OS X Lion brings dramatically redesigned versions of the classic iCal and Address Book applications. Many people, or at least some important decision makers inside Apple, are very happy with these changes. Other folks, such as myself, believe they look and behave like crap. When I first saw the Lion version of iCal, my eyes […]

I’m pretty excited about most of the enhancements in OS X Lion, and in Safari 5.1, which was released along with it. But one of the most annoying changes in the version of Safari that ships with Lion is the removal of any keyboard shortcut for showing and hiding the active downloads list. Downloads used […]

Lion is the first operating system to require, and to fully take advantage of, 64-bit addressing modes in the Intel chips that power Apple’s Macintosh computers. One of the side-effects of this is that every object identifier in Mac OS X’s Cocoa programming framework (typically an address in memory), is now twice as long as […]

One of my favorite new features in Lion is a completely revamped “FileVault”, Apple’s brand-name for encryption techonologies that protect the data on your disk from eavesdroppers, should the disk be lost or stolen. In Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier, FileVault was a feature that only affected your home directory. In OS X Lion, […]