lion

One of the features of OS X Lion that was discussed early on in its development was the updated text-to-speech technology that not only brings much more natural-sounding voices, but also has options for dialect and accent support for various regions of the world. Since early in the Classic Mac OS, Apple has supported text-to-speech technology, with very basic and robotic output that has improved over the years, but with Lion the technology takes a relatively major leap forward.

The system ships with some default voices, including the long-standing novelty ones such as laughing, whispering, bells, and alien voices, but … Read more

Adobe has issued a correction on information it published earlier this week about its Flash Player having issues in the latest version of Apple's Mac OS, which went on sale this past Wednesday.

In a post on the company's Air and Adobe Flash Player team blog, picked up by Macrumors, product manager Rob Christensen writes that Flash Player 10.3 works just fine on the new OS, and that the company's previously mentioned problems were based on tests with older versions of Lion.

"The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same … Read more

The Screen Saver options in OS X Lion are no different from those offered in Snow Leopard, and like Snow Leopard are available to configure in the Desktop & Screen Saver system preferences. As a result, you should expect the screensavers to behave as they did in Snow Leopard; however, a few people are noticing after upgrading to Lion that their screensavers seem to be randomly activating.

If this problem is happening to you, first try adjusting some of your Screen Saver settings by either changing the screensaver, adjusting its activation time, or setting various hot corners that you may … Read more

The FBI escalated its war on hackers, serving dozens of warrants across the U.S. and making more than a dozen arrests.

Sixteen people were arrested in the United States in connection with hacking attacks by the Anonymous group of online activists, as well as one person in the U.K. and four people in the Netherlands, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The arrests of the defendants, who range in age from 20 to 42, followed the execution of more than 35 search warrants throughout the country by the FBI as part of its investigation into hacking attacks … Read more

In OS X, user accounts are structured so that most user settings and resources that applications need are located in the Library folder. As a result, when troubleshooting various problems with settings and applications you may be able to fix the problem by changing something in this folder. In versions of OS X prior to OS X 10.7 the Library folder was readily accessible in the user's Home directory, but upon upgrading to Lion people are finding the Library folder appears to be missing.

The Library folder is in fact just hidden from view by default in Lion, … Read more

Despite more than 250 new features, we aren't aware of any fundamental changes in Apple's new OS X Lion operating system that would affect performance after upgrading. It still offers 64-bit processing, and with Apple's tight control over Mac hardware components, there's no reason to anticipate a learning curve like Microsoft's partners had to deal with when Vista upended the Windows driver model.

Still, the version of iTunes that ships with Lion supports 64-bit processing for the first time. We also wonder about any performance impact from Lion's new auto-versioning feature. There's also the question of how well third-party programs will make the transition in these early days, since they might still be awaiting optimization.

With the 3.1GHz 27-inch iMac on hand from our review this past spring, we took the opportunity to see if Lion introduced any major performance variations compared with our Snow Leopard results on the same system.… Read more

The new gesture controls in Apple's OS X Lion operating system update can take a little getting used to on a MacBook (such as the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs). The reverse "natural" scrolling, for example, has its fans and detractors, and we've previously shown you how to roll back that particular change.

Potentially more annoying is the change from the tap-to-drag trackpad gesture to a new three-finger-drag gesture. In fact, it's probably the single most annoying Lion feature we've found so far.

Traditionally, one could could do a double tap, then hold … Read more

This $999 configuration in Apple's updated Mac Mini line features a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7, 4GB of RAM, and a pair of 500GB, 7,200 rpm hard drives. It also uses the Server version of Apple's new OS X Lion software, making this system well-suited to anchoring a network for small work groups. You can also use the new Thunderbolt port to add fast external storage. Customization options for the Mac Mini Server include more system memory, and different hard drive configurations, including solid state drives.

Apple's Disk Utility program is a useful tool for managing hard drives and volumes; however, in Snow Leopard, Leopard, and other past versions of OS X, when you would run a drive verification routine it would only access the format structures of the volumes on a drive and check them. For instance, if you have a drive that is partitioned into two volumes, then if you select one of those volumes in Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk routine the program will check the volume's formatting in a routine similar to the following:

If on the other … Read more