Last night as I was trying to fight the after effects of jet lag (thanks to my 28-hour door to door journey from Chicago to KL), I saw that Steve Jobs has indeed released Lion and it was available in it's new form which was a downloadable update via the App Store. I am for one, am glad that the update came in the form of the App Store and it was easily downloadable. All I needed to do was fire up my Unifi connection and then download the package.

Now this was a huge difference from my experience about two weeks back when my home PC decided to die on me after a good 6 years (yes, the motherboard failed on me) and I decided to rebuild a whole new PC. Together with that set up, I bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and the whole process of installing everything again took a good long day. What I didn't mention was that the guy at Compu-Zone was trying to figure out why the DVD writer driver couldn't be detected. After troubleshooting almost every component in the PC, the fault laid with the power supply.

What I am trying to point out is that, even with my old Macbook Pro 2008 model, the whole installation was fast and easy. It took me around 20-30 minutes to download Lion, and another 20 minutes to install it over my existing Snow Leopard installation. At the end of the day, I was very impressed and more so impressed by the price tag. USD$29,90 for the entire Operating System. I just paid like RM400 for my copy of Windows 7 and yet Apple has done it again with it's low price.

By the time the installation was completed, I managed to fiddle around with the new OS and the two most impressive thing that I enjoyed was Launchpad and Mission Control. Definitely a good way or sorting out my Apps, previously I would always curse trying to find out apps which I installed but totally forgotten about. Unfortunately for me as well, I can't utilize multi gestures due to the fact that my Macbook Pro was made in the dinosaur ages hence that is one thing I have yet to experience.

Perhaps a new Macbook Air might do the trick but as much as I would love one of those, I really can't justify the need for one.

 

 

 

 

Saw this bit of news on MacRumors, ever since the WWDC keynote event where Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and others were announced by good old Steve Jobs, one of the new features of iOS 5 did manage to catch my eye.

Image source - MacRumours

One of these new features within iOS is iMessage which is Apple's own messaging service for it's own devices. Built in to messages itself, what iOS 5 now will do is to check if the recipient of your message is using an iOS device and then sends it via iMessage instead of the usual SMS channel.

I guess this is Apple's official answer to RIM's Blackberry messenger, WhatsApp and other messaging service. I do hope that there are other features such as group chats and all but as much as I like this to work, we all still have friends who don't use iOS and rely on Blackberries and Android.

What it does allow us to do is to save a bit of cash instead of sending SMS out, and I really do like it's transparency feature where you only need to access messages instead of launching a separate app such as WhatsApp.

Can't wait for these new goodies to be available especially since I promised munz that I would get her an iPhone 5 and I definitely do need to upgrade my current MacbookPro. So far rumours have it is that the next model will sport a whole new casing design. Will probably wait for that. Also another feature which I am really looking forward to, is syncing iOS devices via Wi-fi.

Credit - MacRumors