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Lion Launches as Shuttle Gets Ready To Land.

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

While the last flight of the Space Shuttle rapidly approaches its finale, Apple’s latest iteration of OS X is ready to take flight. While we’re certainly sad to see the end of an era of space exploration, we can’t help but temper our sadness with the excitement over the release of a new OS.

After over a month of anticipation, preparation and a little bit of exasperation, OS X 10.7 Lion was released to the general public earlier today! While you can rest assured that your OWC and NewerTech storage solutions are ready to work with the new OS, you’ll want to make sure the rest of your system is prepared, too.

Here’s what you’ll need in order to install and run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Article Continues…

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Category: Fresh from Apple, Tech Tips
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OWC & NT Storage Solutions Lion Ready.

Monday, July 18th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

You know that feeling when you’ve upgraded to a new operating system and you find that your favorite peripheral doesn’t work any more? We sure do; it stinks.

That’s why we’ve gathered all OWC and NewerTech storage solutions, including ‘legacy’ products from way back in our past and have tested them for compatibility with OS X 10.7 Lion.

You know what? They all work.

So if or when you switch to the new OS, you can be sure that whether you attach your OWC or NewerTech storage solution to your Mac via USB, FireWire, or eSATA, it’ll work just as well in 10.7 as it did in the versions before it.

Now if we only had the same sort of assurance for software…

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Category: Tech Tips
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Dismantling the Trojan Horse (or why MacGuard isn’t a concern)

Friday, June 3rd, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Aside from a couple of “conceptual” examples shown at conferences here and there, the only real piece of malware on the Mac that’s made it “into the wild” is the now infamous MAC Defender and its variants….one of which, MacGuard, has recently made headlines.

Naturally, the MacGuard topic has hit all the major tech news sites, igniting yet another round of “Mac vs. Windows” flame wars. Ironically, all this attention is probably helping the malware’s progress; I’ll go into m0re detail on that in just a moment. First, I’d like to clear something up.

MAC Defender and its variants are not viruses! Article Continues…

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Category: Tech Tips
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“Back to Mac” or “Mac to iOS”?

Thursday, October 21st, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Looking at the announced updates and changes, I’ve got some mixed opinions.

I use both iPhoto and GarageBand on a near-daily basis. From the descriptions on Apple’s site, I could certainly see myself using several of the new features, especially the Flex Time functions in GarageBand. Unfortunately, they’ve kept the same horrible interface they introduced in iMovie ‘09. That, alone is reason enough for me to avoid it like the plague. As for the new “features,” to me, they seem very cookie-cutter; there doesn’t to seem to be half the flexibility a more advanced user may want. For those, Final Cut Express is probably a better choice.

I also hoped to see an update to iDVD, though, possibly with expanded HD support. While DVD players are giving way to Blu-ray, an actual optical disc is still the best bet for watching on a big screen – not everybody has an Internet-connected television or AppleTV, but most people at least have a DVD player. Right now, the best bet for sharing your HD movies for the non-connected is via Roxio Toast 10 Titanium. Article Continues…

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Category: Fresh from Apple, Random Thoughts & Topics
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Apple heading “Back to the Mac” on Oct. 20

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Between the iPad, the iPhone 4 and iOS 4, this has certainly been the year for Apple’s mobile offerings. Though we had the requisite upgrades to the MacBook, iMac, and Mac Pro lines, along with a pretty significant revamp of the Mac mini, the Macintosh platform has taken a back seat this year to its touch-based cousin.

This event, though, is supposedly going to change that; apparently, Apple wants to talk about “what’s new for the Mac.” While the possibility of new hardware exists, the lion photo seems to suggest we’ll be getting a peek at OSX 10.7, which—keeping in with the tradition of naming OS X versions after big cats—could very well be code-named “Lion.”

Other than that, details are kind of scarce. What else does Apple have up its sleeve? We’ll have to find out on the 20th.

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Category: Fresh from Apple
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New Software Updates Available

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Hot on the heels of the new hardware released yesterday, we’ve got some new software to go along with it.

Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.0

I was surprised to see this update show up on my MacBook Pro, but it does add more functionality to your trackpad’s configuration options, including “intertial scrolling” which lets you set your trackpad to scroll through lists like an iPod Touch or iPhone.

10.6.4 update for 2010 iMac

If you’re one of the fortunate souls who managed to get one of the new iMacs released yesterday, this one’s just for you. It includes the normal 10.6.4 updates, as well as these 2010 iMac-specific fixes:

  • Resolves compatibility and performance-related graphics issues.
  • Improves compatibility with large-format SDXC memory cards.
  • Adds support for Magic Trackpad.

Safari 5.0.1

This update contains a bunch of small fixes you’d normally expect from a .0.1 release, but it also adds another, slightly more significant, option: the addition of “extensions.”

These extensions are in addition to the more broad-range “plug-ins” like Glims or ClickToFlash, and (from the few I tried) they don’t seem to conflict with each other.

Even if you don’t use extensions or plug-ins, though, it’s probably worth the download, just to fix the short laundry list of security, stability and usability bugs.

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Category: Fresh from Apple
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Using Skype to Bridge the Gap

Thursday, May 6th, 2010 | Author: OWC Alan

How do you close the gap between a Grandmother and her Granddaughter?

How do you close the gap between the Chicago suburbs and the west coast of Florida?

In a word: Skype

My Mom is a snowbird. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a snowbird typically is a person of retired age who splits their time between their hometown in the northern regions of our country and some place nice and warm. When the snow flies, so do they!

She loves to travel and golf, but she misses my daughter. Enter the new craze sweeping retirement communities; some of her friends in Florida have been using Skype for a while. One day, my mom said to me, “We’re getting a new computer with a camera built in so we can Skype.” *

Wha?

My mom has to call me twice a day to figure out how to work my TV when she is home watching my daughter. You mean to tell me this lady is going to learn how to Skype?! Article Continues…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics, Tech Tips
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Snow Leopard gets updated to 10.6.3!

Monday, March 29th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

For those of you who’ve been itching for the latest version of OS X to come out, your wait is over. Apple released 10.6.3 today, which includes the following fixes:

  • improve the reliability and compatibility of QuickTime X
  • address compatibility issues with OpenGL-based applications
  • address an issue that causes background message colors to display incorrectly in Mail
  • resolve an issue that prevented files with the # or & characters in their names from opening in Rosetta applications
  • resolve an issue that prevented files from copying to Windows file servers
  • improve performance of Logic Pro 9 and Main Stage 2 when running in 64-bit mode
  • improve sleep and wake reliability when using Bonjour wake on demand
  • address a color issue in iMovie with HD content
  • improve printing reliability
  • resolve issues with recurring events in iCal when connected to an Exchange server
  • improve the reliability of 3rd party USB input devices
  • fix glowing, stuck, or dark pixels when viewing video from the iMac (Late 2009) built-in iSight camera

You can find the full list of fixes in this Apple Knowledge Base article.

While I personally have only seen the first two issue pop up, I’ve read reports on many of the others. Let’s hope that this truly resolves those issues. You can do the incremental update by going to the “Software Update…” option in the Apple Menu, but we generally recommend using the Combo Updater, which can be found at Apple’s Web Site.

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Category: Fresh from Apple
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