Just sign up to get your own free sticky notes board.

One of the most basic techniques of Agile is the use of a board with sticky notes on it to represent things that are to be done, in progress or have been completed.

I wanted something that could represent this Agile Board online, something free and simple, so I’ve created www.myagilityboard.com.

To get your own free sticky notes board online that even works on touch screen devices, just go and register and get going.

Update:  I’ve added the ability to change note colours and will soon be launching a feature that allows for you make your notes public to the world if you want.

So as of today, everyone at the University of Dundee has had their email switched from Groupwise to the brand new Office 365.  Well, if you’re like me, you want those brand new Emails and/or Calendar and/or Address Books being synced with your phone or computer.

The good news is, they’re using Microsoft Exchange Active Sync which means instant emails, calendar and contact syncing directly to your phone. There’s also IMAP if your phone or computer doesn’t want to do Exchange.

On Android
These settings should also work on iPhone but I haven’t had a chance to try them out on one yet so will update this blog post when I do :)

1. Go to Settings, Accounts & Sync, Add Account, Exchange ActiveSync, Manual Setup
2. Enter settings like so:

Email Address	apbarratt@dundee.ac.uk
Server Address	pod51014.outlook.com
Domain	dundee.ac.uk
Username	apbarratt@dundee.ac.uk
Password	This is the password you use for all things uni.
This server requires an encrypted SSL connection	Yes

3. Now you’ll be asked what you want to sync, I’ve chosen to sync my Mail, Contacts and Calendar though I’m sure many people will only want their mail.
4. You’ll also be asked how you want your mail to arrive. If you choose Push, your mail will be pushed onto your phone the moment it arrives on the server, this is the most convenient but may not be good for your phone’s battery life. You can also choose to have your phone check every 15 minutes or indeed, only check when you ask it to.
5. You’ll be asked for an account name, you can call it anything you want, I called mine “University.”

Windows (Outlook) and Apple Mac Mail
I know what you’re thinking, why would I group these two computers in the same place? Because, setting them up is identical!

1. On Windows, open “Control Panel”, on Mac, open “System Preferences”.
2. On Windows, choose “Mail”, on Mac, choose “Mail, Contacts and Calendars”.
3. On Windows, choose “Mail Accounts” then “New…” and click Next, on Mac, click the + button and choose “Microsoft Exchange.”
4. Guess what, Macs and Windows are equally clever, just type your email address and password, it’ll figure out the rest, YAY!

Everything Else (including Blackberry) – IMAP Settings
Many devices and programs do not support Microsoft Exchange, but don’t worry, you can still use IMAP settings, this is the same system that the old Groupwise system used except, because it’s run by microsoft, it should be more reliable.

So in what ever you’re setting up on, choose to create your new account and when prompted for the account type, choose imap, you could also choose POP but I do not recommend POP, I’ll explain why further down.

And that’s it, enjoy.

If your phone was slightly different, leave a comment below to let others know.

Why not POP???
I said further up to not to use POP, why not though? After all, most email addresses you get from companies like Tiscali will use POP. Well, POP is designed for getting your emails at home, on your computer. But once you download your emails, they are deleted from the server, meaning you can only get them on one device, once. So you download your emails on your phone, you can’t get them on your computer. Which ever device downloads the emails first, that’s the one those emails are on. That even means you couldn’t see them on the web mail website once you download them on something else.

IMAP and Exchange are a different matter, the emails stay on the server meaning no matter what device downloads them, other devices can look at them too, even on the website, see why that is better? If not, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can make it clearer :)

In 1998 Apple released what in my opinion, saved the Apple Computer market, they released the iMac.  This computer started a huge change in the computer market and introduced powerful but beautiful machines into our homes and created a fair few, brand new Apple fanboys… and girls.  What a shame they’re 11 years old now and really no use to us now… or are they?

I was 10 years old when the iMac was released and I was already a computer nerd so could appreciate a great many things about the iMac that were real game changers.  The first point was obvious.

A computer was always easily identified by two large beige boxes.  One of those boxes would be a large CRT monitor (as flat screen monitors were too expensive and under developed to be the norm) and one would be the actual computer which either sat under the monitor on the desk, or stood as a tower on the floor.  Even now, most desktop computers consist as this tower and monitor style though you’ll find it difficult to find one in beige, in fact, if I gave you a thousand pounds and sent you out into the city to buy a new model beige desktop PC, I’d let you keep the change and the PC if you found one.

The iMac contained the whole computer in one unit, in fact, at first glance most people assumed it to be just a monitor with speakers built in.  At closer inspection though, this monitor had a CD drive on the front of it and ports for the keyboard and mouse to plug into on the sides.  There was no tower.  And this thing was anything but beige.

This thing was anything but beige.

While Apple claimed that the i in iMac stood for Internet and also I as in the pronoun, the real meaning for this letter was not missed by the design community, the i in iMac stood for Jonathan Ive, the head designer at Apple who as it happens, is now Sir Jonathan Ive after being knighted as part of the Queen’s New Year Honours list and it was Ive’s design that really opened people’s eyes to Apple.

Having a whole machine in one unit wasn’t new to Apple, in fact, the first Apple Macintosh computer was an all in one.  What Ive did was to make the damn thing look good!  iMacs were colourful, rounded, even the mouse was circular, these things looked good.  This was a game changer but one of many.  That sexy looking body caught your attention, now look closer and take a look at what else is new.  I remember the total shock that people had when they realised there was no floppy disk drive.  Apple knew that these things were not going to be needed soon and so did what many were avoiding, they took it out of their computer.  Then they did something big, USB.  Every iMac came with two USB ports with an extra one on your keyboard and that was it, Apple had set the standard.  These computers were great, they didn’t take up as much room as a conventional computer and they didn’t need to be hidden away from your interior designer.

Now of course, we all have a good looking computer, whether you’re running PC or mac.  Hell, my desktop computer is golden, the front of it designed to resemble a classic Nokia mobile phone.  We all learnt a lesson in design with the iMac but it was a daring step, they did look pretty radical and perhaps, after several different versions, the current iMacs on the market aren’t quite as exciting to look at.  But then, times have changed haven’t they, 1998 was fourteen years ago and now it’s 2012.  Well I’ve still got my old iMac, and I don’t want to throw it out.

Bringing the iMac G3 back to life

New iMacs are a very different creature now, they have Intel processors in them just like Windows computers.  Those old original iMacs had PowerPC G3 processors.  These are a very different chip, they run differently, they’re built differently.  Today, you can install Windows on an Apple computer, back then, you couldn’t, the PowerPC chip just isn’t able to run it.  That isn’t because it wasn’t a good chip, it’s because it just runs in a different way than what Windows was made for.  But as things have moved on, now even Apple’s own software won’t run on it either.

The last three versions of Apple’s Mac OS X have been for Intel computers only, Apple turned its back on all those people who had bought computers from them in the past and told them, “if you want to keep up with us, you’ve got to buy a whole new computer.”

My iMac G3 was left with Mac OS X Tiger as it’s final upgrade, after that, it was left to rot, abandoned.  Apple kept making new operating systems: Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion… my iMac got nothing.  People made software for new Apple Operating Systems, Firefox, Microsoft Office… my iMac started gathering dust as I started using newer machines that could run software that it was too old for.

Firefox doesn't get made for old Mac OSX

And why should they make software for it?  There’s no good reason for a software company like Mozilla to bring out it’s brand new Firefox 9 for Mac OS X Tiger or earlier when everyone is using newer computers.  But I’ll tell you something, Firefox 9 can still run on my iMac G3, just as long as it’s running something better than Tiger, it’s just not made by Apple.

There are still modern, up to date operating systems being made that work just fine on the PowerPC architecture and if you’re feeling brave, you should take a look at them because through Linux, you can recycle that old computer that you had given up on and give it a new lease of life!

This weekend gone, I’ve given my iMac a copy of Ubuntu and I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not just running programs that Tiger couldn’t run, it’s running faster!

My iMac G3 Running Firefox 9 on Ubuntu 10.04

Installing Ubuntu on iMac G3

Installing Ubuntu Linux on these machine is actually pretty straight forward thanks to the Ubuntu Community who see to the release of PowerPC compatible Live CDs for it.  Though there are more up to date versions you can get (and feel free to try them), I chose to use version 10.04 which is the official Long Term Support version.  In other words, the only one that the folks who make Ubuntu feel is as bug free as it should be.

You can download yourself a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS at this here link that will work on your iMac’s Power PC G3 processor.

There is a bug!

Ubuntu won’t work straight off the disk with the iMac G3 as it can’t quite cope with the graphics on board, resulting in a blank screen.  It’s easy to fix though, just make sure that at the first prompt after booting your machine from the CD, you don’t just type “live” like it suggests, type “live video=ofonly” and then hit enter.

This will start Ubuntu in Low Graphics mode.  Once you’re in, double click to install Ubuntu on the hard drive.  Once you’re done, you’ll want to fix that graphics problem properly, it’s easy to do, just create a text file and copy the text found at this little linky into it.  Now save that file at /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot your machine.  Done, you can now get installing all your new software like Firefox 9.  Be warned, there’s a few things that won’t want to be installed on a PowerPC chip, like Chrome for instance but you’ll still get a lot more on there then you were able to before.  Happy recycling.

So this post is more for people at Dundee University.

One of the most irritating things about the email system at Dundee University, is setting it up on your own computer.  With a little enquiry you might find out that this can be done using IMAP and by just Google searching for “Dundee IMAP” you’ll find a page with settings on how to do this.

These settings are wrong!

The IMAP settings on the Dundee University website have been incorrect for the entirety of the three and a bit years that I have been here so to save you some pain, here are the correct ones to be able to receive but also send emails on any device (this includes your email enabled smartphone).

Dundee University IMAP Settings

Incoming

• Email Address: Your dundee email address, i.e. abexample@dundee.ac.uk
• Username and Password:  The username and password you use to log into groupwise normally.
  (this is often the same as what you log into uni computers with)
• IMAP Server: imap.dundee.ac.uk
• Security Type: SSL
• Server Port: 993
  (This is usually set automatically by your device)

Outgoing

• Username and Password: Same as above
• SMTP Server: smtp.dundee.ac.uk
• Security Type: TLS (yes, TLS, not SSL)
• Server Port: 25

This is what works for me, leave a comment below if it doesn’t for you or to tell us about your other Dundee University Email woes, of which I’m sure we all have many.

Chip Counter is a free app, now available in the Android Market Place, that lets you set the values of different coloured poker chips and then simply say how many of each one you have, giving you a quick and instant total of how much you have.

Update: Chip Counter now has a handy Poker Hand Ranking Screen for people who struggle to remember them all.

Just say how many of each chip you have and touch the "Calculate" button.

Recently I’ve started playing poker with my friends and every time we do this we get to the end and as you do, we start counting up our chips.  Problem is, we always made mistakes and would end up counting and recounting our chips, adding up the total in our head or digging out pieces of paper to keep track of our progress.

Ok so maybe we’re just not that fantastic at mental maths, I’m a computer scientist, not a mathematician, so I thought “surely there’s an app for that?”  I grabbed my phone and searched, there was not!  Or at least, not one that matched my search terms.

Now we have just been working on a project at uni which resulted in us deciding to make an Android app so I had literally just taught myself how to make Android apps and seeing as the idea of counting chips like this was really, ridiculously simple, I figured I’d just write it.  So here it is, Chip Counter for Android.

When you open it, you’ll see a selection of eleven different coloured chips, just put the value of the chips that you want to use (I only needed four of them) and hit save.  Now, when ever you open the app, you’ll see your selected chips, just type in how many of each chip you have and touch the “Calculate” button.

I hope you like it, I may make it look prettier later but for now, it does the trick.  (Update: have now made the buttons and title bar have a gradient and curved corners.)

Chip Counter now has a handy screen to show you different poker hands that can be reached through your menu button.

Getting in the Market Place

I’ve only very recently switched to Android and of course one thing I knew about the Android Market Place compared to the Apple App Store that I’ve been using for three years is that it is a lot easier for developers to get in.

The first and most obvious thing is that to become an Apple iOS developer, I have to pay $99… every year.  Android on the other hand is a $25 one off registration fee.

There is something that bothers me about Android though.  In the Apple App Store, I know that every app has been checked and approved by Apple.  This means that Apple believe it is safe for me to use it.  When I submitted my App to the market however, it was instantly available to download!

Now on some level, they don’t need to be as thorough as I have to place in my code exactly what permissions my app needs (in this case, none) and so there’s not as much risk, people know what they’re getting into, i.e. they know that an app will be looking at their contacts or that an app needs location data.  But that’s not stopping me from lying about everything else.  My app might not have been a chip counter, what if it had been filled with hardcore pornography?  (it is not).  It does make me take a second take though, I’m sure I’ll be more careful about what I do and don’t install on my phone in future, now that I know that anything can get in the market place without people looking at it.  Or perhaps I’m missing something obvious.

What do you think?  Should the Android Market screen all apps?  What if it raised the cost to developers?

I’m trying something new, last night I was bored and like so many at a loss for something to do, I ended up on Google, typing random words and clicking through the results.  I happened upon a game in which I clicked the link for results page numbered seven then tapped the down arrow key seven times then hit enter (seven is a favourite number of mine).  Soon my boredom became so chronic that I could no longer think of random words so, like so many at a loss for words, I ended up typing out QWERTY.  Upon playing my game of sevens, I became engrossed in a site, over a decade untouched, about the Dvorak keyboard layout.

Note: Before starting this post, I started a stopwatch.

My Macbook after a bit of surgery to convert it to Dvorak.

I remember my first day at secondary school.  I was just twelve years old (though my aspergers gave me a mental age of around 10 I think) and I hadn’t even left primary school yet.  It was an “induction day” in which we were given tours of the school and samples of different classes.  I of course remember the Information Technology class.  I couldn’t tell you what was said, needless to say, it was all very basic stuff that I already knew; what I remember is my fascination of the room.

The most computers I had seen in one room up until that point had been two… in my living room.  But here before me was a room with easily thirty computers in it and amazingly they were all, every single one of them, on the internet!  We didn’t have internet at home, Dad said that it was “too expensive,” it would be a few months yet that I would convince him otherwise and perform my first PC surgery to install a dial up modem.  But it was not the internet that caught my fancy that day, I knew that the internet was far, far too big for me to read through in a fifty minute class, I would need a whole day to do that, no, it was the posters on the wall that caught my attention.

It was really one specific poster, a picture of a computer keyboard.  Different columns of keys were colour coded and numbered between 2 and 5 with the space bar numbered 1.  I knew instantly what this meant from my books at home for learning piano.  This was the secret to touch typing.  This was very exciting to me as I so very wanted to be able to type without having to stare at my own fingers, then up to the screen then down again and so on.  It was tedious and knowing that others out there could type without this strain filled me with envy.

That night, I went home to my computer and started practising.  Very quickly I realised that the F and the J had little bumps to tell me where to place my index fingers on the middle row as a kind of starting point.  I later learnt that these bumped keys are known as the “home keys” and the middle row, the “home row.”  By the end of the summer holidays and before my real first day of secondary school had even arrived, I had taught my self to touch type.  The tedious IT classes using the horrid ‘Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor’ software were used mainly as a race than anything else to see how quickly I could escape them as by this point, these classes were not needed on me.  Few others in my class seemed even interested in learning to type and eleven years later, I still meet people who act like I’m some kind of magician when I turn my head to look at them and my fingers continue to tap away over the keys.

A quick test today using this site tells me that I can type at 62 words per minute.  Not lightening fast I’ll admit but I’m pleased with it.  But reading through the articles I found last night told me that this could be improved by using the Dvorak Keyboard layout.  Assuming I avoid switching between the two too much, it promised that I would be back to my normal typing speed within two to three weeks, if not, faster.  A major benefit boasted was that I would also be less likely to find my hands cramping up, an issue that plagues me on a regular basis.  I set about with my pen knife at hand, modifying my keyboard.

My Macbook halfway through Dvorak conversion.

This took about an hour to do and I’m sure anyone who has ever had to  replace just one of the keys on a laptop keyboard can guess why.

Now I’ve always found typing tutors to be more a hindrance than anything else so I’d chosen to use my original tactic of diving right in to touch typing.  After around five minutes, I discovered that this was not going to work.  I was wrong, when I started typing on Qwerty, I didn’t start just touch typing, no, I had to spend a long part of my early computer days hunting and jabbing at letters; only when I’d learnt where the letters were was I then able to start learning to type at any real speed.  So that’s how you find me now, my first day of Dvorak, back to my computer childhood, hunting for my letters and jabbing them with frustration when I finally find them.  I’ll keep you updated.

Time to type this post: 1 hour 31 minutes.

As many of you may know, as well as a computer scientist, I’m also a YouTuber.  Last summer I tried an experiment, I wanted to see if I could make a daily show during my time off from uni, of course, any daily show needs a topic and I didn’t much like the idea of doing a daily vlog again.

Well as it happened, channel four’s final series of Big Brother was about to begin and so, with a topic at hand, I had my show.  The Alternative Big Brother Show or ABBS as it became known on Twitter, was a minor success.  With most shows acquiring at least a few hundred to thousands of views in 24 hours and Channel 4 flying me down to appear on magazine show Big Brother’s Little Brother after winning a video competition which I can now reveal, they contacted me directly and told me to enter as they wanted me on the show!

One reason for its appeal was that my show gave a summary of the events in the house for that day at the end of the day.  The difference being that Channel Four’s own show, wouldn’t cover it until the next day.  So what you saw on TV was actually the round up of the day before.  Makes sense considering it would take time to edit it all together, something I discovered myself.  Another reason is probably the fact that I didn’t actually like Big Brother and so much of what I said in my show involved making fun of the house mates.  That said, even after calling on everybody to evict Sunshine Martyn from the house, Sunshine and I have remained in friendly contact through Twitter.

As it has turned out, this was not the UK’s final series of Big Brother as Channel Five has now gone and bought the rights to the series and the twelth series will air very soon indeed.

Return of Alternative Big Brother Show?

So I’ve received several messages recently, either through Twitter, FormSpring, Facebook and YouTube, asking me if I will be bringing back The Alternative Big Brother Show, even Sunshine herself has offered to co-host the series with me.  The answer I’m afraid is no.

As much as I loved making ABBS, it was probably the most exhausting thing I have done.  Each episode required a 24 hour live feed of The House in my living room which was watched as much as possible with notes being taken.  I would trawl Twitter and Big Brother sites looking for news.  Then, at midnight every day, I would write the script, film it, edit it, write the description for it, upload it and market it on Facebook and Twitter.  Each night I would get to bed at 03:00 and need to be up again in the morning to do it all over again.

So why can’t I do this again now in 2011?  I coped before after all and I did enjoy doing it.  Well the answer is rather dull I’m afraid.  I have a job, I’m now working on a Student Internship.  To top it off, the new Big Brother hasn’t started yet so if I were to cover it in my evenings, I’d likely still be covering it in my University time.

Anything else from Wormholer693?

The good news is, I’m not gone from YouTube, for those of you who have stuck around, you will have seen lots of new videos done in my free time and now, I’m pleased to announce a new web series from us at Wormholer693!

While not on the same scale as ABBS, Postcards From Eddy is a less regular animated web series which illustrates the postcards I receive from my Brother Eddy which are, to say the least, unusual.  The first episode has premièred on the Wormholer693 YouTube channel today.  I hope that, while not as fast paced as ABBS, you’ll appreciate the comedy in these as Eddy explains his turmoils with The Hordes of Consutramang, Seduction of Tribal girls and even, where sheep come from!

In the mean time, thank you for your support and I hope you enjoy Big Brother on channel five.

If you’ve ever had a video on YouTube start receiving thousands of views, you may receive an email from YouTube inviting you to monetize it by placing adverts on it.  Today I may have discovered a way to do this with any video!

Today I noticed a new My Videos page on YouTube, this finally gave me the option to view how many Likes and Dislikes a video had received.  Before this new page arrived, I would have to click a video’s link to view this information, thus adding a number to my own view count, something I’ve often been uncomfortable with doing.

However, I noticed something else, on the videos that I have already got adverts on, there was a link reading “Monetized.”  On clicking this link I received a page of information about my video monetization options.

I looked at the URL of the page I was on, it began with

http://www.youtube.com/video_claim_settings?video_id=

followed by the ID of the video I was on.  I wondered what would happen if I changed this ID with the ID of a video I did not have ads on.  It worked!

I filled in the form and clicked Save Changes.  Now I’m just left to wonder whether it will be accepted for monetization, there’s no reason it would be rejected normally but I’m looking forward to seeing if it will be rejected on the basis that I was not invited to do this.  I’ll update this article when I know.

Was it deliberate?

The question arises, was this page made deliberately available?  If so, is it the case that YouTube is now allowing everybody to monetize their videos?  Or was this a complete accident.  As of yet, the YouTube Blog has not stated anything but it is something I’m sure many will look out for.

If this is the case, could this mean we are approaching an end to YouTube Partners? A YouTube Partner is a person whom has been pre-approved for adverts on every video they make.

But would this be wise?  I must admit, I think the careful filtering of videos to make sure only the most popular have adverts on them is a good idea.  I certainly wouldn’t want every video on YouTube covered with ads.

Should YouTube open up Revenue Sharing to the wider public so that any person can apply?  If so, this would be much the same as Google’s policy on Adsense, allowing anybody to place Google adverts on their content online.

Lion, the latest operating sytem for mac from Apple.

Any one who has upgraded to Mac OS 10.7 Lion will will have had the new inverted scrolling (natural, as Apple call it) which I described in my last post.

However, while many may have found it irritating at first but chose to power through and get used to it, have got too used to it.  Now, other computers seem just wrong.

I hate it when it turns out Apple were right but it would seem that moving the page up and down rather than the scroll bar really is just, natural.

So here’s how you Linux folk can get Lion like scrolling working on your computer.  I’ve been using Ubuntu but I’m sure we’ll see it working on other distributions.

Right then, open up your terminal, let’s get going. You can click on any of these screen shots to see larger versions.

Your first command is:

xinput list

This will show you a list of devices, work out which one is your trackpad or mouse. From my screenshot, you can see that my Trackpad’s ID is 13.

Now that you know this, it’s time for your second command, incorporating the ID you have found out.

xinput test 13

Replace the 13 with whatever your device ID was.

Now scroll up a little and then scroll down a little, finally press Ctrl+C to end the test. From this you can see the mapping of your scroll function. In my screen shot you can see that my scrolling up as button 4 and scrolling down as button 5, obviously they’re not really buttons but you’re not supposed to think of that ;]

Work out what your scroll button numbers are, you’re going to need them.

Now for the actual change, the button mapping of your device will be set up as something like 1 2 3 4 5. In my case; 1, 2 and 3 are likely left, right and middle button; 4 and 5 we know for my case are the scroll, obviously they may be different for you, take note of these along with the device number you already know.

So of course all we’re needing to do is swap these round, here we go:

xinput set-button-map 13 1 2 3 5 4

Now pay attention to how that’s made up; we’ve got your device number in there (I’m 13 remember) and we’ve flipped round the numbers that we know are mapped to our scrolling, (5 and 4)… also, while I’m patronising you like this, don’t forget those spaces. Now go try it out, look, it’s working! Aren’t you clever.

You’re not done yet!

All you’ve done is make it work for now, the moment you restart your computer, it’s going to go away so let’s just make this thing permanent shall we?

Now you can set up an xorg option (Option zAxisMapping “5 4″) but I’m still in my patronising mood and thinking I should just give you the easy option so all we’re going to do is take that last command we typed in (xinput set-button-map 13 1 2 3 5 4) and make it run on startup.

So open up your System Settings and choose Startup Applications.

Now just click Add and type in the command along with a Name and description. You’re all done, you’re natural Lion like scrolling is all done. Congratulations, you may roar, raaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Lion, the latest operating sytem for mac from Apple.

Yesterday Apple launched Mac OSX 10.7 Lion.  OSX is the Operating System used on Apple computers much like Windows on most PCs.  I use three computers, a PC with Windows 7, a netbook with Ubuntu Linux and a Macbook with Windows 7 and Mac OSX.  So yesterday it came time to upgrade my Macbook.

Now most operating system upgrades require a large spend of money, Windows 7, for instance, costs from £99 ($150 in the US) to buy an upgrade disk however, Apple has made the price of the upgrade to Lion a tiny spend of £21 in the UK ($29 in the US).  This is the same as their last major upgrade, Snow Leopard though before hand, like Microsoft, Apple had always charged over a hundred pounds for the upgrade.

While some would say that this shows a much fairer company than Microsoft, let’s not forget that Microsoft is primarily, a software company while Apple, makes most of their money on their hardware.  You can’t install Mac OSX on any computer that isn’t an Apple computer (you can but you need to crack it and that’s not neccesarily legal).  And let’s also not forget how much profit margin Apple makes from their machines.  Devices of higher spec than Apple can be bought a lot cheaper in terms of both computers, music players and smart phones.

It also shows that Apple are once again, not allowing small businesses to make a decent profit from their products, compared to Microsoft who allow anyone to sell computers using their software and make a fair profit in the process and even then, they donate some of their profits to charity.  But I’m not here to start a Mac vs PC debate, let’s talk Lion.

Lion has taken the final step in making sure no one other than Apple can profit from selling it by making the operating system a download only purchase.  You can’t buy a disk for this upgrade, you must open the App Store on your Mac and click to purchase.  For anyone who has been trying to avoid creating an iTunes account, I’m afraid you’re out of luck here, your App Store account is the same thing.  Once you’ve selected the purchase, your download will leap to the dock and you’ll have to wait for the 3.49GB to arrive on your hard drive.  I’m fortunate enough to have a 25Mb/s download speed so was only waiting for around 30 minutes but I expect others will find themselves leaving it overnight to download, I do not envy those on rural internet connections.  Once downloaded, the upgrade process is actually very easy and you’ll be done in around 30 minutes if your computer is much the same spec as mine, perhaps faster.

On your first load, I’m afraid that there’s no music, no fancy animation, nothing to make you feel smug about completing your upgrade.  You’re just thrown into using your computer but not without a quick intro to the big change that you’re going to have to get used to:

Inverse scrolling

Mac users have had a form of multi touch long before the multi touch trackpad appeared on the scene, we’ve been scrolling by moving two fingers up and down on the trackpad for some time, an extremely simple concept that has now been appearing on other computers as well.  Well this gestured scrolling has been turned upside down in Lion, literally.

Think about it, ordinarily when you scroll down, your page moves up.  On macs now, when you scroll down, the page moves down.  However, as mac users are so used to scrolling with touch, even on their desktop machines (using the magic mouse or magic trackpad), it made sense that pages should scroll in the same way they do on other touch devices, such as smartphones… ok I’ll say it, such as iPods, iPhones and iPads… iOS devices.

Now for many, this seems like a very strange thing to change but really it’s just a very simple change in the way you think.  Before, when you scrolled, you were pushing or pulling the scroll bar up or down.  Well now, you are simply pushing or pulling the actualy page up or down.  It took me a couple of hours to get used to but like everyone else I’ve heard talking about it, it became very natural to use and I was doing it instinctively.

Launch pad, bringing iOS to Mac

Launchpad

The scrolling is not the only new feature to simulate iOS, we now have launch pad.  By clicking an icon in the dock or using three fingers and a thumb to pinch on the trackpad, Lauchpad is opened.  This is very much the same as the homescreens on your iOS device, listing every Application in your Applications folder.  However, it does this without descrimination.  I had a screen filled with adobe uninstall applications which was a little frustrating to look at, though I could organise them into folders much like I can on my iPhone.

View all your running mac applications in one place.

Mission Control

Anyone else noticing the space age terms we’re using here?  I thought we had gone beyond all this but then perhaps this is some kind of recognition to the last space shuttle, Atlantis, which is due to make its final landing.

Mission Control seems to be replacing Exposé and spaces.  With this view, found by either clicking its icon in the dock or swiping up with three fingers, you can see all your running applications, the dash board and now, seemingly limitless desktop that can be spawned as you need them.  Just drag an application onto one of these desktops or to the far right to create a new one.  Even without Mission Control you can swipe between these desktops using three fingers left or right.

The Mac Mail app is just one that many users can use fullscreen.

Fullscreen Apps

Once again looking to mimick their iOS devices, Apple has launched a number of updates to their main programs including Mac Mail and iTunes allowing them to be used as Fullscreen apps.  The trick is to place one of these on a desktop of its own in Mission Control and leave it there as a full screen app.  This allows for a submersive and distraction free experience.

Easily roll back your corrupted files to a previous version.

Autosave and Version Control

I’ve lost track of how many of my friends complained of writing large research papers only to have the file become corrupt shortly before it was time for submission.  Now Lion provides built in version control that allows users to roll back a file if it should become corrupt or even if you just want to roll it back to a previous save.  This is nothing new, version control has been around for decades, long before GUI interfaces took over and it has been built into many linux operating systems for quite some time but now it’s available to Mac users without having to install third party software.

Is it all worth it?

For a simple twenty one quid, definitely.  Buy it and buy it now, there really is no reason to wait.  As I’ve mentioned, Apple has worked hard to make multi touch gestures an even bigger part of their system after they were first introduced in Snow Leopard.  One thing I highly recommend doing after installation is opening your System Preferences, clicking track pad and looking at all the little video demonstrations on these different gestures.  Once learnt, you’ll be using them every few minutes.

UPDATE

My friend and classmate, James Bennet, has written an article on Lion’s new security features, is it too little too late? http://james-bennet.com/?p=112