Pinboard (guardiantech)

How OS X “Mavericks” works its power-saving magic >> Ars Technica

guardiantech — 2013-06-11T23:11:32+00:00

Nate Anderson:

Timer Coalescing attempts to enforce some order on all this chaos. While on battery power, Mavericks will routinely scan all upcoming timers that apps have set and then apply a gentle nudge to line up any timers that will fire close to each other in time. This "coalescing" behavior means that the disk and CPU can awaken, perform timer-related tasks for multiple apps at once, and then return to sleep or idle for a longer period of time before the next round of timers fire.
Apple has never guaranteed developers that timers will run at exact times, either, so this isn't necessarily a break with convention. Apple currently tells developers that "because of the various input sources a typical run loop manages, the effective resolution of the time interval for a timer is limited to on the order of 50-100 milliseconds," and it notes that busy apps may have their timers affected even more.

Isn't that going to mess with music apps, which rely on timing precision that's more granular than that? (Thanks @rquick for the link.)

BlueStacks’ App Player for Mac launches beta: now you can run over 750,000 Android apps on Mac >> TechCrunch

guardiantech — 2012-12-31T15:50:01+00:00

Some mobile developers (whether mobile-first or mobile-only) are late to address the desktop market entirely. As BlueStacks VP of Business Development John Gargiulo pointed out to me, for example, the Mac beta release means that Mac users can run Flipboard on the desktop for the first time ever.
For developers, BlueStacks is also hoping that the Mac launch will help make going “Android-first” more attractive, Gargiulo explains.
“We look at it from the POV [point of view] of our mobile developer partners – they start out by deciding, what mobile platform do we build for first? What’s going to get the most distribution? Now with BlueStacks, building for Android first means they’ll get on all PCs and Mac,” he says. There are many ways to monetize the Mac distribution, too, in addition to the in-app purchases developers can offer (without sharing a cut with Apple). BlueStacks will announce its further monetization plans in Q2 2013.

Wouldn't Flipboard really want a touchscreen? It does have deals with Acer and AMD which will see it pre-installed on Windows machines... with touch. (A Twitter comment: "old Macs will probably have better future Android app support than most current native phones will.")

What Killed the Linux Desktop >> Miguel de Icaza

guardiantech — 2012-08-30T22:53:45+00:00

The inventor of Mono, the Linux version of Windows C#, writes:

True story.
The hard disk that hosted my /home directory on my Linux machine failed so I had to replace it with a new one. Since this machine lives under my desk, I had to unplug all the cables, get it out, swap the hard drives and plug everything back again.
Pretty standard stuff. Plug AC, plug keyboard, plug mouse but when I got to the speakers cable, I just skipped it.
Why bother setting up the audio?

Permanently unhide Library >> Red Sweater blog

guardiantech — 2012-05-23T20:51:22+00:00

When Apple shipped Mac OS X Lion 10.7, the “Library” folder located within every user’s home folder, which had previously been visible to users in the Finder, was made invisible. To access the Library folder, users must now hold down the option key while selecting the “Go” menu in the Finder.
This is probably a good move for the vast majority of Mac users, but for folks with even a small amount of interest in tinkering with the configuration files and caches of various applications, it’s an outright nuisance.

A quick trip to the Terminal can fix it, or he has an app for that.

Joe Pirillo uses Mac OS X for the first time >> YouTube

guardiantech — 2012-03-15T06:45:25+00:00

Yesterday we showed you Chris Pirillo's father using Windows 8 for the first time. Now here he is using Mac OSX for the first time, and trying to find "the internet". Fascinating piece of user interface film: watch this before you judge users. (Pirillo senior is a confirmed Windows user, though he has used iPads and iPhones.)

Flashback Mac Trojan Horse infections increasing with new variant >> The Mac Security Blog

guardiantech — 2012-02-27T06:26:48+00:00

Intego:

We recently reported about a new variant of the Flashback Trojan horse which is using novel techniques to infect Macs. Since then, we have discovered a number of samples of this latest variant, Flashback.G, and have seen evidence that many Mac users have been infected by this malware.

What's not explained is what "many" is (even compared to Intego's client base) or what this novel infection method is. Flashback is a password-stealing program. Presently easy to detect: • open Terminal.app • type cd /Users/Shared • type ls -l • look for any file ending ".so". If you're infected, you've then got a problem. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)

About Gatekeeper >> Panic Blog

guardiantech — 2012-02-17T08:10:40+00:00

Why the new Gatekeeper feature on the new version of the Mac operating system matters to all users.

Mountain Lion drops support for several older Mac models >> The Unofficial Apple Weblog

guardiantech — 2012-02-16T23:01:52+00:00

Basically, anything earlier than 2008 means you're hosed, apart from the iMac. Though of course your existing system will continue to run.

OS X 10.7 Lion is more painful than Vista >> ZDNet

guardiantech — 2011-08-24T08:32:40+00:00

Adi Kingsley-Hughes isn't enjoying. (We haven't upgraded from Snow Leopard yet, so can't comment.)

Macs & Mac OS X: The Two Faces of Lion >> TidBits

guardiantech — 2011-07-02T21:22:07+00:00

Glenn Fleishmann on some of what you can expect later this month from Apple.

Ars Technica Investigates the State of Malware on the Mac >> Daring Fireball

guardiantech — 2011-05-20T22:20:43+00:00

Ars Technica: "Internally, Apple’s [IT] department mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company machines.”
John Gruber: "This may be true for any Apple-owned machines running Windows, but it is not true for machines running any version of Mac OS X. I asked several Apple engineers whether any antivirus software was mandated or even recommended for Mac OS X, internally. All said no. Said one, 'You couldn’t get me to install Norton on OS X if you slipped me the date rape drug.'"

Windows generates less than a third the profit of iOS + OS X >> asymco

guardiantech — 2011-05-04T05:09:53+00:00

"The end of an era is the end of growth in one dominant business model. The PC era was epitomized by the concentration of profits in a dominant operating system vendor. That growth has slowed if not ended. The post-PC era is being kicked off by a new business model where profits are being concentrated in a hardware+software+service integrator."

It would be interesting to see the profits for Windows PCs manufacturers added in.

Grand Central Dispatch for Win32 >> GitHub

guardiantech — 2011-04-27T10:07:53+00:00

Intriguing: Apple's "Grand Central Dispatch" (a method to push some threads off to the GPU for processing) ported and "lightly tested" to Win32.

The interesting thing being that in days gone by, you'd have seen the Mac programmers desperately trying to port Win32 APIs to run on MacOS, not vice-versa.