WWWDC 2014. Biggest take for me. Mail Annotations on OSX 10.10

From today's Apple's WWWDC conference. The biggest surprise to me today was the large file attachments and email annotation (aka Markup tools).

Seem very simple, huh?

Well, I work in the advertising industry; working with clients and various agencies across the world. This is exactly what they've been looking for. They deal with super large files. Other fields may be sending 2-5MB Excel attachments, but in creative media, they're sending large files either video or images. Have you ever seen a 2GB TIFF before? I've seen people try to send those large of files as attachments. And in the past 14 years of my life, I can tell you clients and vendors are always sending large attachments.  40 MB Attachments are the norm and they're always FTPing them, using box or some sharing service like yousendit. Yes, the dreaded email bounce back is a fairly common sight.

Also, many agencies use expensive markup tools. Some cost $60K to $300K. They have more advance collaboration features like real time markup, realtime zooming of large files over the network, and precise onsite monitor calibration. This is not the answer to those highly specialize workflows which are used 5% of the time. For the other 95% of the time where people are marking up PDFs and images, this solves it.  People use third party apps, some even use Photoshop, Illustrator or Indesign to do mock-ups. But now, it is built into a mail client.


In the grand scheme of things, these are relatively small features and none of the tech blogs even picked up on this but I  sure did. Considering 98% of the creative agencies I've worked with, they all use Macs. This is a big deal for those users.

Ubuntu Folder colors. Aka Macintosh Finder Labels

Mac OS 7 had this back in the mid 1990s. Now, you can have this same feature on Ubuntu 14.04 in 2014. Mac OS calls it labels. This is basically the same principle.

I gotta say, this is a cool system add-on. It is handy for organizing work. Unfortunately, it is not built-in the OS. You will need top download and install it from the link below:

Link:http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org/

VMware ESXi, Xserve, and virtualizing your old Mac server infrastructure

I've been asked quite a bit on this blog, offline and via email about Mac Virtualization. Specifically, virtualizing old Mac OSX servers that previously ran on Apple's discontinued XServes. With VMware's ESXi, you can easily consolidate clusters of old Mac servers into fewer machines and easily provide failover and redundancy. For example if you had 4 Xserves, you can dedicate two as Hypervisors and virtualize all four older Mac Servers on a single machine. With two hypervisors, you would have duplicate and redundant standby failover new Mac servers.

Hopefully, this post will be a guide to help many of those who want to consolidate and virtualize their old Mac OSX 10.6 (and up servers). Think of this as a road-map, blueprint from this fortysome geek. This is my article on running ESXi on the Xserve and virtualizing old Mac servers.

First of all, you will need a few things.

• VMware's Free Hypervisor server, ESXi version 5.1.0
• VMware's Desktop Fusion. 
• an INTEL XEON Power Mac or XServe. My host is a XServe 3,1 which was the last one from 2009.

Quick Review: Logitech Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard K811

Today I am going to give a quick review of the Logitech Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard  also known as the K811 keyboard. If you ever wanted the same illuminated glowing feature of the Macbook for your desktop, this is the keyboard to get. It retails for $99 but can be had for $60-80 when shopped aggressively.

This is a pretty slick keyboard. It is roughly the same size as the Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard.

Design wise, it is plastic with an real aluminum front plate finish. The aluminum is a nice touch and not some faux painted plastic. The black on silver is reminiscent of the current Macbook island keyboards.
It is pretty slim as well.

What makes this keyboard so great are:
- USB charging. No more replacing AA batteries. It uses standard micro-USB.

- 3 device Bluetooth pairing. I love this feature. With a switch of a key-press, you can toggle this between computers and devices. I have this paired with my iMac, 13" Macbook and iPad. It takes less than a second to switch over between the devices. I simply love this! This alone makes me want to replace all my keyboards at my various locations. It is so convenient to switch between my iPad and iMac at any given time.

- backlight keyboard. The thing glows at night! This alone is one of the key selling feature.



Overall, I dig this keyboard. The incurve keys are evenly space with some good tactile feel. It feels like a Macbook keyboard and is much better than Apple's own.

Here is a comparison picture to see how this would fit in with your Apple gear. I think they should have make it more subdued without the logo and black bar on top. Otherwise, it is a very handsome design.

And a few pictures at night where this device really shines.

Late night work on the iPad is a pleasure with this keyboard!

Link: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/illuminated-keyboard-for-mac-ipad-iphone

Running OS 9 on a 15 inch Macbook Retina Pro at 2880x1800

Yes, it is possible to run Mac OS 9 Classic via Sheepshaver on a retina Macbook Pro. In fact, you can run it at 2880x1800. Nerdy indeed!

Mount,read,write NTFS on Macs and do the same with HFS on Windows.

The title of this blog is very long, "Mount,read,write NTFS drives on Macs and do the same with HFS drives on Windows."

If you want to share and mount drives between Macs and PCs you can either use FAT32 or exFAT formatted drives.

exFAT works on OSX versions 10.6.8 and higher and is preferred over FAT32 for support of files larger than 4GB. I actually like exFAT because it is the fastest middle-road solution when you take account Linux usage.

For most purposes, exFAT works great. However, there are times you want to have access to the 'other' OS preferred filesystem such as NTFS on Windows and HFS + on OSX.

I have a few large RAID drives that I would like to occasionally see from either side of the fence.

Hence, I decided to fork out the cash and buy commercial drivers from Paragon system to mount, read and write NTFS volumes on Macs and do the same for HFS+ volumes on Windows.

I've tried other products including various free ones but performance was lacking. I was pleasantly surprised with both piece of software from Paragon.

So today, I will do a dual review on both products as a single end-user.

Here is a HFS Plus volume under Windows 7.

A NTFS volume under MacOSX.

HFS + for Windows
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/
and
NTFS for Mac OSX10
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Pretty much install and reboot. There is nothing to configure on Windows as I can tell. On the Mac, you have a System Preference pane.

First of all, I did not notice any significant speed handicaps. The drive access seemed as fast as native on both Mac and PC.  I've used other filesystem drivers such as NTFS-3G on Mac, Fuse on Linux and they all seemed very, very slow. Here, it is blazing fast. 7GB files took about a minute to copy and copy reliably.

Benchmarks on both pc and mac seem to indicate no performance penalty but the real test was real-world copies which appeared normal to me.

Both screenshots below are benchmarks of drives that were 60% full with operating systems on them.

USB 3, eSATA and Thunderbolt are both supported. Thunderbolt was not disclosed in their marketing but as you can see from the Windows screenshot above, a Samsung 830 SSD via a Seagate Thunderbolt adapter on a Gigabyte motherboard does indeed work. I was also able to connect a HFS formatted Drobo 5D via USB 3.0. All the USB 3.0 sticks and external drives I have in my possession work on both.

I run 64 bit on both OS so it is safe to say it works otherwise this review would not exist. I am running the latest Mountain Lion 10.8.2 and no problems to report.

Next, I tested them both by making and copying large encrypted Truecrypt container files.  TrueCrypt (for my mac readers) is an encrypted file container like an encrypted DMG that works cross platforms on Windows, Mac, Linux. Think of it as open source, open platform DMG that is encrypted.

I made my truecrypt containers 7GB to see if there was any corruption. I then copied a clone disk image of a fresh Mountain Lion install.  I made the container on my Windows system NTFS drive on the Mac and copied the DMG into the container. I then booted into Windows , mounted and copy the container to various HFS and NTFS drives. I was able to mount and copy, restore the clone image reliably.

It is safe to say, mounting TrueCrypted volumes on either platform works. For example, a HFS truecrypt container created on a mac will mount on the Windows side.


Next, in Windows, you can toggle hidden directories in the explorer. It was very nice. No more ._files or .DS_Store files.

See below. The first image is with the default Explorer view. Clean and tidy. The second image is after I enabled hidden file view in the Explorer preference.

The cons are:
Neither will see software raids created by the opposing OS. For example, I plugged my Thunderbolt LaCie into Windows (which works via Thunderbolt) and I can see the drives in the Device Manager but not the RAID volume.

Neither will see encrypted file systems created by the other.
For example, you can't see a FileVault HFS+ on Windows. To me, this is considered to be a good thing because I keep my work on encrypted volumes.

There are other issues as well. For example, symlinks, permissions, and extended attributes are not preserved on the Windows side when dealing with HFS drives. Certain mac files still use resource forks (which contain extended meta-data) and labels. If you copy them on Windows using HFS+ (copy HFS to HFS), they will not be preserved.

Below is an example. The script folder is highlighted in red label on OSX. Those attributes get stripped when you copy under Windows. Same with the broken link icon on files that have resource forks.

The meta-data, resource forks , symlinks are preserved on the mac side when working with NTFS drives. Meaning, if you copy specials files on OSX onto NTFS drives, you will be fine.
You just can't do that on the Windows side.

Apparently you can set an NTFS as a startup disk on OSX. I did no test this.

This is a minor inconvenience but it is something to know.  It is also disclosed in the manual.
You wont be able to use Windows cloning software to clone a Mac Drive. If you need anything that maintains permissions or meta-data, copy the files in the native operating system. The resource forks and labels are relics from the classic Mac past. I love my colored labels but this is not a show stopper.

Overall, I am pleasantly surprised. Both app drivers are $20 and you have the option of getting multi computer home licenses.