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Techradar |
- Tutorial: How to fix Mac startup problems
- Google upgrades image search function
- Bjork set to release new album as 10 iPad apps
- In Depth: Best Linux music player: 5 reviewed and rated
- New 3D version of Tetris arriving in October
- Mac OS X 10.7 Lion features explained
- Review Roundup: This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar
| Tutorial: How to fix Mac startup problems Posted: 05 Jun 2011 01:00 AM PDT If your Mac won't switch on, what can you do? If you have an iMac, Mac mini or Mac Pro, try another lead, a different power outlet or the lead with a different device and swap the fuse. Also, check if it's your external screen that's not on as opposed to the Mac - If none of this helps, try resetting the System Management Controller. If this fails, the power supply in your Mac could have failed. Apple may replace it under warranty or AppleCare. If you have a notebook, check the battery's charged or plugged in. If the light on the connector is not coming on, plug the adapter into a different socket. If the adapter's working, resetting the SMC may help. Still no joy? The power adapter could have failed. If you have AppleCare, take it back to Apple - if that doesn't help, something may be wrong inside your Mac. That's one for Apple to look at. "My Mac switches on but beeps at me or won't start up" A beeping Mac suggests a RAM issue - have you recently upgraded? Are the chips slotted in correctly? Remove and reseat them. Unplug all but mouse and keyboard and restart. If your Mac boots normally, the external kit or its software may be at fault. Plug them in one at a time to identify the culprit. When you have, uninstall its driver software, then reinstall it. If you're still having trouble, hold down Shift as you switch on your Mac to perform a Safe boot. No luck? Turn off your Mac, hold Command+Option+P+R and switch on again. Release the keys when you hear the startup chime the second time. Alternatively pop in the OS X install DVD, restart holding C and open Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Run the disk and permissions repairs, repeatedly, until you get the all-clear. If it still won't boot, restart with your Applications Install disc in the drive and hold down D. Run the Apple Hardware Test. If it finds problems and the component is removable, remove it and see if this helps. If the hardware seems fine, reinstall Mac OS X, but before you do, back up files in Target Disk mode. Boot from the OS X DVD. A last resort is to boot from the OS X DVD, use Disk Utility to wipe your drive and install OS X on the clean disk. "I've forgotten my Mac account password. How can I log in?" The main administrator can change passwords in System Preferences > Accounts. If you are the main administrator, try the Forgot Password button on the login pane. In FileVault this button is labelled Reset Password. If none of this helps, restart with the OS X DVD, holding down C. In the Installer's Utilities menu, choose Reset Password. If your Home folder was encrypted with FileVault, and you don't have the password, your Home folder's contents will be gone. Quick tip To back up your files in Target Disk mode, hold down T as you switch on your Mac until the FireWire icon appears on your screen. Then plug a FireWire cable between your Mac and another - yours will appear on its desktop as a removable drive. You can then copy your files off it and back them up. How to control your Mac Hold down these buttons at startup for the following functions. Mouse/trackpad button: Eject CD/DVD Some of these won't work if you've enabled a firmware password. If you want to boot from another drive, hold Option at startup. Type the password and press Return. To remove the password, boot from the OS X DVD choosing Firmware Password Utility from Utilities. 
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| Google upgrades image search function Posted: 04 Jun 2011 05:44 AM PDT Google has made significant improvements to its image search functions this week, rolling out the latest updates to Google Images. Google will now automatically try to figure out whether or not you are looking for images, even before you remember to hit the 'Images' tab. How to find great images "Starting this week we're making it easier to quickly find great images right in your Google search results," reads a recent post from Google software engineer, Grant Dasher. "Drawing from last year's broader update to Google Images, we've integrated many of the features we introduced at that time into our main search results. Images will now appear in a tiled layout, with hover previews that give you a larger thumbnail and more information about a particular image." Basically, if Google thinks that your query has "high image intent" then they will start to automatically show you lots more photos, pictures and other images on the page. The Google engineer gives the example of a search for [nebula pictures] which "instead of just three or four pictures at the top of the results" throws up "more than a dozen beautiful pictures filling up most of the page." So if you are looking for photos or pics, a top tip would be to simply write photos or pictures after your main search terms to find what you are looking for faster than ever before! 
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| Bjork set to release new album as 10 iPad apps Posted: 04 Jun 2011 05:22 AM PDT Bjork is set to release her new album Biophilia as a multimedia project, comprised of teb separate iPad apps. It's an intriguing move from the pixie-like Icelandic songstress, though there is still no confirmed release dates or pricing for Bjork's new songs/apps. An innovative app album Biophilia will be Björk's seventh album to date, with the title itself meaning "love of life or living systems" and a whole host of music and video production talent lined up to help out on the project, including feted director, Michel Gondry. Biophilia is set to be premiered as a multimedia live extravaganza at this year's Manchester International Festival (MIF), were she has a three-week residency throughout July. The album will be comprised of 10 separate apps under the umbrella of one 'mother app' – each app will allow the user to explore each tracks in different ways, or remix them in various playful ways. Bjork commissioned interactive artist Scott Snibbe to help create her new app. "Björk's put herself way at the forefront here by saying, 'We'll release this album and these apps at the same time and they're all part of the same story.' The app is an expression of the music, the story and the idea," Snibbe told The Guardian. Snibbe gives the example of one song, called Virus, which he describes as "a kind of a love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it." It sounds adequately bonkers, as we've come to expect from Iceland's leading pop star over the last 20 years. And we look forward to seeing Bjork unveil the whole thing at MIF next month. 
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| In Depth: Best Linux music player: 5 reviewed and rated Posted: 04 Jun 2011 05:00 AM PDT Most desktop distros include at least one music player, which many people won't even think about changing. But with Ubuntu 11.04 dropping its old Rhythmbox application and opting instead for Banshee, our curiosity was piqued: which are the best music players for Linux? We compiled an initial shortlist of three that we felt everyone should try: Rhythmbox, the default Gnome player; Amarok, the default KDE player; and Banshee, a player that has been around for a while and has now supplanted Rhythmbox on Ubuntu. To this we added Songbird, a music player built on the Mozilla codebase; and the doughty VLC, which has been playing media in various formats and on various operating systems since 1996. Direct comparisons between such diverse software may seem unfair - a bare-bones player such as VLC is competing for a different demographic than a bells-and-whistles app such as Amarok or Banshee - which is why we've broken the Roundup into categories. How we tested... As Amarok is heavily integrated with KDE, we tested it on that desktop and, for fairness, tested Rhythmbox and Banshee on Gnome. VLC and Songbird were used on both desktops. We're after a music player that looks good; offers playback in as many formats as possible; enables us to access internet radio stations, such as LastFM; and to buy music from online stores. We've borrowed an iPod to see how well they all work on that, and tested them with our 8GB Creative Zen MP3 player too. We're using a mix of MP3s and Oggs - some we've downloaded from Vinyl Plus and Amazon, some we've ripped ourselves. The disparate nature of our collection should test the applications' ability to recognise the albums, and possibly even shame us into sorting them all out one day. Ripping and formats You may think that, having bought a CD, you have the right to listen to it any way you want. Sadly, you don't: all you've done is licensed the music stored on the CD. The music companies want to impose restrictions, such as what devices you listen on, and how many people listen with you. They also want to stop you converting the music into different formats, and the formats themselves often have restrictions placed upon them. VLC, for example, gives users the ability to play DVDs that have been protected with the CSS encryption system, putting it in breach of the USA Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is why we can't put VLC on the LXFDVD. This means that if you have a problem with codecs, it's almost certainly an issue with your distro. Users attempting to play MP3s with Amarok will have more success if they use Linux Mint than if they use gNewSense. This makes it tricky for developers, and the answer that most projects have arrived at is to break file format support into separate plugins, which can be installed at the user's discretion within the laws of wherever they are. Banshee, Rhythmbox and Songbird all use the Gstreamer back-end, which uses a plugin system to support a huge variety of file formats. If you have problems playing a file, you probably don't have the right Gstreamer plugin installed. Collective excitation Amarok uses the Phonon back-end by default, which doesn't enable playback of DRM-restricted files. It almost didn't let us play MP3 files either. If you're trying to use Amarok on the Gnome desktop, you'll probably see an error message saying it can't play MP3s. This is a packaging problem, not a problem with Amarok, though it could be made clearer how to fix it (we used Google). MP3s play fine on KDE, as do Ogg, FLAC, AAC, WAV, WMA and WavPack. VLC is cross-platform and has been around for yonks, so you'd expect it to be able to handle everything. It couldn't be simpler to rip a CD in Banshee. Unlike with separate ripping utilities, such as Sound Juicer, the tracks are automatically added to your library. It's just as easy in Rhythmbox, but we've found this function unreliable: we recommend you use Sound Juicer to do your ripping. Amarok uses a dedicated tool to rip CDs. The function you want is Extract Digital Audio With K3b. Songbird doesn't seem to have a way of getting audio from your CD collection (though there is a plugin to add this functionality). VLC can do it, but the option is hidden away under Media > Convert/Save. Verdict Amarok - 4/5 Device support Whatever you think of Apple's locked-down, controlling business model, it does make some lovely, shiny hardware. We weren't expecting much success with our borrowed iPod Nano, but Banshee, Amarok and Rhythmbox confounded us, recognising the device perfectly, importing music into the apps and downloading cover artwork. Syncing with the iPod was easy too: you can do it with a right-click on the iPod's icon in Rhythmbox and Amarok, or from the configuration menu that appears when you highlight the device in the sources panel in Banshee. VLC simply opens a window displaying the iPod's entire contents (including calendar information, config files and the beep tone). It skipped any files it didn't recognise and started playing the first one it recognised, which happened to be an annoying disco tune. We wouldn't want that to happen every time we used the iPod. We also tested using an 8GB Creative Zen. This is pretty basic - we use it as a USB storage device, managing the files with the Nautilus file manager rather than a dedicated music playing app - but Rhythmbox and Banshee both performed just as well as they did with the iPod. Likewise in Amarok the device appeared in the source panel, with its contents displayed underneath just as it was in Banshee and Rhythmbox, although we did encounter problems with the version installed on the Gnome desktop. VLC, though, couldn't access the Creative device at all, despite recognising the iPod. Songbird did not work with either device - it's one for the web, not the real world. Verdict Amarok - 5/5 Interface How you want your media player to look will probably depend on how you use it. If you like to set up a playlist, then minimise it to the system tray and forget it's even there, you're less likely to appreciate graphical niceties than someone who wants to get the most out of each and every feature. At least, that was what we thought. In practice, a well-thought-out interface makes sense no matter how long you're in front of the machine - you could even argue that the 'play and forget' brigade need a better interface, because they'll spend less time learning to use the software and so need to be able to find the features they do use quickly. The applications on test here vary in their approaches, so there's bound to be something you get along with. Amarok - 2/5 The first time you open Amarok, it presents you with the screen to the right. There's loads of blank, grey space, yet the application's slogan, "Rediscover your music" has been truncated to "Rediscov…". Nothing seems to fit, and because there are so many icons crammed in, it's not clear where to start. When you've populated your music library and expanded the application window to a sensible size though, things make more sense. Amarok uses a fairly traditional three-panel view, showing (from left to right) the music source; information that changes depending on the song that's playing; and a playlist view. The price for Amarok's high degree of configurability is a generally messy appearance, and the notifications that pop up when the track changes are surprisingly ugly. Banshee - 5/5 By default, Banshee uses the largest panel to display your albums with their cover artwork. This isn't as space-efficient as a list view, but it does give us something like the thrill we felt after saving up for a record, stroking the album artwork on the bus on the way home, and imagining what our new purchase would sound like. The GTK interface is clear and intuitive. It's easy to work out what to do if you want to play a song, and the menus are clear enough that you can perform more advanced manoeuvres, such as setting up a playlist, connecting to internet radio or managing a large collection. Banshee's interface is configurable to an extent, though nowhere near as much as Amarok. Typically for a Gnome application, the configuration tools are hidden from view unless you ask for them - not like Amarok at all. Songbird - 4/5 Songbird is a funny one. It's a web browser based on the Mozilla codebase, so its look and feel are completely different from the traditional music player. The main panel shows your music collection, you choose the media source from the panel on the left, and the control buttons are along the top. So far, so ordinary, but the main panel is actually a cunningly-disguised browser window! Click on the Help menu in the toolbar and www.getsongbird.com opens up in a new tab. It's similar to what other apps do - they're all grabbing content from the internet to add to your music listening experience - it's just that Songbird displays it in its original web page. A range of skins (here renamed 'feathers') enables you to customise the appearance, though further configuration options are limited. VLC - 1/5 The powers that be in the VLC development team have chosen a traffic cone as the project's logo, which to us denotes something not finished, a work in progress. But maybe we've got the wrong end of the stick: maybe it's supposed to represent utilitarianism, for there's not a scrap of fat on the current VLC interface. We say 'current', but VLC has been in development since 1996 (that's about a million years in Free Software terms), and in all that time the developers have steadfastly ignored any graphical niceties. Toolkits may come and go, shaders, OpenGL effects and spinning cubes have passed them by. VLC doesn't give you much more than a standard file browser for navigating your music, with a basic window border. It works, but it's functional at best. Rhythmbox - 3/5 Rhythmbox is the default music player in Gnome, and as such looks like a typical Gnome application. This is good and bad: good, because it's clean, simple and easy to navigate. Bad, because it's just a little bit boring. The left-most panel displays your available music sources, while the artist, album and individual tracks are listed in the largest panel. The rich metadata that you get with Banshee, Amarok and Songbird is absent, and as a result Rhythmbox feels distinctly clutter-free. Cosmetically, it's like a much better-themed version of VLC, which is no bad thing if you just want to listen to music in the background - or maybe it's just that the developers don't think we should be staring at a screen looking at lyrics and band biographies when there are more interesting things to be doing with our time? Online music shops Back in the day, the only decent online music store was the expensive, DRM-encumbered iTunes. As you'd expect, things have got a lot better since then, and competition has brought us a number of ways to pay for music. Amarok and Rhythmbox both offer the Jamendo and Magnatune services, giving access to a huge range of work from little-heard artists. You won't find the Radio One playlist in here, but there is an awful lot to enjoy, and you can stream content for free, save music to your hard drive or make a voluntary donation. Unfortunately, when you click on the Jamendo icon in Rhythmbox it brought so much music into our collection that it crashed the app. VLC handles Jamendo much better, by breaking it into manageable categories. The best services come from Banshee (with Amazon) and Songbird (with 7digital). Both of these commercial music stores are seamlessly integrated into their respective apps, bringing the music and album artwork into your collection automatically. 7digital also has the honour of providing the back-end for the Ubuntu One music download service, and just shades Amazon in terms of usability for enabling you to listen to short snippets of your prospective purchases in the Songbird interface, rather than in a modified browser, like Amazon does with Banshee. Amazon offers more choice though, so honours are even here. Verdict Amarok - 3/5 Internet radio and podcasts We know there are podcasts and radio streams all over the place, but we want the app to help us find them. Nul points then to Amarok, which, under the Podcasts icon in the Sources panel, merely invites us to add the RSS or Atom feeds of our favourite podcasts. Rhythmbox isn't much better in this regard, but in Linux Mint it comes with the MintCast feed already added to give you a head start. Rhythmbox also scores win points by integrating well with LastFM. Once you've signed up to this service and given a few of your favourite artists, LastFM will stream related audio straight into Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox also has a far clearer way of listing streaming radio stations than either Banshee or Amarok. Banshee's LastFM implementation is poor, but it's great for podcasts. It's integrated with the great Miro website, which aggregates free sound and video recordings that you can add to your media library. VLC performs well here too, offering a selection of radio streams via Icecast. Its podcast support is no better than that of Amarok though. For an application built on a web browser, Songbird disappoints. The Shoutcast icon is there but there's no way to browse stations. Songbird enables you to rate the current track, 'love' it or block it from your LastFM stream but sadly we couldn't see an obvious way to actually play LastFM. Verdict Amarok - 3/5 Music management You don't really need much in the way of sorting options to manage a small collection like ours. Some 8GB of music might sound like a lot, but if you have any more than that there are bound to be albums that get lost in the nooks and crannies of your hard drive. When you take into consideration that one reason for digitising a music collection is convenience, it's clear that the ability to find your songs quickly is of paramount importance. Bringing up the rear on this front is VLC. If there is a way to organise a playlist, we missed it. Rhythmbox offers track number, title, genre, artist, album and song duration as filters to order the tracks in a playlist (you can add more from an option in Preferences), as well as a search box. This approach is intuitive, but limited. You get more control in the main music library view, where you can see the sources panel, plus windows showing genres and artists. This enables you to, for example, select 'Elvis' then 'Jazz' in the relevant windows to get a list of all the Jazz albums by America's answer to Tom Jones. Banshee is similar to Rhythmbox, but uses windows to let you search by artist and album, with the matching track shown below. The difference is minimal, but we prefer the Rhythmbox approach, because Banshee's cover art view makes it harder to search large numbers of albums. Songbird goes one better, with three panels to help you limit the number of tracks you're searching through. Smart playlists More impressive is that Banshee, Rhythmbox and Songbird have smart playlists, which automatically create playlists based on certain user-defined criteria. For example, they each have a Recently Played playlist. In Songbird this compiles all the audio tracks that you've listened to in the last week, but you can edit the inclusion criteria and change this to whatever you like. Without doubt the winner here is Amarok. It offers you the ability to search through your playlist by artist, album, year and track name, but also such arcane options as beats per minute, sample rate and when the track was last played. There are 22 filter options to help you find what you're looking for, and you can perform nested searches, making it easy to find (for example) all your top-rated tracks by Beethoven with a BPM of 127. We know it sounds daft, but you might be a DJ with a love of the classics. You can decide how much or how little information to display to help you find what you're looking for, and there's a search field that you can type into to find tracks. Verdict Amarok - 5/5 Plug-ins Firefox is so popular because of the huge numbers of plugins available for it. From weather applets to terrorist threat level indicators, there's bound to be a plugin out there that adds the functionality you want. And as Songbird and Firefox are cousins, it should come as no surprise that the Songbird website offers a heap (593 at present) of add-ons to make Songbird better (including an add-on for iPod support - we wonder how much 'missing' functionality is there in the form of a plugin?). Rhythmbox has 57 plugins, our favourite being Resume On Restart, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Banshee has 21, including a cover flow implementation that will surely make it into the main release once it's stable enough (it's still an alpha release at the time of writing). But it's not so much sheer numbers that we're looking for as the ease with which the end user can get them. In this case Amarok excels. A click on Tools > Script Manager > Get More Scripts gives access to loads of radio stations, lyrics apps, a Koran stream and even that emblem of pointlessness the mood bar. Our favourite must be the music quiz, which plays songs and asks you multiple-choice questions about your own collection. VLC has a similarly clickable addons mechanism, but without the descriptions, ratings and screenshots offered by the Amarok version. Verdict Amarok - 5/5 The verdict All the products we've looked at here have something to offer. Songbird, in particular, must get a mention as a fascinating project. It's no longer being officially supported on the Linux platform, but it's still a great piece of software that deserves some of your time to evaluate it. Then there's our other wildcard entrant, VLC. If we're ever faced with a file that just won't open, VLC is what we turn to. It runs on OS X and Windows too, downloads in seconds and uses minimal RAM, so if you ever have to use a borrowed machine, you needn't have to put up with the abysmal Windows Media Player hogging your resources. After that it gets tight at the top. Rhythmbox is winningly usable, but it suffers in comparison with Banshee, which feels just a bit more polished in just about every respect. Banshee is written in Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's C# language, so if you're concerned about the implied patent threat of using that, you're better off with Rhythmbox. The lupine factor The one application that we can't make our mind up about is Amarok. If you have a vast music collection that you need to manage in convoluted ways that mere mortals can't imagine, it's probably the right choice for you. Amarok can do everything that the other apps here can do, but it's blighted by a terrible interface that turns simple tasks into a maze of guesswork and trial and error. However, we're guessing that the only serious disadvantage that this offers is a steepening of the learning curve. Those with the patience will find it full of music processing power. That just leaves Banshee. The Boycott Novell brigade won't like it, but it's our favourite by a mile. Thanks to Gstreamer's unfree repository it can play all the naughty but convenient file formats, it works perfectly with Amazon, it looks good, and it's the easiest application to use. Banshee is also the one application that uses the brilliant Miro podcast guide, opening up a world of free online learning/gibberish about ponies. Ubuntu's switch from Rhythmbox to Banshee will bring it lots of new users, and deservedly so. 1st - Banshee - 5/5 2nd - Rhythmbox - 4/5 3rd - Amarok - 3/5 4th - Songbird - 3/5 
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| New 3D version of Tetris arriving in October Posted: 04 Jun 2011 04:54 AM PDT Nintendo's 3DS has got off to something of a slow start since it launched in the UK back in March, although the promise of a 3D version of the system-selling Tetris this coming September may well soon change this. Tetris, as most gamers are aware, was the game that sold the first iteration of Nintendo's Game Boy to a mass market of casual gamers way back in the early 1990s. For many gamers, casual and hardcore alike, it remains the definitive handheld gaming experience. Virtual Boy flop The first 3D version of Tetris was actually launched with Nintendo's Virtual Boy system in the mid 1990s. Marking one of the Japanese gaming giant's most spectacular hardware flops of the last twenty years. Tetris was previously released in 3D on the Virtual Boy as two versions V-Tetris and 3D Tetris, with the latter making use of a 3D playing field allowing players to turn the blocks both horizontally and vertically. Tetris for the Nintendo 3DS will be shown at E3 next week and will launch this coming October, according to a new announcement from The Tetris Company. Anybody for Tetris soup? The Tetris Holding Company, which owns the rights to license the brand, has also recently revealed that there are licensing plans in place for 12 different product categories set to arrive before Christmas - with plans to move the brand way beyond videogames with planned new Tetris-themed products set to include T-shirts, Halloween costumes, tabletop games, chocolates, candy, waffles, furniture and Tetris soup. Yes. You read that correctly. Soup. The Tetris Company claims that there has, to date, been up to 132 million paid mobile downloads of the game. It looks like Majesco is set to be the North American distributor of the new 3D version of Tetris, following their success with the Wii and DS versions of the title back in 2009, and Tetris Party Deluxe on Wii and DS in 2010. No word as yet on a British distributor. Expect queues to get hands on with the first demo of Tetris for 3DS which is set to be playable at Nintendo's booth at E3 2011 next week. 
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| Mac OS X 10.7 Lion features explained Posted: 04 Jun 2011 03:00 AM PDT When OS X 10.7 Lion was first announced back in October 2010, it received a lukewarm response. Apple lifted the lid on very few of its features, and what was shown was useful, but by no means essential. Since then, two things have happened. Apple demoed the OS X Lion to the media back in February, revealing far more of its secrets. Also in February, a preview version of Lion was released to developers, leading to inevitable information leaks on the internet. We now know much more about OS X Lion than we did when we first previewed it. So what will OS X 10.7 bring us, and are we sufficiently excited? Announcing Lion at the Autumn 2010 keynote, Steve Jobs said the new OS would bring features developed for iOS back to the Mac. "We started with Mac OS X, repurposed it for the iPhone and used it in the iPad as well," he explained. "Now we're bringing some of its ideas back to the Mac." And this philosophy runs through the heart of Lion. A new feature that's obviously inspired by iOS is Launchpad, an application launcher that works just like the iOS homescreen. When you open Launchpad, open windows fade away to be replaced by a grid of application icons, just like you see on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. You can rearrange their position by dragging icons to different locations, and group them in virtual folders. And as with iOS, multiple pages of apps can be navigated with a swipe gesture. Another feature making its way from iOS to Mac OS is fullscreen applications. With a single click, apps written to take advantage of this feature can fill the entire screen, with no borders or distractions. You can swipe between fullscreen applications and the desktop to use your apps that are not being viewed fullscreen. Naturally, iLife and OS X-native apps such as iCal, iPhoto, Preview and Mail will have a fullscreen option, and system-wide support allows third party developers to include the feature in their own applications. Mission Control combines Exposé, Spaces and Dashboard into a single feature, giving an overview of everything that's open on your Mac. Mission Control groups open windows according to the application in which they're running, making it much easier to find what you're looking for. As such, thumbnails of Spaces-style virtual desktops and fullscreen apps are shown across the top of the screen, along with the Dashboard. Auto-saving OS The way OS X saves your work has undergone a revision, with two new features added for Lion. Instead of pressing Command+S every couple of minutes, saving is automatic in OS X 10.7. It does more than simply save a backup copy as you go, like Microsoft Word and TextEdit do already. Instead, it saves the changes that have been made to a document instead of saving the file in its entirety, so it doesn't waste disk space. You can lock a document to prevent changes being auto-saved, and documents are automatically locked after two weeks. The Auto Save feature is only available in applications written to take advantage of it, so remember to manually save documents created in non-autosaving apps. The second new save feature, Versions, creates a history of a document as you work on it. A copy is automatically saved every hour and each time you open it (as well as manually whenever you wish). You can revert to a saved version of your document using a Time Machine-like interface, or simply open an older version and copy something you regret editing out, pasting it into the current document. If you've ever put off installing a software update as you didn't want the hassle of restarting your Mac while in the middle of something, you'll definitely welcome Lion's new Resume feature. When a Lion Mac restarts, it returns to exactly the same state it was in before it shut down. Running applications relaunch and open windows reopen. It's so comprehensive that if you highlighted text in an open document or app, it's highlighted again on restart. This will prove incredibly useful, and a major timesaver; no need to save your work, close everything down and then relaunch it all after boot-up. With Lion, it's all done automatically. Like fullscreen apps and Auto Save, Resume is only available in (to use Apple's term) "apps that have been developed to work with Lion". Third-party developers will no doubt welcome the opportunity to take advantage of these exciting system features, but it remains to be seen how fast software will absorb another level of OS integration. AirDrop is an exciting but limited transfer system that works over Wi-Fi. By clicking the AirDrop icon in your Finder sidebar, you're shown every nearby Mac that's also using AirDrop. If someone in your Address Book runs the Mac, the photo associated with the profile is also shown. To send someone a file or folder, you simply drag it onto his or her name. AirDrop is peer-to-peer, connecting via Wi-Fi regardless of whether the Macs are on the same network. Transferred files are saved to the recipient's Downloads folder, but only after being accepted; you can't copy something to someone else's Mac without their knowledge and permission. Unfortunately, AirDrop is only for Macs running Lion. You can't, for example, transfer a file from your Lion iMac to a colleague's Snow Leopard MacBook Pro, and you certainly can't AirDrop to a PC. The feature will be welcomed in the MacFormat office, where transferring files from Mac to Mac is commonplace, but if you're in a mixed Mac-PC environment or not all local Macs run the latest version of the operating system, you'll have to stick with Dropbox or USB flash drives. App revisions MISSION CONTROL: Lion's Mission Control should act like a central hub for your running tasks and applications Lion sees OS X's native applications revised. Address Book now resembles a physical book like the iPad version, with contacts listed on the left-hand page and individual contact details on the right. An icon disguised as a red bookmark ribbon is used to access your groups. The change hasn't been met with universal enthusiasm. The current version of Address Book offers a three-pane view, with groups, contacts and details readily available. Switching to two panels for no better reason than to preserve a visual metaphor might be considered a backwards step. An option to return to 'Classic Window' has been found in a debug menu; we hope it's available as a Preferences option for the final release. New Mail Another OS X app that's adopted the look and feel of its iOS counterpart is Mail. The new version, Mail 5, makes much better use of its window space, showing a list of messages in your inbox and a full-height preview of the selected message. Its new Conversation View lets you thread messages from the same conversation in a timeline, even if the email's subject is changed. This makes an email exchange as easy to follow as a forum or newsgroup thread. Mail 5 is compatible with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and incorporates a powerful new search feature. Also, instead of a single flag to indicate an important message, you now have several coloured flags to choose from. This could prove useful if you want to flag different messages for different reasons or levels of priority. QuickTime Player gains some features previously present in the paid-for Pro version of the application. You can copy and paste, insert a clip, crop, trim or rotate a video and resize your movie. Video sharing is built in, enabling you to export footage to MobileMe, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, iTunes and Mail. Screen recording is enhanced, allowing you to record a section of the screen simply by selecting it with your mouse. Signed for Preview has a very interesting new feature. Signature Capture digitises your pen-and-ink signature for use in documents and emails. You simply hold the paper version in front of your Mac's webcam and your signature is captured. iCal has picked up a few features from the iPad version, and also a Year view alongside Day, Week and Month. Its layout has been simplified, with a very clean and tidy user interface. iChat has also undergone a minor revision, with support for Yahoo! Messenger added. Safari improvements Finally, Safari benefits from Apple's new WebKit2 engine, making it faster and more stable. Codewise, each open tab stands alone like a separate app, so if a web page crashes, it doesn't take down the whole browser. Unsurprisingly, much use is made of system-wide Gestures. They're so widely used and well integrated into Lion, we wonder how comfortable the new OS will be without them. Will those who use a desktop Mac without a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad feel they're missing out? Developers with access to the Lion preview have complained that the vertical scrolling gesture on a trackpad has been reversed to match the iPad's. Previously, moving your fingers down on a trackpad scrolled the window downwards, matching the actions of a mouse's scroll wheel. Now it scrolls upwards, like on iOS devices where you interact with the window more directly. This could get very confusing. We hope it's optional in the final build. There are some notable changes in Finder, the Aqua interface and the system in general. With Lion you can resize a window with all four corners, not just the bottom-right. Lion's scroll bars are similar to those in iOS, appearing when needed and fading after use. Finder windows include a new sidebar option called All My Files. This gives you a handy overview of every file on your Mac, which you can then order according to date, kind, size, name and more. Interestingly, if you take a close look at the icon – a drawer full of documents – several of them show quotes from Steve Jobs. OS X's popular Quick Look feature has been expanded. Spotlight search results can be previewed, as can URLs sent to you in Mail or iChat. You can also Quick Look within Stacks. Unfortunately, there appear to be no tabbed Finder windows, a feature we hoped would be introduced in OS X 10.7. Get protected On a technical level, the FileVault security option now encrypts your entire hard drive, not just the Home folder. It encrypts as you work and decrypts on the fly using XTSAES 128 data encryption; we're promised it's totally unintrusive. A recovery partition containing utilities found on OS X install discs can be used to restart your Mac after a particularly bad crash without having to boot from the optical drive, and SSD TRIM support has been added to keep solid-state drives optimised. Perhaps most significantly, the server edition of Lion is incorporated into the client version. As Snow Leopard's Server Edition is sold separately for £417, this represents quite a saving for those who want to set up a Mac purely as a server. A few features have fallen by the wayside. The developer preview of OS X 10.7 has no Front Row, so if you want to use a media centre with Lion, you have to install a third-party application such as Plex or XMBC. Adobe Flash Player and Java Runtime are no longer installed by default but can be added manually, and the translation bridge Rosetta has gone entirely, with no option for it to be installed. Without it, applications written for the PowerPC architecture cannot run on Intel Macs. If you open the System Profiler found in Applications > Utilities, click on Applications and sort them according to Kind, you can see what (if any) PowerPC apps you have on your Mac. If you're planning to upgrade to Lion, they must be upgraded or abandoned. Like Snow Leopard, Lion is Intel-only. The developer preview demands an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or later, though the full system requirements have not yet been released, and are subject to change before the final version is with us. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is shaping up to be an excellent release. With powerful and practical new features and some welcome polish on existing ones, it seems set to radically change the way we use our Macs. We may not have been excited when it was first announced, but we certainly are now. 
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| Review Roundup: This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar Posted: 04 Jun 2011 01:00 AM PDT This week we've reviewed the fabulous new Android handset from HTC - the HTC Sensation. Featuring the first dual-core Snapdragon ARM-based processor, it comes with Android 2.3 and a new version of HTC's own software. We've also reviewed the latest Canon PowerShot SX230 HS compact as well as the Panasonic TX-P42GT30B 3D plasma among scores of other reviews. Read on for the full list. Ever since the first wave of Android phones washed up on these shores, HTC has been at the forefront of the fight against Apple and its iPhone. The first major assault came in the shape of the HTC Hero. Then came the HTC Desire. And here we now have the HTC Sensation. Sporting the latest version of Android and a revised version of HTC's own Sense UI overlay, it's a cutting edge phone with cutting edge software. The hardware's a bit good too – the 1.2GHz dual-core processor offering plenty of power for multitasking and multimedia performance. Is it better than the Samsung Galaxy S2 though? We're not convinced. This could well be the best set-top box in the entire universe. Offering most of the same features as its sister device (BWT800) but with a much more agreeable price tag, it's a powerful do-it-all living room performer to be proud of. Key features include dual Freeview HD tuners, 3D Blu-ray playback, Blu-ray recording from all sources (except Sky 3D), media streaming and IPTV. For a little over £500 it's a shining light of the AV world, then, and while the BWT800 will get the headlines (it's got more storage, Wi-Fi and an extra HDMI output) the £900 price will send people flocking to its little sister. Canon PowerShot SX230 HS review Canon has upped its game of late. With increasingly pressing competition from the likes of Panasonic, the performance-to-price ratio in the compact camera world is being stretched constantly. Unfortunately with global exchange rates the way they are currently, we're not getting the best prices but we're still getting a lot of bang for our buck. The SX230 is a super little compact which offers a 14.1MP sensor, 14x optical zoom, 1080p video recording and built in GPS for geotagging your snaps. It's an excellent performer all-round, but is ultimately let down somewhat by a weak battery life, inconsistent GPS results and an itchy flash that's a bit too keen to pop up. Panasonic's GT30 range of 3D plasmas represents its attack on the not-quite-premium but still-awesome-and-good-value market. Containing both dual Freeview HD and Freesat HD tuners, it's a brilliant 2D TV while also offering excellent 3D performance with both 3D Blu-ray and broadcast-3D inputs. Watch out though – the price is attractive, but this set doesn't come with any Active Shutter 3D specs. If you're running an Intel system and are looking to drop £280-ish on a GPU upgrade, this is probably the card for you. Offering stunning gaming frame rates and decent price-to-performance ratio, the GTX 570 is an office favourite. However, if you're running an AMD system, you'd be better off going for AMD graphics too. Other reviews AV accessories LG ST600 Smart TV Upgrader review Camcorders Compact cameras Digital TV recorders Graphics cards Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB review Headsets Mobile phones Routers TVs Hands ons Mobile computing ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
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