-Fi Sync for Windows.

However no iTunes 10.5 beta 4 for Windows has been seed as this writing.

For first time in the betas, you can simply update "over the air" (wifi required), without the need to install itunes at all for the update.

Long time still is in front of us before final iOS 5 arrives us in Fall, and with every beta more things are polished to perfection.

Lion gets updates, iWork, Apple Remote Desktop and iTunes

2011-07-22T05:46:00.001+01:00

Less than one day from Lion launch, Apple seeds new updates for iWork, Apple Remote Desktop and iTunes.

You can get them using Software Update or manually downloading from Apple Support.

iWork 9.1

Long awaited by Lion users (ok, less than 48 hours of waiting, but LONG awaited) iWork now supports all the pretty good and beloved features of Lion.

Now we can simply sit in Pages Full Screen and forget all distractions while writing the last New York Times best-seller, having the confidence than in a catastrophic stop of electrical supply we will continue where we left Resuming in the same exact word.

And what if we saved just to say "oh oh! I deleted that important paragraph"! Lion to the rescue! We also get support for Versions, and in case we just forgot to save that new paragraph, Auto Save.

Of course all of this support is not just in Pages, but also in Numbers and Keynote.

I'm loving it! (and would love to have it on my iPad).

Little notice shown on this update improving compatibility with Microsoft Office documents and Keynote including two new builds.

More information on Apple Support.

iTunes 10.4

Available also for Snow Leopard and Windows, iTunes gets Lionized.

Ok Versions and Resume and Auto Save are not so much of a sense in iTunes (and not implemented in 10.4), but Full Screen may be for some users.

This is not the only change, previous iTunes versions (including 10.3.1 that came with Lion) were 32 bit only, but this new 10.4 is a pure 64 bit Cocoa application. This means, that compression and decompression algorithms (converting your recently bought CD to AAC or playing your just bought movie) will benefit from huge performance improvements.

The bad thing is that any iTunes plugin you were using will not be compatible until the developer updates it.

Unfortunately for Windows users it's still 32 bit, but it's still compatible with PowerPC G4 and G5 (my PowerBook G4 is happy :D), also 32 bit only.

More information on iTunes.com.

Apple Remote Desktop 3.5

Not so impressive, it mostly receives some reliability workouts, even if 3.4 worked flawlessly on Lion.

One new feature nonetheless is that when connection to a Lion client you can use the current logged in session, or open a new one in background invisible to current user.

One step toward "Apple Terminal Server" ?

More information on Apple Support.

Hands-on Lion, Mac OS X 10.7

2011-07-20T21:46:00.001+01:00

In this article I'll talk about everything new on Lion.

Some things were already on the developer previews and so I talked already about them, however, I'll do here again.

What's Lion?

Lion is the newest version of Mac OS X, Apple's operating system. It's also known as Mac OS X 10.7.

It's available from July 20, 2001 on the Mac App Store for 23,99 €, $29.99 or £20.99.

It comes as a download of 3,49 Gb, or for an extra premium cost you can buy it in an USB pendrive in Apple Stores.

You can also create your own DVD or USB pendrive once downloaded (but BEFORE installing) using my instructions. Also if you want to do a clean installation, you must do that or on reboot press Option key and choose "Recovery".

It's also the first version that the "family" pack (5 computers) comes for the price of 1, you just authorize with the same iTunes account up to five computers and it's legal to install it on all of them.

Officially Lion cannot support anything lower than a Core 2 Duo computer, however there are hacks you can do to install it. Same applies for Hackintoshes ;)

However system executables are only 64 bit and running on any kind of cpu without that support will simply not work.

Installation

Once you have downloaded it, the installation application will load, make you choose destination hard disk and start preliminary checks prior to a reboot to the real installation.

The installation is slimmer, simpler and more elegant than previous ones and when it is finished there is no welcome video.

Considering its installing from hard disk to hard disk it's quite slow, taking more than one hour on my Mid-2009 MacBook Pro.

When you finish the installation you will be presented with a small tutorial about gestures.

System preferences

System Preferences get a little reordering (Universal Access is now a Personal thing not a System one) and the new "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" panel appears.

New pretty and real background pictures come with Lion, including but not limited to, Mount Fuji, M31 Andromeda Galaxy and a Lion (appropriate isn't it?).

Lion includes new system-wide languages: Arabic, Czech, Hungarian and Turkish.

It also includes new text-to-speech voices, not just for all system-wide available languages but also for variations (Latin-American and Spain's Spanish), and non-present ones (Romanian). The bad is that they are downloaded from Apple on installation, making that small, the good of that is this would allow new voices to be added in updates.

FileVault now encrypts the whole disk at once, not just the home folder, with a new and supposedly better algorithm (just another AES variation).

This adds a level of security (the whole disk is encrypted) and subtracts another level (another user can access your home).

But there is also another level of security (or of control by some paranoids). The encryption key can be stored in Apple for recovery in case of absolute loss using three (chosen from a list of a dozen options) secret questions.

Also you can now choose some privacy options, like sending or not anonymous usage statistics to Apple and what applications can access Location services.

There are now a lot of gestures, so you can move pages, move full screen apps (leftmost Dashboard, second-left non-full screen, rest on order of full screening), open Launchpad, open Mission Control, so on. Of course this requires an integrated or a Magic trackpad.

You can do some of the gestures with a Magic Mouse but that is anything but comfortable.

The new "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" preference panel allows an easy to access configuration of, mail, contacts and calendars services, like Google Mail, Yahoo!, MobileMe and iCloud.

It is plugin based, indeed iCloud must be installed separately right now (iCloud is expected to be ready on Fall) and MobileMe would disappear soon.

If you add your account to, for example, iChat, it automatically appears here (only instant messaging is enabled). If you add it here, you can enable it to appear on Address Book, iCal, iChat and Mail.

Mac OS X 10.7 Server accounts will also be supported here directly. Previous servers accounts should be added as CalDAV and LDAP.

FTP disappears on file sharing and SMB (windows sharing) gets substituted by a fresh, new, clean implementation of the lastest SMB version (SMB2, introduced with Windows Vista), providing a huge performance boost with other Lion or Vista or 7 computers. The previous SMB software was Samba, used also in Linux, limited to the 20 year old SMB1 version.

Also an option to automatically restart on a kernel panic (bluescreenofdeath for windows users) happens is added. In difference with Windows, the option is disabled by default, can be based on power source, and the information you obtain about the panic on reboot is some orders of magnitude better.

Now user accounts can be linked to any kind of Apple ID, not just a MobileMe one. It can be your iTunes Store account, your Find My iPhone account, your Apple Developer account, your Apple Forums account, you choose!

You can also allow your user password to be rest using your Apple ID, so if you forgot your user password but not your ID password, you can just reset it.

Applications

The most curious thing of Lion is Launchpad.

And what is Launchpad? Launchpad is an application menu for Lion. Indeed, it's the same one and old and touchy application menu used on iOS (called SpringBoard there), but now in Mac OS X.

You can create folders, delete applications, move them, have multiple screens, all in your fingers (integrated or Magic trackpad required).

It is also quite intelligent. If you add an application, it automatically appears there, if you move one to trash (in the old way, Finder-ish) it disappears, and if you install a folder that contains an application inside it (like Adobe Photoshop does) only the application icon appears here (if you delete it here the whole folder is deleted). Also it detects the Developer folder even if not being inside Applications.

And before starting with applications changes, let's see two things:

1.- Spaces has disappeared completely. I think no one will miss it.

2.- Applications can now run full screen (more or less same as in Snow Leopard having one app per space). NOTE: They CAN, you can choose to run them like before in a per-moment basis.

This fullscreen-ish does have some advantages (concentration on just one task), and some disadvantages (losing the ability to multitask). I have not tested fullscreen on multiple monitors, but it would be great to have the application you want fullscreened on the monitor you want.

iCal gets full screen. Aesthetic changes are small, but kind to the eye.

Yes only the upper part.

Safari also gets full screen. Gets better HTML5 compatibility (as with every update) and a new, non intrusive, see it everywhere downloads list that I'm loving.

Photo Booth also gets full screen. Adds new effects, specially interesting the ones that remove you from the video and adds a moving background.

That's my Pikachu, test subject on anything that requires camera :p

Preview gets full screen, allowing better reading of books or multi-page documents. However I still miss iBooks for Mac OS X.

Chess also gets full screen, so you can concentrate on the King without distractions from the desktop.

Dashboard is no more an overlay on the current view, but an always running full screen app that resides left-most in the list of full screen apps (more on the order below).

Address Book gets a radical aesthetic change to be more alike a, well, an address book.

Lion includes a couple of new system fonts, but the most important to note for all of us is Apple Color Emoji. This font includes all the Emoji icons as seen on the japanese iPhone (or in rest-of-world with a little hack or iOS 5), so now you can see them in notes, emails, contacts, wherever you used them on your iOS device, when synced with Lion.

This also means new features for font designers, like adding support for colored glyphs.

iChat now supports Yahoo! accounts out-of-the-box. And I say that, because now iChat support for messaging protocols is plugin base. So maybe in a future we'll see plugins for MSNP (Windows Live Messenger), Twitter, Gadu-Gadu and others. I hope this feature does not end in The Void.

It also joins all the contacts from all accounts in a single contacts list.

Mail gets full screen with an interface overhaul. It also joins conversations (dozens of "Re:" messages) in a single place so you can read them chronologically.

It also detects duplicates, and can hide the messages and/or folder list so you can concentrate on the email.

QuickTime 7 disappears, completely. There is no remaining of Carbon. Ok, there is, the Carbon framework is still there, you can execute Carbon applications. But none are included with the system.

QuickTime X gets more editing features, and a bigger "share" list, adding Vimeo, Flicker, Facebook and Mail.

Finder also receives an aesthetic overhaul, and adds a new section called "All My Files" that made me tremble in fear.

It also gets more intelligent when copying, so when you copy a folder (A) to another (B) that contains a folder with the same name (A') it doesn't delete A' with A, but combines A and A' contents.

Also when you copy a file (A) to a folder that also contains a file (A) you get (A) and (A2) in that folder.

The system also adds support for vertical text. Not so useful for occidental languages, but for oriental ones (Chinese, Japanese, so on). Surely oriental writers will find more comfortable to write their texts in the way they're used to do calligraphic-ally.

One of the new features of Lion is called "Mission Control". It more or less substitutes Exposé.

The dock still appears on its place, the non-full screen apps on the middle, and the full screen ones (including Dashboard) on the top.

Resume and versioning.

When you shut down the system with opened applications and documents, they appear immediately on the next boot, in exactly the same place you left it, including the cursor position. That's resume. It also happens if you close a single application with new or modified documents. This must, however, be supported specifically in the application, so old non prepared applications will not get this functionality for free (d'oh!)

Also when you are working with the document versions are automatically saved periodically without user intervention, and when you save it, different versions are saved also separately. On disk you'll just see the last one, but you can access always to a restore versions screen, that similar to Time Machine shows you all the stored versions so you can choose to which one revert.

Also, you can duplicate it.

Ok, all of this features where in Lisa Office System (pre-Mac Apple's system) 28 years ago (1983), but from my filesystem-expertise I assure you it's not so easy to implement this things transparently for the user to a system not designed with this features from the start.

External and third-party applications

Most of the external applications are compatible as is, with some exceptions.

Little Snitch gets silently disabled, and requires to be updated to version 2.4 at least. Same applies for VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallels, requiring new versions with explicit Lion support.

Mono and applications that use it are currently unsupported, and the Mono team is working on this. Even MonoDevelop crashes.

Java applications will require downloading a Java runtime on first launch.

iTunes comes as 10.3.1, while on Snow Leopard it's 10.3, and is absolutely not Lion aware.

Most other applications simply work flawlessly.

Sadly iWork is not yet Lion-aware (it's time for iWork '11!!!) so nothing is autosaved.

Also Xcode 3 does not load, crashes with error -10658, so developers must migrate to Xcode 4 now.

EDIT: I installed Xcode 4 (that become free with Lion's launch) and then Xcode 3 is working again. Maybe just a Xcode 3 reinstallation would have solved it also.

Mac OS X Lion, burn to DVD or pendrive

2011-07-20T19:23:00.001+01:00

Now, today, Mac OS X Lion is finally out.

On the Apple store it's available for 23,99 €, $29.99 or £20.99, but it's big.

3,49 Gb is not something you want to download three times, or even just twice.

This guide will explain you how to burn it to DVD, or copy to a pendrive, so you can install in more than one machine with just one download.

Start with one machine, that will download it. It will create an item called "Install Mac OS X Lion" in your Applications folder.

Leave the installation on this machine for later (if you close it, you can reopen just doing double click on this item), and right click the item choosing "Show package contents" option.

Now open Contents folder, SharedSupport and see the file called InstallESD.dmg. Leave this window opened.

Go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility.

Burning to DVD

If you want to burn it to DVD, click the Burn button. Drag the InstallESD.dmg item from the Finder to the "Select Image to Burn" dialog that Disk Utility just presented to you.

Burn will then start, and you can boot from this DVD on the rest of machines to install Lion.

Copying to USB drive

If you want to copy it to a USB drive, like a pendrive or a hard disk, first connect it to the computer.

Then choose the item in Disk Utility, choose the Restore tab, drag the InstallESD.dmg item to Source and the USB drive to destination.

Be sure that you have chosen the correct one, "Erase destination" is marked and the drive is formatted with GUID partition table, or it won't boot.

Now press Restore... THIS WILL ERASE THE CONTENTS OF YOUR USB DRIVE ALL AND FOREVER.

Wait, and when it finishes, the drive will be bootable to install Lion in other computers.

This will make installation on homes with multiple computers very easy.

Remember to read the EULA of Lion and not install it in more computers than the license allow you to!!!

Enjoy Lion while waiting for my review on it :p

Third iOS 5 impressions, beta 3

2011-07-12T15:58:00.001+01:00

If you come here without reading previous impressions, you should read this first and then this second reviews, as this one only counts on differences of beta 3 against beta 2.

The first new feature offered in beta 3 is that now, on Location preferences, you can set up which system services can get up your GPS location.

Cell Network Search allows to find the best GSM or CDMA repeater near you, and Setting Time Zone allows the system to set up the correct timezone where you are.

Location-Based iAds allow the iAd server to show appropriate advertising that can be useful depending on your location, like local restaurants.

Diagnostics & Usage is not so clear, but may simply mean anonymous statistics and debug reports on how the location is working.

However what does Traffic mean, is yet to be discovered. Maybe it will feature traffic information on maps, or on a new widget, application, etc.

AssistiveTouch, another feature first appearing on iOS 5 beta 3 allows for better accessibility for impaired users, with custom gestures and...

... a menu that allows you to easily choose a gesture to be done, simulate a device button press, so on.

Wireless synchronization becomes named "iTunes Wi-Fi Sync"

And Over-The-Air updates now show your current iOS version (but still do not show the beta updates :p).

There are also other minor features:

You can now disable not only data roaming, but also voice roaming.
Safari again gets the option to remove cookies
On Safari preferences there is an Advanced option to enable a debug console for developers and delete website data (as well as check how much they take)
On Usage panel you can now see exactly how much space an application takes (including user data).
Reminders application gets a new icon.
Mail allows to create folders.
The Music application now shows a message informing that movies, tv shows and music videos have been moved to the Videos application.

Oh and iTunes 10.5 beta 3 now installs flawlessly on Windows x64.

Ubuntu 11.04, vade retro

2011-07-11T05:08:00.001+01:00

Recently release Ubuntu 11.04 introduces a new, supposedly state-of-the-art, interface called Unity.

So in this article I'll not talk about the system in general (it's just another Linux) but about the severe problems and headaches it can cause, and Unity.

The future? Not yet, thanks.

Some years ago, Intel created a new firmware (that little thing that makes you computer power up, test itself, and load an operating system) for their high-end Itanium servers called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). They pretended the whole thing to catch up and substitute how PCs were made, but it simply didn't. However EFI specifications were made public so anyone could create their own implementation.

On June 6, 2005, Apple announced the migration to Intel processors, launching on January 10, 2006 the firsts Intel Macintosh. To the surprise of everyone, they used EFI instead of Apple's usual firmware, Open Firmware (I'll make an article about major firmwares, don't worry).

PCs by the way, used a firmware called BIOS, a monolithic unmanageable piece of code coming from 1981. As of today in 2011, only a few PC manufacturers have started migrating to EFI (now called UEFI and independent of Intel).

VirtualBox and VMWare also include their own EFI implementations, mostly to virtualize Mac OS X Server.

But EFI support is not only scarce on the PC manufacturers, but also on the software side.

Only Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7 of 64 bit are able to run on EFI flawlessly. Linux support should be considered alpha at best. Of course, this is only on PCs, on Macintosh Windows requires a newer version of the EFI firmware than provided by Apple and will simply not boot (also Apple's EFI is unable to read Windows' installation disc filesystems so it's unable to load them), and Linux...

Ok, what happens with Linux and EFI on Macintosh computers? It bricks your computer. Ok, not so, but almost.

For some strange reason you can (and I did with this Ubuntu) install Linux using EFI, flawlessly, until you reboot. Then your screen will remain black, your LED will blink 9 times and a long beep will make you cry in fear.

For some strange reason I'm pretty sure you don't want to experiment, the Ubuntu Linux installer (maybe all, just don't use Linux + EFI + Macintosh) messes with EFI in such a way that makes it want to update continuously. In most case, after 3rd or 4th try (force shutdown, power up), it will boot (by default will try to boot Ubuntu, I hope you still have a Mac OS X partition). Then you MUST boot on Mac OS X, download the lastest firmware update appropiate for your model from Apple's Support, check your system profiler for your current Boot ROM Version and then choose:

a) If your firmware is lower than the lastest available one, just, update it following Apple instructions.

b) If your firmware is the same than the lastest available one, download it, use Pacifist to force installing the firmware updater and then use the following command line:

sudo bless -mount / -firmware /Applications/Utilities/MacBook\ Pro\ EFI\ Firmware\ Update.app/Contents/Resources/MBP53_00AC_B03_LOCKED.scap

b...) Then continue with a normal firmware upgrade (check Apple Support for instructions), and it will solve the problem. If you made any single step of this bad, it will brick your computer for ever.

By the way, on VirtualBox using EFI, Ubuntu install flawlessly but messes in some way also with EFI making it show the EFI Shell at every boot (manually trying to boot Ubuntu results in brown screen forever).

So, Macintosh users, use BootCamp, VirtualBox users, don't enable EFI, PC users be happy, most probably you won't have EFI at all.

Buuuuut, surprise surprise! Ubuntu disc is so badly made that when trying to use BootCamp or under BIOS emulation on an EFI PC, it won't simply not boot, and you'll have to download an alternate, quite hidden, version of Ubuntu called "+mac", that includes only BIOS bootloader and not the EFI one at all.

Not being for the sake of the review, at this point, I would have simply burnt (with a Zippo lighter) all the Ubuntu discs.

The installation

Ubuntu installation remains the same as in previous versions, a boring step by step gray and brown, decide almost nothing, installation.

By default and unless using advanced options (decide some more things, but not much) it will use the ext4 filesystem, so if you remember my article comparing all Linux filesystems you will want to enter advanced options and change that as soon as possible.

The installation kernel is UNSTABLE (not by the name of the branch, but really not stable at all) and will start getting hard disk errors when NONE exists. Indeed, the installation crashed and the kernel showed sector errors while running inside VirtualBox, a thing absolutely impossible because virtual disks never have sector errors!!!

I needed three tries to successfully install it on a real PC (plus the tries on VirtualBox and on my MacBook Pro).

Unity

So what's Unity? Unity is a state-of-the-art new interface that simplify tasks to the users. Ok, Mac users forget that statement, Unity is simply a Dock with Stacks and the application's menu bar on top, as you've been seeing on Mac OS X long time ago.

Unity introduces a fast access bar at the left with most common applications and menus, that's, a Dock.

Menus when clicked open to show an attached icon view of its contents, that's, Stacks.

When you open an application, the menu is shown on the top of the screen, instead of on the application's window.

See this:

Similar isn't it? Yeah, ok, that's Mac OS X's Dock and the Applications folder opened as a stack. They just copied it and called it "new". Please, next time you copy at least don't say it's state-of-the-art, thanks in advance.

There are sayings there and then that Unity needs 3D, false, the above screenshot was taken using 2D only.

Hardware unSupport

Linux is famous for supporting almost all hardware than Windows does, without installing separate drivers, but sometime later.

However this Ubuntu version cannot apply to that.

First of all, the already commented "brick my EFI hardware" issue.

Next, while it detected my iPhone 4 (that thing with japanese characters), it was unable to do anything with it, showing that cryptic error no one understands.

My Android phone, was simply invisible. No option to do anything with it (no sync, no ADB, nothing).

And finally, when I finished the tests and shut it down, both network cards (Realtek 8169, as most integrated ones) just stopped working. Trying to boot other non-Linux systems, using the diagnostic in BIOS, plugging and unplugging the cables, nothing. Finally after letting the capacitors drain out (unplug every cable) and resetting the switch, they returned to live.

Conclusion

Usually I don't recommend users what operating system to install or not, that's a matter of preferences or needs, but in this case I'll make an exception.

DON'T INSTALL UBUNTU 11.04. It's not just buggy, it will crash, it may break your hardware, and sooner or later it will see a sector error where none is, provoking you lose of data and time searching for an inexistent faulty hardware.

This release denotes hurry, too much hurry, it's not tested throughly, Unity is not appealing enough, offers no reason to update, and will make you have more headaches than any computer is worth.

Wait until Ubuntu 11.10 that should be released shortly (October?) and just forget that 11.04 ever existed at all.

Game Review: Backstab

2011-07-10T20:32:00.001+01:00

“My name is Henry Blake, once a proud officer in England’s Royal Navy. Now I stand a shattered man. Betrayed, imprisoned, my fiancée taken away, I have now found my freedom - and soon I shall find my revenge.”

Ok let's do the review.

Thanks for Matt Sevely from Gameloft Spain for giving me the game for the review.

Backstab is a new action platform with RPG features launched by Gameloft on June 23, 2011.

It's available in iTunes App Store for US$6.99, compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPod 3rd Gen, iPad and higher. Being universal means the same one works at full normal, iPad and Retina resolutions.

It's also available in Android Market for US$6.99, compatible with Android phones and tablets that include high-end 3D accelerators (full list on Market).

As my Android device is anything but listed (no 3D hardware at all), my review is based solely on the iPhone 4 and iPad versions.

The technicals

Backstab presents us with great graphics, while still having a fluid gameplay. Indeed while playing on the iPad I just though I have no reason to buy a portable console.

The controls, consist of two virtual areas with four virtual buttons. On the left, the virtual area allows looking, on the right the four buttons control the interaction and combat functions and on the rest of the screen we control the movement with our fingers. This results a pretty good control scheme, that I got easily used to, and is present on other Gameloft titles.

The whole game contains conversational audio, always in English, with a big list of translated subtitles. However, at least in Spanish, the translations are not perfect, sometimes omitting important story details or using incorrect expressions.

The story

The game starts with you impersonating Henry Blake, a british official in colonial times, being betrayed by your best friend.

Here starts the adventure to bring light to the conspiracy that brings you to jail, getting help from other betrayed commanders, smugglers and thieves.

In a very linear story, where quests must be done in sequence, secondary quests give you nothing but unusable money (best weapons are given free completing main quests) and a big lose of time, everything starts funny and interesting until the middle of the game, where you'll get easily bored of doing the same and same and same over again, and the story gets fucked up (ok, zombies!?).

Gameplay

With the excellent Gameloft's control system, playing is easy, and well done, but there are a couple of things that soon make the game boring.

First of all the linear story. There is only a main quest at any time, when you finish it another new one appears. Secondary quests give mostly money, and some times objects.

Then combats, they can be distance (shooting guns) or close (handling swords), with some using ship cannons, but mostly you'll never use a single gun, and combats are so easy, I've seen myself rounded by more than 8 guards and receiving not a single hit. And in a single hour you'll have more money than you'll able to spend at all.

Continuing with an annoying IA, like so you're walking on the city and accidentally touch a guard, then you have all the city guards wanting to kill you, forcing you to use a safe house (and paying it).

And finally, a severe bug that makes your hits be counted as if you were a big box. In the above image, for example, in the ground there are spears that kill you on contact, upping and downing from the ground. If you walk near the hole, while the spears are down, so near that you're almost inside the hole but not in it, you'll die. This happens over all the game, making some stages a nuisance that will probably make you abandon the game for another day.

Conclusion

This is an interesting game, with great graphics and a mediocre story. But the interest is soon lost, making it just a game for moments, when you have nothing else to play.

Graphics: 4.5 / 5
Sound: 4 / 5
Gameplay: 3 / 5
Quality/cost: 3.5 / 5

Overall score: 3.75

Vodafone 858 Smart (Huawei U8160)

2011-07-05T06:44:00.001+01:00

Recently Vodafone launched the Vodafone 858 Smart pre-paid Android smartphone for 60 €, with 12 € in calls and free internet connection until August 31, 2011. So I run to the nearest Vodafone shop and got my first real Android device (previously I only played with the emulator and iDroid).

Technical specifications:

Manufacturer: Huawei
Model: U8160
Operating System: Google Android 2.2.1 (Linux kernel 2.6.32.9)
Processor: Qualcomm MSM7225 @ 528Mhz with dynamic underclocking, ARMv5 instruction set
RAM: 256 MiB (180 MiB accesible to applications)
Storage: 64 MiB internal flash, microSDHC slot
Display: 2.8" multitouch at 240 x 320 pixels driven by software (after having triple-checked, this phone contains no separate GPU unit, using Software OpenGL and 2D framebuffer).
Wireless networks: GSM (900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz), UMTS (2100 Mhz), Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and WiFi 802.11 (b, g and n)
Ports: 4-pin 3.5mm miniJack, microUSB-B 2.0
Sensors: Temperature, digital compass, accelerometer, FM receiver, A-GPS, photometer, proximity
Camera: 1.9 Mpx, fixed focus, no zoom, no flash
Included accessories: USB charger (5V, 400mA), headphones (with microphone and a button), three different colors backcovers (white, lime yellow and light purple)

The system:

While this phone does not include the lastest version of Android, it includes a pretty new one that will allow a huge bunch of the Android Market to be used.

The system feels pretty fast, but if you install too much applications (I got 109 on the first day) it will start to do really crazy things, like automatic restarting, taking more than 15 minutes to list the installed apps, so on. Just don't install anything you don't really need and it will go fine.

There are however some limitations you have to take account into, that will be described below.

Bundled applications:

Appart of the applications usually bundled by Google with any Android phone, Vodafone includes a little bunch of applications on their own, including a Formula 1 one, a propietary application shop (an irony considering by default it is disable to install things outside official Market), a music shop and an updater for their own applications.

They are capped to not work under Wifi connections, so you'll probably never use them.

There is also an application for the FM Radio that does its job pretty well, with automatic channel searching and RDS support. I suppose it's the same on all Android phones with a FM receiver by the way.

Performance:

In this particular Android model, the Java runtime limitations appear quite clearly (Dalvik). Just a little number of applications installed will make the system run out of RAM really fast, making it feel like a turtle walking over hot tar.

The browser feels just enough, and Adobe Flash is not available (due to missing features of the processor, if you install it forcedly it will simply crash the browser instantly). Also the lack of multitouch and the small screen makes browsing not desirable (or reading eBooks).

When it comes to games, even the simplest 2D games of the Android Market (like Angry Birds), simply are unplayable, so not to say forget about 3D ones.

Sensors:

The phone includes a big bunch of sensors, but not so many applications to use them.

The assisted GPS is pretty slow finding satellites while on clear sky (more than 5 minutes), and the accuracy is low. I tried it one night of walk using the RunKeeper application to track me, with the phone in one of my pockets and the resulting data was as if I were doing zig-zags on the street.

If you want to use the digital compass you'll need to download some application from the Market, but forget about it, it's absolutely unusable. After dozens of calibrations, it still shows the same error of 130 degrees. When pointing to 0º N it thinks I'm pointing it to 135º SE. And if I rotate the move clockwise, the sensor does not detect the rotation, staying always as pointed to SE or S.

The temperature sensor also needs an application to use it. I tried AndroSensor, but it always says "Waiting for Event", so I don't even know if it works at all.

The FM receiver however it's the most accurate of all, being able to find all broadcast radios on my city inside a building. The bad thing is that it requires the headphones to be connected, as they act as the antenna, but this is not a problem as mostly you'll want to use both at the same time.

Network performance:

The phone supports all the known GSM/UMTS data network variants (CSD, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HDSPA) and almost all the GSM/UMTS frequencies, so you'll almost never get out of options (but CSD is not enabled by default, it's slow, expensive, not included in data plans, just forget this archaic technology)

The reception is pretty good, and the data speed is really decent. Things change when using Wifi. While it supports up to 802.11n protocol (that should be more than 108Mbps), all tests concluded with it being 10 times slower than the other devices tested (the router is 802.11g). Anyway, it is still faster (and cheaper!) than using GSM/UMTS.

Bluetooth speed and performance is excellent in all the cases.

The phone supports tethering via USB, Wifi or Bluetooth. I don't know if it's included in the bundled data plan, but at least you won't need to make tricks, roots, or custom ROMs to enable it.

Camera:

The included camera sports a 1.9 megapixel sensor with unknown focal length (if you know please tell me), fixed focus, no optical zoom and no flash of any kind.

The automatic white balance works quite well, and offers up to 2.8x of digital zoom, but the level of noise in the camera is so high that when using the digital zoom the photo is all noise.

The dynamic range is very slow, getting pale colors and easily overexposing or underexposing details. Also the sensibility is very poor, being unable to get any photo under the light of a candle (not even the candle itself, only the flame that gets overexposed).

Also the focus point is set very far of the camera (more than 5 cm / 2 inches), disabling the ability to take near photos, and probably making useless any barcode scanning software you can imagine (I tested a few and none worked).

Finally it gets lens flare quite easily, so put your hand over the phone always when in direct light.

Multimedia:

The music player works quite well and flawless, but the integrated speaker (monoaural) is a pain in the ears. Luckily the included headphones sound good and are comfortable.

For videos, the screen is too small to watch a movie (get a tablet!), and the performance when playing anything higher than 360p drops out dramatically. Even a simple 480p video from Youtube gets framedrops.

Syncing:

There is no included CD on the package so you'll think at first something will appear when you connect the phone thru USB to the computer. And it does.

A virtual CD appears called "Mobile Partner", but don't expect any kind of software there, just a driver for developers, that doesn't even work (a bug in the installation file prevents it from working unless modified). If you are not a developer, forget it at all, I have not named it, erase it from your memory. period. If you are a developer you can use the driver on Android's SDK webpage.

While you can always use the included 2 GiB microSD card to put the music and videos and photos you want in any kind of disorder you prefer, and let Google sync the contacts and calendars using your GMail account, probably you'll want something more automatic.

So, as nothing is bundled to do that by Vodafone, we should go to the manufacturer directly.

If you are a Windows user you're lucky, because the manufacturer's software, Hi Suite, only available for Windows, is free, and allows syncing everything we can imagine, from applications to SMS, from contacts to Android updates (none available yet), and even backup the whole device, using the USB cable or over Wifi.

If you are however a Macintosh user, you're not so lucky. The only free option is DoubleTwist but it only works for multimedia. However for US$39.95 you can get Missing Sync for Android (Windows version also available) and sync everything the official suite does on Windows and more (no backups or updates, but...). It supports syncing via USB, Wifi and even Bluetooth.

In any case don't use two (even less three) syncing applications at the same time. Because of design decisions of Android, all of them will stay running in background (taking RAM, CPU power and battery) waiting for a sync to be requested.

Conclusion:

Ok I think I've not forgotten anything.

This phone is of course not state-of-the-art, however it's a really bargain for that budget, and in my opinion an ideal for one starting with smartphones (that in time will feel the need to migrate to a bigger thing, like an iPhone, a Galaxy, so on).

If you're a developer wanting to start developing for Android this is an ideal, as you'll learn (by the hard way) to optimize your applications, and your budget won't be affected at all.

Also if contracts made you tremble in fear, this is the best way to get a smartphone without signing hundreds of contract while thinking your soul is being sold at the same time.

However if it's not your first smartphone at all and your budget allows you to sign contracts or spend money, get anything bigger, even if you come from something as old as an iPhone 2G or a Nokia N70, this phone will make you feel being stepped back.

Also if you are searching for a cheap phone to go to places dangerous to your more expensive ultra new one, this is the ideal choice.

UPDATE: The phone is multitouch, the included operating system disables that.
UPDATE: You can install Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) if you're brave enough, follow my guide here.

iTools -> .Mac -> MobileMe -> iCloud

2011-06-27T04:06:00.001+01:00

In this article I will talk about iCloud, what is it, what it's not, and its historic evolution.

iTools

On January 5, 2000, Apple launched iTools free for all Macintosh users.

It is a collection of the following web-based tools:

@mac.com email: An e-mail address that allows access thru POP3 and IMAP protocols as well as from a website.

iCards: A free greeting card service

iReview: Reviews of popular web sites.

HomePage: Webpage publishing.

iDisk: An online data storage service, first using AFP and then moved to WebDAV protocol.

KidSafe: A directory of web sites for all the family members.

.mac

On July 17, 2002, Apple renamed iTools to .mac and made it a subscription-based system.

While removing iReview and KidSafe, it also added the following tools:

Backup: A personal data backup, with files being copied to their iDisk and CD or DVD disks.

Antivirus: Offering the McAfee Virex antivirus for free to all .mac users until June 15, 2005.

Web gallery: Introduced on August 7, 2007, it allowed .mac users to upload photos and videos so anyone could see them.

.Mac slides: Public slideshows.

.Mac groups: Groups allowed files uploaded to them to be synchronized between .mac users.

Back to My Mac: Introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, allowed connecting users' computers remotely without almost any configuration.

Bookmarks: Bookmarks are synchronized between computers, and can be accessed online.

MobileMe

Introduced on June 9, 2008, it's the "Exchange for the rest of us".

It removed iCards, online access to bookmarks, slides, groups and the antivirus while adding the following tools:

Windows support: A downloadable control panel for Windows allowed the usage of almost all MobileMe tools for Windows users.

iPhone support: Introduced alongside iOS 2.0 (iPhone OS 2.0) added all the services to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Calendars and Contacts: All the users calendars and contacts are synchronized between users devices (computers and iDevices).

Calendar sharing: Using the CalDAV protocol you can share selected calendars with other people that don't need to be MobileMe users.

Dashboard widgets: Users widgets are installed on all the computers and their exact configuration and position synchronized between them (only for Macintosh computers).

Dock items: Dock items are synchronized between Macintosh computers.

Kotoeri User Dictionary: User preferences on Japanese hiragana to kanji conversions ("kotoeri", only for Macintosh computers).

Keychains: User credentials, certificates and passwords (only for Macintosh computers).

System preferences, Mail accounts, rules, signatures and custom inboxes.

Notes.

iLife integration: Only for Mac OS X 10.5 and upper, allows iWeb to upload websites to Homepage and iPhoto and iMovie to download and upload photos and movies to Web Gallery (renamed to MobileMe Gallery).

Find My iPhone: Introduced in June 10, 2009, allows MobileMe users to find in a map where their iDevice is, make it sound even if sound is disabled, show a message upmost in the iDevice screen, lock it and remove all its contents remotely, both online and from another iDevice. This service was separated from MobileMe and made free to any user with an Apple ID on November 22, 2010.

iCloud

Introduced on June 6, 2001, it's the final iteration, and free again.

Until June 30, 2012 both MobileMe and iCloud will coexist. No new MobileMe accounts can be created, and existing ones will remain free until then (even if they expired before that date). Users can choose to migrate from Mobile to iCloud at any time before than date, and users that has not migrated will cease to work. They can move anytime later, but their data will be deleted.

Dashboard widgets, dock items, kotoeri, keychains and system preferences will stop working, and your data deleted from Apple servers as soon as you migrate.

Homepage (iWeb publishing), Gallery and iDisk will continue working until June 30, 2012, even if you migrate before that date. After that, all you data will be deleted.

As Backup depends on iDisk, its fate is the same as iDisk's.

New features are:

iTunes in the Cloud and Apps and books history: All your bought iTunes Store items are synched between devices, chosen by the user if done automatically (once bought, it is downloaded on all iCloud activated devices) or manually (user can check a history of bought items to download it manually).

iTunes Match: Paid-separately (it is said to be US$24.99 per year), checks all your iTunes library and when a song is present in the iTunes Store, but you have not bought it there, automatically downloads it in AAC 256Kbps format.

Documents in the Cloud: Application developers can store your documents and sync them to your iCloud account, and then between your devices. In the presentation Apple clearly stated that the iWork suite for iOS (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) are already enabled to do that, but nothing is said about iWork for Mac OS X.

Photo Stream: Any photo you take on you iDevices, or manually put on Photo Stream using iPhoto, is uploaded to iCloud and downloaded to all your devices. There is a limit on how many photos your iDevices will download, but no limits on computers or uploads. (see screenshot below). Nothing is said about if Aperture will ever support this feature.

iDevice backup: When using a WiFi connection all the contents not synched in previously named features, like documents and other application data, as well as any particular configuration, is backed up and can be restored without access to a computer. iTunes items not bought from the iTunes Store (manually added to iTunes by the user) are not backed up.

The previous 10 Gb of iDisk space available to MobileMe users gets reduced to 5 Gb that's used only by Documents in the Cloud and the iDevice Backup, having Photo Stream (but Roll ones do in the backup) not counting on that available space, and the rest of the features already stored on the iTunes servers (bought apps, books, music, videos and tv shows).

iCloud adds all the features needed for iDevices to work absolutely independent of any computer, becomes free and removes features that a lot of people loved.

As it is said, never rains to everyone's taste.

I however, being a user of MobileMe since its inception, welcome these changes, specially the free-of-cost one.

iCloud will be launched on Fall 2011 alongside iOS 5. Windows and Mac OS X Lion will get support, and nothing is said about Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Finally, Apple has published a FAQ on http://www.apple.com/mobileme/transition.html about the migration from MobileMe to iCloud, just for any question I may have not answered.

Windows 8 Milestone 3 (build 7989)

2011-06-27T02:31:00.001+01:00

A new Windows 8 build. I'll only talk about things that changed from my previous post about Windows 8 Milestone 2 (build 7955), so read it first.

The first change is a new boot screen, showing a static bettafish and a circular loading symbol.

The next thing is a new, more cybernetic, wallpaper that prevents reading the Microsoft Confidential advice.

I'm not a lawyer but the inability to read a contract does not null it automatically ? Just lol.

There is a new virtual on-screen keyboard, differing in aspect from previous versions one, taking an aesthetic more similar to Windows Phone 7's. I personally prefer the transparencies of the previous one.

It also has less and bigger keys, more finger and less pen oriented.

One of the new virtual keyboard features is a numeric keypad. While it is not more similar to a keypad one (missing # and * keys), it's also missing keypad keys (/, *, - and +) as well as ordered like a phone. I may speculate as support for phoning on Windows 8?

Finally it includes one emoticons scheme. However it is not as pretty, or as complete, as Emoji.

There are also rumors about an application to send SMS, however I've been unable at all to find it.

Also, in forums it is said there is an option to have a "roaming profile" synchronized to Windows Live Cloud. I've been also unable to find it, however I'll clarify a couple of things.

In Windows' terminology a roaming profile is when absolutely all the contents of the user's home folder (including, documents, movies, photos, configuration files, registry entries) are copied between each computer the user logins in, and a server (usually an Active Directory server).

However the new roaming options, is not a "roaming profile", it just allows synchronizing some of the user settings, not all the registry entries, and not any of your files. This is like Apple's MobileMe did for years between Macintosh users.

And answering a question people made me on Twitter when I did the article about Milestone 2, this one includes Windows Media Center, but no changes are present yet.

It clearly seems that Microsoft is seriously mixing Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 in a single codebase, but the question is, will Windows 8 be optimized enough to run on smartphones and tablets?

Girly 'n' Geek

DiscImageChef and the Lisa operating system source code recovery

iTunes 12.2 or how they frack'd up iTunes...

ZFS on read-only devices

Cold-storage and live-storage of ROM and ISO sets, or "compression vs deduplication"

Hands-on: Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks Developer Preview (up to DP2)

Hands on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion *Preliminary*

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) on the Vodafone 858 Smart (Huawei U8160)

Hands on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview 1

Microsoft returns customers to the past, ReFS, the Resilient File System

Star Wars The Old Republic, 2011/11/25 to 2011/11/29 weekend beta test

Hands on Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" with LG Optimus 7

Rest in peace Steve Jobs

Hands-on Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8 public beta build 8102)

Comparison of NTFS drivers for Mac OS X

Virtualizing Lion with VMWare Fusion

Fourth iOS 5 impressions, beta 4

Lion gets updates, iWork, Apple Remote Desktop and iTunes

Hands-on Lion, Mac OS X 10.7

Mac OS X Lion, burn to DVD or pendrive

Third iOS 5 impressions, beta 3

Ubuntu 11.04, vade retro

Game Review: Backstab

Vodafone 858 Smart (Huawei U8160)

iTools -> .Mac -> MobileMe -> iCloud

Windows 8 Milestone 3 (build 7989)

Hands on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Preliminary