Bit Hacking

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

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 […]

Lion’s Whole-Disk Encryption

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

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, […]

Get Lion

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

Today Apple released OS X Lion, aka Mac OS X 10.7, the latest in the decade-long run of incredible updates to Mac OS X. I encourage everybody to upgrade to Lion. I’ve been running it for months in pre-release form, and even while the bugs were being ironed out, I found the experience of using it […]

The iPad Category

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

I, like most, have been perplexed by the persistent rumors that Apple is gearing up to release a third iPad this fall. For those of you who don’t follow the product lineup closely, the iPad 2 was released just earlier this year, so Apple releasing a successor to that product so soon after would be […]