What Counts as a Hackintosh?
My Dell Mini 10v running a retail version of Snow Leopard. For $300 this is one of the cheapest and easiest Hackintosh's out there. But are you up for the challenge?
Also known as the OSx86 project, getting a non-Apple made computer to run any form of OS X is considered an accomplishment, and there’s even a name for your new machine: A Hackintosh. Officially, its against Apple’s Terms of Service to run OS X on hardware that wasn’t created by them, but wheres the fun in that? Now because it’s against Apple and what they believe, creating a Hackintosh isn’t for everyone, but if your a good sport, you’ll go buy the retail Leopard disc and at least reward Apple for a good operating system.
So do you have a Hackintosh? Do you plan on making one? Well I’ll share a key secret: there is no 100% guide to making a Hackintosh. Part of the challenge is picking pieces that are going to work in your machine, then you have to decide if your going to run a clean copy of Leopard or a modified version thats more/ less suited to your hardware. Kalyway, iATKOS and iDeneb are examples of modified Apple software thats been created to assist you in your journey. The advantage to running these modified versions are that your probability of success is higher, and most hardware-related errors can/ are solved in therse versions. On the downside, because its modified, it might not run just like a Mac, as a clean copy would. Its up to you which you choose, but if you can get a clean copy running flawlessly, your less likely to run into problems in the future.
A Hackintosh can be anything, in any shape or form. Seen above, you can see my Dell Mini 10v running a retail version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.1 to be exact!) and so far its been smooth sailing. The Dell Mini lineup is a small setup of netbooks that can run Leopard pretty dang well right out of the box, and for the few errors you encounter, some great guys (melkort and bmatlis I believe) created some great software to make the process much simpler. On another note, the desktop Hackintosh is probably the most popular as it saves you money and provides a great deal of hardware flexibility and choices when it comes to Apple’s selection.
Don’t get the the idea that running a machine like this is a walk in the park. Sometimes its just a matter of building a computer and running software the way it was designed, on the other hand, hardware and software hacking knowledge can and will be required to get your machine up and running. Its always a risk, but the reward is great.
Apple’s Magic Mouse: The Wrong Direction Forward
Posted by Ben in Mac, Peripherals on October 27, 2009
Seen above, Apple's new Magic Mouse literally has no buttons, as the front acts as one big track pad.
When Apple released a slew of new products, coincidentally 2 days before the launch of Windows 7, one of the rather interesting products hitting shelves was Apple’s new Magic Mouse. An “improvement” from the previous Mighty Mouse, this new device is much thinner, sits lower to the ground, has Bluetooth connectivity, and has no buttons. You heard me, no physical buttons at all. The real catch is that the whole front of the mouse is a giant track-pad, capable of multi-touch gestures. While I do find this an advancement to the current form of computer interaction, I believe we are not headed in the right direction when it comes to this technology.
The mouse has been in the market for a half century and up until recently with touch-screen tablets and computers, its been the only form of interaction. While it is powerful and flexible, its just too limited. One pair of coordinate points is all that can be used at any given second, greatly reducing possibly productivity. As the market has shown, multi-touch is the next generation of interaction technology, but in what other ways can we talk to our computers?
Its the question that must be answered in the coming years as new products like the “Magic Mouse”, though putting us ahead, only drop us farther behind in the pursuit of new and greater technologies. When you consider a form of interaction, the click-wheel featured on an iPod is a popular one, and with that, I have no doubt in my mind that Apple has the ability to pave the trail of advancement in the development of the next great form of interaction with our everyday computers. It’s a technology that is not questioned often, but as we push further into the future, the mouse will not work.
App Spotlight: chompSMS for Android
Posted by Ben in Cell Phone, Software on October 23, 2009
The chompSMS app is no real application, but an enhancement to your current SMS app.
App Name: chompSMS
Platform: Android
Price: Free (with carrier texting)
Overall rating: 4/5
An application that iPhone owners could only dream of, chompSMS is available exclusively on the Android OS and supercharges the SMS available on your phone. chompSMS can be used as a replacement to the built-in SMS application, or you can just use it to boost the features of your current application. The application even offers there own message network called the “chompSMS” network. To use their texting service instead of your carriers, you’ll pay a flat rate of $0.12 per text.
They try and tell you this is “much cheaper” then using your carrier, but doing the math, sending 200 texts through there network would run you around $24. Pay an extra $6 and you could probably get unlimited from your own carrier. On the other hand, this is quite a deal for international text messaging, if you do that a lot, but be sure if you do text your pals over seas that your not jacking up their bill.
The application itself enhances the messaging experience nonetheless with a slew of features including: quick compose, chat style bubbles (like on the iPhone), quick reply option, various user interface customizations, notification customizations, ring tones per contact, and blacklisting. For a free application, it really fixes the holes left from the default app.
The Bottom Line: Its an excellent download that really enhances the way you text people on your phone. The app itself is free and is well worth downloading, but the rates for using their personal network are a bit outrageous. Runs fairly smoothly most of the time but can have a little lag every now and again, but not enough to keep you from using such a great app.
Windows 7 to the Rescue!
Officially being released tomorrow (October 22, 2009), Windows 7 provides users with many reasons to rejoice. However, upgrading charges isn't one of them.
Personally, I still use Windows XP and thought Vista was pretty much what you’d call a failure. And being honest, I’m really looking forward to this next major release from Microsoft. After taking a spin around defeat, things like search, navigation, and stability have been repaired and hopefully are now up to par. Coming out soon (if not out by the time you’ve read this), plenty of big-name companies have gotten the opportunity to try out a pre-release version of Windows 7 and so far, its been smooth sailing…
Upgrading looks like a breeze (if you use Vista already… if not, your going to have a little harder time getting all your precious data straight over to Windows 7), and system performance looks incredible! “Noticeably faster” is a comment many reviewers have used and I think its well deserved. Now I won’t rant about features because I personally haven’t gotten to use this new OS. Putting it simply, there is only a few things I really look for in an operating system: performance, stability, and simplicity. Unfortunately I can’t fill out Microsoft’s grade card quite yet as I haven’t even used it yet!
In preliminary judging however, performance looks better than average, and the simplicity of the machine is improved but not perfect. And stability in my books, is judged based on how well the machine will run overtime. For example, if 3 months into use, the machine still runs as fast as the day I installed, I’ll be impressed.
In conclusion, its a nice “clean-up” to Vista and should hold out until Windows 8 (which is already being developed). I personally believe the pices for all three versions are outragous compared to what they should be. Seriously… Vista failed and Microsoft still expects us to pay full price? Not cool. On another note, iIt still doesn’t stack up to Leopard in my opinion, but it nears the Mac OS X Tiger region… still leaving it behind in terms of innovation, but thats okay. I’ve been using XP since I can remember and any Windows OS better than XP is going to make it feel like a huge improvement.
iMovie 09 “Save” Function Missing
Apple's latest installment of the iMovie family left many dissatisfied as the ability to downgrade to iMovie HD from iLife 09 was dropped.
I have my own fair share of rants about Windows computers, but I notice that I do tend to have more positive comments to the Mac I have. Well it wasn’t until this weekend, when I actually opened up iMovie ‘09 for the first time, that I realized the one major flaw it has. I have never used any previous versions of iMovie, but I did hear that when Apple “completely redesigned” iMovie ‘08, it was so different that Apple actually let users downgrade for free. For me, I hoped that the 2009 version would have fixed what was wrong, because they did drop there support for free downgrading with iLife ‘09.
Well, it was a good 4 hours later when I had finally finished my first very important video. The program had run smooth and steady the whole time, even with constant video adding, editing, etc. But when I started it from the top to quickly review my production without rendering it, iMovie decided to “unexpectedly quit”. And it wasn’t until I reopened the program that I learned that iMovie ’09s claimed Auto-Save is all but real. Don’t get me wrong, the video clips I have imported were there, but the hours upon hours of work putting them together meticulously was not there.
In my conclusion, I’ll let you know in the process of creating over 5 short-films, iMovie crashed a total of 12 times for me, all for unexpected reasons. So I just have to ask Apple why. Being honest, the program and its abilities are just shy of professional video editing software, but the fact that I cannot manually go to: File > Save, to keep my progress every now and then is flat out ridiculous. If there’s one thing that needs to be in iMovie ‘10, it better be the ability to save, cause it sure isn’t there.
I’ve yet to discover a work-around even after reading elsewhere that you can manually save the file via drag and drop through the finder, but that is not the case. I’ll let you know if I ever figure this out. Leave a comment if you think you’ve figured out how to fix this, cause I know I’m not the only one!