NVinNYC

Now that the new MacBook Air comes with a USB software restore drive instead of optical media, I wonder if we have any chance of seeing non-optical disc based Mac OS X 10.7 Lion upgrades sold by Apple.

Certainly the remote disc option that Apple cooked up for the original MacBook Air should still work just fine for the new Airs, but this solution is kind of clunky and requires a secondary computer with an optical drive as well as a properly configured network.  USB optical drives are similarly regressive.  Instead, think that Apple could (and should) sell a USB restore drive or downloadable upgrade package for Lion.

The first option would would certainly be the preferable way to upgrade a MacBook Air, but it would probably sell well even to users who still had optical drives on their Mac.  A USB thumb drive seems more reliable and rugged than a disc, it should work fine with any Intel based Mac, and would look cool on a key chain.   Apple would still sell Lion DVDs of course, but they could offer the USB drive for a small premium.

The second option for a download would be very convenient, especially to international users where shipping can be slow and expensive. Obviously, this would only work if Apple allowed purchasers to download the software multiple times and run it without requiring burning a bootable DVD, though that should be an option too.

We could see some interesting new Lion upgrade options Apple next summer!

I picked up an Epson V100 Photo scanner refurbished for something like $40 from Woot the other day just because I’ve always wanted a cheap scanner around to digitize paperwork I wanted to trash.

Epson’s site lists the driver as compatible with Leopard but it hasn’t been updated since November 2006, so I wasn’t looking forward to installing old scanner software with some agent that would sit in the background sucking RAM and CPU just to launch the right app when I press the scanner button. Nor did I wish to deal with clunky scanner software with a terrible interface.

Luckily, I don’t have to. The Preview application built into Mac OS can control the scanner (presumably through the standardized TWAIN interface). Here’s a screenshot of the interface which can be accessed through the ‘File’ -> ‘Import Image…’ menu item:

As you can see, it features a nice little suite of controlls and tweaks for scanning and doing basic editing on the image.  Overall I’m quite pleased with the purchase and the built in Mac OS support.  Yay for standards!

QuickTime 7.2 was released a few days ago, and while I normally don’t mention incremental updates here this point release is rather noteworthy for three reasons (two of which you probably won’t care about and one that you will):

• It adds an iPhone export option (as part of the Pro export suite). Actually there are two options, one high quality setting and one for streaming over cellular networks with lower quality and sizes.
• It improves the movie Inspector (Window -> Show Movie Inspector…) so that it ‘sticks’ open so that it shows whenever the QuickTime player is launched. It also has the smaller title bar to differentiate itself. These features, which I recall were both present in versions of Quicktime 6 were somehow missing in version 7 until now.
• Finally, the one you’ll care about, QT 7.2 enables you to view movies in full screen without purchasing the Pro version. The fact that Apple tried to use fullscreen support as a up-sale (while including it in iTunes and leaving the fullscreen command accessible in AppleScript) was a bitch movie that Apple has finally rectified.

You can download Quicktime 7.2 via Software Update or directly over the web. I highly recommend it.

I’ve been messing with the iSight on my brand new MacBook (in white) because it was working at first and then it got really dark (so that you could only see light bulbs in the image). Finally, it stopped working at all with Photo Booth reporting that the camera was in use even after just booting up or logging into a fresh test account.

I figured it must be a software issue because it disappeared when I booted the machine off of my new Mac Pro drive in target disk mode. However a clean install of OS X didn’t change anything even after all the updates were applied.

Somewhat stumped, I did some searching and found this account of the exact same problem (with more technical details). It turns out that because I had installed Boot Camp on my Mac Pro and then booted my Mac Book off of this drive, the iSight firmware had been updated. As such, the Mac Book was unable to communicate with it as it lacked corresponding updated drivers (but the Mac Pro could because it had those drivers). The solution is to extract the iSight drivers from the Boot Camp 1.1 installer and add them to the Mac Book (Boot Camp installation is not needed, but would work too). I imagine this will only be an issue until Apple releases 10.4.8 which bundles the updated drivers, but I thought it was an interesting problem worth discussing. However, this could remain an issue in the future for a computer that hasn’t been updated to 10.4.8 or had Boot Camp 1.1 installed.

The moral of the story is: be careful mixing machines with Boot Camp updates and those without.

Three new ‘Get a Mac’ ads and a new iTunes + iPod comercial with Bob Dylan. Sweet stuff.