I recently did my SSD upgrade on my 15" mid 2009 MBP. I used an OWC 120GB Mercury Electra 6G, before you go and tell me my laptop will only support 3G speeds (SATA rev 2) the price difference was justifiable, and since I went OWC the 3G SSDs were only 115GBs.

My biggest regret was not getting OWC’s data doubler, or optibay as other manufacturers would call it, at the same time. I’m still looking for local resellers but that doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so I will probably be ordering one online soon.

As far as the drive’s performance, the difference with the stock 5400rpm is like night and day. I get booted up and ready to go in 22s, that’s on Lion OS X (10.7.1) with a bunch of apps preloading during boot (safari, rockmelt, mail, ical, reeder, twitter, adium, twitter, Skype, istat menu, dropbox, read now, fantastical)…photoshop loads in 5s when i need to launch it. After this experience, I can no longer advice anyone to freely buy a new mac without first doing a RAM/SSD upgrade to see if their happy with the results.

Even older pre-unibody macbook pros can be upgraded into very useable and competitive machines with these upgrades. There are videos on you tube with pre-unibody machines booting up 2x the speed of icore machines after the SSD upgrade alone.

Some notes:

• I opted for a 120GB SSD because the 240GB drives are in my opinion still too overpriced at the moment. If I had the extra cash, I would have definitely gotten a 240GB drive, which I think should be enough for moderate users.
• After a few weeks of testing I would recommend the same 120GB drive for power users and a data doubler/optibay adapter to turn the optical drive bay into a 2nd HDD. Others have installed a 2nd SSD drive, personally I plan to go with just moving the stock 500GB 5400rpm drive back into the macbook pro. I have already reformatted and partitioned the drives (250GB each partition) to serve as my time machine back up and music/video/documents repository.

Why would I partition my extra (soon-to-be internal) drive to serve as both repository and Time Machine…

Honestly I don’t know if my logic is right, lol, but there are few things I considered.

1. Time machine on Mac laptops are storage hungry, in a mean way!

   • Time machine eats up free space on your drive. It does this to have a back up of your data when you do not have the time machine drive within the network. Over time this is space keeps getting bigger and bigger. On my newly formatted drive (after a week’s use) i’ve seen it take up as much as 10GB of storage. that’s just painful for a 120GB capacity drive. on a friend’s macbook pro i was able to confirm the storage spaced used by time machine to be as much as 40GBs.
2. Mac laptops on OS X Lion no longer the hibernate feature thanks to lion’s autosave/resume features.

   • The hibernate feature actually takes up additional space on the drive as well, equivalent to the max amount of RAM you have stored + a few more. in my case 9.5GB was allocated and named as the “sleep image” (8GB RAM installed)

   • TUAW has written up an informative article about this as well. read more about it here

After removing the 2 space hogging features (via terminal) on my drive, I figured the use of a portable time machine back up drive would hold more importance than having to wait to back up until I got home.

Since then, I have been lugging around the extra drive plugged in via seagate’s goflex usb cable, but this is not ideal for 2 reasons.

• 1st the drive being constantly plugged in pretty much makes 1 usb port unusable for anything else
• 2nd having to always be wary of an uncased/unprotected external drive is unneeded stress, lol. Oh and I already always carry a spare external firewire drive for mobile HD movie viewing, making this a less than ideal set up.

So the only solution I can think of is getting a data doubler from OWC and re-inserting the stock drive back into the MBP. This will of course mean an end to my internal CD/DVD ROM drive, which doesn’t actually bother me since I can’t even recall when the last time I needed it for something other than run the repair disk on the boot drive. Something I can freely do now via the USB recovery disk I created. Then again I can always purchase an extra external enclosure for the optical drive. Having it in my bag and not actually in the MBP seems to be a better option than having to constantly plug in an external drive that has far more uses than an often ignored optical drive.

After a 2 year wait the guys at Cupertino finally decided the wait was long enough and that it was time for the Mac OSX's newest incarnation to take center stage. Was the wait worth it? Well if a shitload of overly positive reviews aren't enough to make you go and get a copy yourself at this point you probably won't be upgrading anytime soon. In the end it's not a to-die-for experience, but definitely worth the 30USD they're asking for. This has been the 2nd 30 or so odd dollared asking price for a Mac OS, yet big brother MS (or is it small brother now?) insists on charging an arm and a leg for theirs. I will not spend time bashing an OS that I haven't had spent much time with but they should really start considering having more consumer friendly price points.

Here's a short list of + and -

+ launchpad makes it easy to get to what you want (no more fumbling through the applications folder in the dock thing)

- launchpad still seems detached from the overall experience (i honestly don't know what to suggest to get this remedied)

* I wish launchpad had the "light dots" to show if the apps are already open (like how the dock does this)

+ mission control has over taken exposé as the main window manager, and it's far more powerful for managing windows/apps

- some may miss exposé's neat window management presentation over mission control's space's integration

+ making the dashboard available via 3 finger swipe (far left) has given it its last hope for survival into the next OS

- don't know why the dashboard is still around

+ fullscreen apps are kinda cool 

- it'll be a few more days of waiting to get other used apps upgraded by developers for fullscreen goodness

+ new safari features for caching pages (back/forward) for faster load times is awesome 

- safari still sucks without an awesomebar/omnibar, or whatever they wanna call it when they do finally realize it's what people want

+ not too often praised, airdrop really "just works"

- airdrop could be improved with iOS support

+ spaces is gone, and mission control is a very big upgrade over what spaces used to offer

- spaces was much simpler to grasp and teach people how to use on thier own, mission control requires patience to teach

+ gestures are making the mouse feel old for common day-to-day task

- certain applications will never really be able to live without the mouse, so buying a mouse + trackpad (for desktop users) is needed for the full Lion exerience

 

Why firefox opted to use Bing as the default search engine I don't know. I don't read any of the developmental blogs on Firefox to know the answer to that. I know google search has taken some hits of late, but I still feel more comfortable with the google search results interface to want it as my default search engine on the address bar. One of the bigger changes in the last decade of browsing for me was the use of a single address bar up on top that also acts as the "search bar", nullifying the need for an additional "search field".

This change to Bing however and the use of a single address bar, makes changing the default keyword search not as user friendly as one might expect. So I did a little search and true enough there are several instructional manuals on how to change from Bing to Google. It's really not that difficult but why the Firefox team made it harder than it needed to be is another mystery altogether.

 

So I finally made the jump to jailbreaking my first generation iPad. It was a lot less painstaking than I had anticipated, with only a brief scare right after. So, what pushed me to do it. Well, several things really more than anything else it was the lack of mirroring capability that I really wanted to try out.

After a quick internal debate on my conscience i went ahead and prepped for the procedure, which turned out to be quite easy. I had already all the necessary files, thanks to an overly capricious nature of downloading stuff I have no idea if I actually have any immediate need for, LOL.

To my surprise there have been many vast and unbelievable improvements in the jail breaking scene since I last stepped foot on it. Cydia seemed much more streamlined and polished that it could easily be mistaken as a default application within iOS.

Years ago when jail breaking first became popular cracked apps was mostly the determining factor in pushing someone into jail breaking their device. This is no longer the case, in fact there are a host of very useful applications that are available on the Cydia store that I feel are "must haves" for every iOS owner.

Since the iPad is still relatively a new device some applications have yet to be maximized for the bigger real estate that the iPad offers. One of the things I hope sees an ipad upgrade is "Lockinfo" which makes it possible to show different kinds of information on the lock screen. There is even a plug-in that displays an HTC-esque appearance with the "sense" clock/weather icon. Pretty sweet except the tiny image itself looks out of place in such a big screen.

Another clear winner here is 3G unrestrictor and MyWi. Both have clear detrimental implications on the 3G carriers had they been available on the iOS App Store. The first app unlocks the restriction some apps impose for larger downloads (think no more than 20mb for App Store purchases over 3G). The second makes your iOS device a very handy mobile hotspot, being able to share the 3G interconnectivity with the rest of your gadgets is always a cool back up to have.

One final note of caution though is the availability of "cracked" applications. While not readily available one can easily hit up google to find sources on how to add the ability to install cracked applications. Free stuff is always nice but when you get it at the expense of someone's hard work then it might not lead to good things. Give the developers their due credit and buy the apps you use. I guess some justify installing cracked apps as a "test" but please remember, if you like the app and wish further development into it a few bucks thrown at the developers will go a long way.

For something they market as a way to grab new customers, RIM sure is taking it's time making it's proprietary messenger service to the world. It already feels close to the most robust mobile messaging service I've ever used sans video, so why not mass market the experience on computer desktops?

Instead we read rumors of RIM working on an iOS and Android port of the service. In my opinion this is definitely not the direction you want to go. Start with the desktop experience to draw more people into using it to communicate with Blackberry users. Use some proprietary login service that to sync the mobile phone with the desktop like they showed with the Blackberry playbook demo. If apple can grow with facetime limited to only apple ios and apple computers do the same with Blackberry Messenger. Have some pride RIM keep the experience to the faithful fans who've been sticking by you.
Sent from my mobile

I could have sworn there were times yesterday I was itching to write about something. This happened at least on 3 separate occasions yesterday, but I can't remember what it was I wanted to write about, LOL. Hopefully something will jar my memory back into writing mode, for now.

So what's new in cyberspace and the Mac universe...

• The Mac/iTunes App stores have added filtering options making finding apps easier and a less taxing experience.
• The Daily was launched in a less than entertaining media event
• The office (real world, not the TV show) in general seems to be doing better, it's the final stretch...and once we get through all this sacrifice will be worth it
• mmmm....what else...oh yeah I found this cool text map thingy.
  

I guess for now that's it. I am still on some strange writer's block, could just be needing some rest. Maybe I'll think up something to write about later on.

So "The Daily" has finally gone live in the app store. This new app from media magnate Rupert Murdoch, sure came in with a bang. Everyone was certainly all ears on the unveiling of this supposedly killer app that aims to show the true power of media on the iOS platform. So how does the app fare after real world testing?

There will surely be many countless reviews as to the impact this app on the iOS app universe. It is a viable replacement for real world print publication? Will it be the main way for news to be consumed on any iOS device? At this point it's hard to say for sure what the general public will do with the app, but it certainly is packaged and marketed very competitively. Throwing out all outrageous rumors about the app including the infamous 0.99 cents per day price tag, I'd have to say it looks pretty darn attractive.

I downloaded the app a few hours ago and had my fill of the content it had to offer. Certainly the promise of daily updates on everything under the sun is something to look forward to opening the app, along with the very marketable 0.99 cent weekly price tag. In my opinion this has all the makings of a runaway success story for the average user. But I would not go as far as to say it would supplant the dominant form of my news consumption on the iOS device (RSS).

Certainly the interactive and pretty presentation make an appealing argument which will probably be enough to woo the average news consumer on the IOS platform, and again with the 0.99 price tag per week (or .39.95 a year) I will probably be signing up yearly for the service myself, but it won't outshine the personalized news approach that RSS feeds can do for the seasoned news hungry consumer.

Got burning questions about your new shiny Mac? Head on over here and fire away.

Needing no actual application introduction here lemme share some thoughts from the jump to Skype 5.0 non beta from the previous beta build.

I actually made the jump into Skype 5 Beta a few months back and have slowly appreciated the new bolder unified look. Undoubtedly the initial Beta look was a screen hog and had too much space wasted in terms of visual design. This was even more painful in the chat screen window where it was just glaringly white all over the place. That was finally remedied by a few intrepid programers who figured out how to install custom themes for the chat window screen, called "styles". Since then I haven taken a liking toward a chat style called "Simple", I'd share the link where I got it but I can't remember. Nevertheless I was happy to see that after upgrading Skype, my chat style still stayed the same, that and there were drastic improvements to all that extra space the whole Mac community was clamoring about on beta. Over all the unified interface may take some time to adapt to but presents a better user experience in the long run, that's from personal experience.

Too bad they had removed the groups video calling on the free version (it was free for a short while when Skype was on Beta). However until Google Voice releases an official desktop application (I assume they have something in the works) Skype will be the king of voip communications. If you haven't already downloaded it for your Mac, get it here.

Note: This list is by no stretch of the imagination supposed to be perceived as a comprehensive review. It is meant to introduce you to some nifty apps that I feel would make working on your computers a better place. Included in this write ups are insights on how I regularly use the apps and how they have helped me work better and more efficiently.

Very interesting article about how Apple has become the one true spiritual successor of the dominant Sony of old. Nicely written, the historical references really have an impact making you understand Steve Jobs' philosophy in releasing "..the next big thing". There are many who wish the demise of Apple in the near future...just like Sony was the dominant force in the past, Apple may very well fall under the same pressure to go with the flow and forget the core philosophy that has made it so great.

Here's a small snippet from the article...

...in the Sixties, when color TV was going from 3% to 25% of the market, Sony was one of the few electronics companies that didn't sell a color model. "People were telling Ibuka, 'You have to come in to this market, everyone will take your market share,'" says Deutschman. "And Ibuka refused, saying, 'No, we will only do great products. We will only do high quality goods. We will only do breakthrough technology.'"

As a result, the company found itself in a precarious financial situation, losing out to its primary rivals -- until it came upon the aperture-grille technology that Sony unveiled in 1966 as the core of the Trinitron TV. A full 25% brighter than its rivals, Trinitron became the best-selling color TV for the next quarter century

This is of course one of a million "pro" Apple articles floating around the net. Take this as something to make you Apple owners feel good about that not so cost efficient purchase you just made on your new shiny Apple device. I enjoyed it a lot, and it did make me appreciate my Macbook Pro a little bit more than I already do. In the end, Apple products can't please everyone and honestly, I don't really care...it does a lot for me and nearly everything I need it to do it does better than expected. I'm happy with my purchase I hope you are too.