Hey Media and Design People, as well as tech” geeks” everywhere,
Well, I was afraid of Mac OSX Lion. I heard if your application could run on a PowerPC, even if they were optimized for an Intel machine, they wouldn’t run under Lion. I thought I’d wait longer, but I bought this cool thing called a Leap Motion device, which is kind of like a Xbox Kinect for the Mac. You can draw in the air and other cool stuff like in Majority Report and other Sci-fi movies.
Anyway, when I got this weird thing, I saw that to use it I have to move up to Mac OSX Lion. Almost returned it due to the upgrade hassle just to have it. Now I have an older Mac, the first Intel Power Mac tower, so after Lion, that’s as high as my machine supports. I was worried, “What if I lose an important piece of software from the upgrade” and “How do I even install it when it can’t be bought off the App Store any longer?” Well, I decided it give it a try and figure it out.
I used the wonderful Carbon Copy Cloner to create a Firewire boot drive of Snow Leopard, I called Apple, who said I had to buy over the phone, then they approve the download through a link on the App Store and it takes a few days. When I asked why, they said they didn’t know, but you had to do it that way. Okay Apple. Now it’s getting to be a bit of a hassle, but okay, I got this far, might as well wrap it up. I find out I need to make a Lion install disk or I will never be able to reinstall it again, so I find an application that makes a Mac OSX Lion install drive on a 8GB USB thumb drive, but it takes forever! I get that done, I get my codes a few days later, I download Lion and start the install! After it completes, I reboot and I am in MAC OSX Lion!
I see what the fallout is from the change. Lion puts the incompatible software in a folder by that name, but not all of it. Crap! One thing won’t run anymore, Microsoft Office! No big deal, right, I have my own business, am a teacher and an MBA student, so I only use it for…EVERYTHING! I sure can’t afford an upgrade right now, so install or alternative? I resort to the kindness of starngers on the Internet! Although I tell my kids to stay away from strangers on the web, in this case, I just downlaod Apache Open Office, thanks guys and gals at Apache, donate money to them. Anyway, for now that’s an okay solution. There are good sides to the Mac OSX Lion upgrade.
Mac OS X Lion offers true 64 bit processing, this can make a difference, especially if you are using the newest CS 6 and CC from Adobe. I know the only real difference over Mac OSX Snow Leopard and Lion is supposed to be limited to applications being able to access more than 2GB of memory, but the newest applications sure seem faster under Lion. The new Photoshop CC 64, after initial setup, is really fast under Lion. I can see the difference, even without benchmarks, maybe it’s my imagination, but it sure seems faster. Applications like Maya and Poser, that need lots of RAM can now use more than 2GB under Lion since it’s 64 bit. That means less crashing and errors during big renders. I’ll update you all on my progress and high and low points. Please share with me what you’re experiencing too.
More artists and cool stuff than you can smack with an enchanted hammer!
See ya!
Mike
Here’s the link back to my main web site for Casey Design: