Mac OS X Lion includes an interesting ability to boot directly into the Safari web browser. Access to this feature is currently limited to those with Lion DP4 and the iCloud beta software installed, in addition to having the “Find My Mac” function enabled, but it is expected to be available to all users by the time Lion ships in July.

Safari-only mode is suggested to have several purposes:

• 1) As a security feature for anti-theft purposes, since a user without an account password can boot only into Safari, they won’t have access to your files, but getting online and using Safari will cause the Mac to broadcast it’s location thanks to the new “Find My Mac” utility.
• 2) As a recovery aid, since a user who is locked out of their Mac will still be able to perform essential tasks like checking their email, plus use Safari to do something like search Apple’s Discussion Boards for assistance, or make an appointment with the Genius bar.
• 3) As a sandboxed web kiosk, MacRumors suggests that Safari-only mode will offer “a nice sandboxed mode so Lion can easily act as a secure and anonymous web kiosk.”

If you want to access this feature in Lion now, you’ll need to install iCloud beta, and then from any user lock screen you will be see a “Restart in Safari” option appear. Without the latest Lion dev preview, iCloud, and Find My Mac enabled, the feature is not yet accessible.

This was discovered by a MacRumors user, which is also the source of the screen capture.

This is a fun Mac-centric video to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Maxon, the creators of Cinema 4D. The entire video was rendered in Cinema 4D and it shows a little ball bouncing around and causing a ruckus on the Mac OS X desktop, bouncing around windows, knocking over apps, it’s pretty creative.

Many owners of the oldest 32-bit Intel Macs were discouraged when they found that Mac OS X Lion’s system requirements demanded a 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor or newer. These users were discouraged, but not deterred, because some have managed to get the latest Lion developer build running on older Core Duo Macs… sort of.

First some background. In earlier developer previews, running OS X Lion on a Core Duo Mac was just a matter of deleting a plist file and then it would magically boot. Simple enough. That changed in later dev previews, and in Dev Preview 4 things get a bit trickier. Now onto the current state of affairs…

The Bad News
This isn’t really a usable solution yet, because Finder.app doesn’t run (it’s a 64 bit application, therefore won’t run on 32 bit hardware) and launchd consumes too many system resources.

The Good and/or Optimistic News
Lion DP4 is booting on these 32-bit Macs! This means that after the public release in July we will almost certainly see a modified Lion kernel and Finder that runs as expected on the oldest Intel Macs. This is much less of a stretch than some of the other crazy Mac OS X installations out there (remember all those Hackintosh machines running on Atom, Pentium 4’s, AMD CPU’s and other unsupported hardware?).

OK so enough blabbering, let’s go over the process that works right now to boot Lion on ye old Intel Macs.

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This awesome Mac setup comes from one of our readers, Rob Abraham. From the left to the right we have: 2GHz Dual-Core Hackintosh with 4GB RAM and 2TB of disk space hooked up to two displays, iPhone 4, MacBook Pro 13″ with 8GB RAM and a 500GB hybrid drive connected to the 24″ LCD to the right reading OSXDaily (woohoo!), and a MacBook Air 13″ with a 128GB SSD. Don’t miss the wireless keyboard, magic trackpad, or Starbucks iced coffee to keep the human side of things cruising along either.

But that’s not all, to the left of this Mac heavy desk there’s another Mac Pro connected to a 37″ TV and two additional 22″ monitors that display network status and latency from their datacenter (image below):

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Want to create a new Terminal window from a tab on the Mac? It can be done, but how it works may depend on what Mac OS system software version you are using and therefore what version of the Terminal app is in play.

In Mac OS X, the Terminal app reacts differently than Safari and other apps that use tabs. When you want to drag a tab into a new window in Safari or Firefox, you just drag it outside of the tab bar and it becomes a new window, it’s simple and intuitive. I agree, but Terminal app doesn’t behave like this on some versions of Mac OS X, you can drag your tabs all you want and they’ll slide around but won’t break away from the tab bar. But you can still make a new tab turn into a new window, here’s how.

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It may be possible for developers to create custom widgets to contain within the iOS 5 notification center, assuming Apple allows it. This was demonstrated by a very simple proof of concept that is shown above. 9to5mac quotes @chronic, the jailbreak developer, describing how this is accomplished:

all a developer needs to do is create a “custom view interface” and “compile it is a bulletinboard plugin.” Bulletinboard is Apple’s internal codename for the iOS 5 Notification Center.

Allowing third party developers to create widgets for the iOS 5 Notification Center would certainly be a nice addition. In the current iOS 5 beta, the only two widgets are weather and a stock ticker which you can see in the screen capture below, but there is certainly interest in having more.

What if you could have an RSS or Twitter feed in Notification Center? What if the world of Mac Dashboard widgets was transferable to iOS devices? I think many of them would be more useful and better suited in iOS than Mac OS X really, so let’s hope it happens.

One things for sure though, if Apple doesn’t allow third party widgets, you can bet the jailbreak scene will handle it. Considering a jailbreak for iOS 5b1 is already out, it might not be long before this happens. You can poke around in the source code of the sample widget on GitHub to get a look at how this works.

You can watch Notification Center in action and more in these videos of iOS 5 features.

All iOS devices come with a Unique Device Identifier number, known as a UDID. The UDID is kind of like a serial number for that device, except that it’s even longer at 40 characters. By far the most simple way to retrieve your iPhone, iPad, or iPod‘s identifier number is through iTunes itself.

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Redsn0w 0.9.8b1 was just released to jailbreak iOS 5 beta 1 on the following hardware: iPod touch 3G, iPod touch 4G, iPad 1, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 GSM, iPhone 4 CDMA. This jailbreak is tethered, meaning you will need to connect it to your computer on each reboot.

Important notes about this version of Redsn0w:

• Redsn0w 0.9.8b1 does not “hacktivate” iOS 5 beta 1, thus you are still required to have a registered UDID from Apple to use iOS 5 b1
• Unlockers and anyone with preserved unlockable baseband need to stay away from this and iOS 5 beta, you will lose your unlockable baseband if you update
• This version of redsn0w is intended for jailbreak developers only, the Dev Team reminds us that there are many broken components in the jailbroken iOS 5 beta so this is purely an experimental release intended for devs of Cydia apps to test compatibility on the new iOS – this is not for wide consumption

If you are comfortable with all of these limitations, proceed.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.8b1

This version of redsn0w is available for Mac and Windows users:

• Download now (Mac OS X)
• Download Now (Windows)

The iPhone Dev Team suggests this version of redsn0w will continue to work to jailbreak upcoming iOS 5 betas assuming you save your b1 IPSW and point it at that file when jailbreaking, so they recommend preserving your 5b1 IPSW files for future use.

If you’re brave and don’t mind losing some essential features of your phone, you can install iOS 5 beta on an iPhone without a dev account or UDID activation by utilizing a bug in Voice Over, but this is not a recommended method, and there is no word on compatibility with this version of redsn0w.

Another day, another nice wallpaper from Mac OS X Lion. This one comes from the background of the Mission Control app in the latest Lion Developer Preview 4, it’s not quite as flashy as the galaxy wallpaper but it’s a nice subtle grey shaded linen pattern and it’s a lot more subdued than some of the other Lion wallpapers.

Click for the full sized 2560×1440 image

Here’s what it looks like behind everything else in Mission Control, the Exposé & Spaces replacement:

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If you buy a Mac from now until the release date of Lion in July, you qualify for a free upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 directly from Apple. This is thanks to Apple’s Up-To-Date program, which gives users 30 days from the purchase of their new Mac to request the free update.

The free upgrade expands to Macs bought through Apple and their resellers, meaning you can take advantage of discounts offered through online stores like Amazon. The announcement was largely lost in the midst of other WWDC excitement, but was included in Apple’s press release regarding Lion:

The Mac OS X Lion Up-To-Date upgrade is available at no additional charge via the Mac App Store to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after June 6, 2011. Users must request their Up-To-Date upgrade within 30 days of purchase of their Mac computer. Customers who purchase a qualifying Mac between June 6, 2011 and the date when Lion is available in the Mac App Store will have 30 days from Lion’s official release date to make a request.

Technically the offer expands back to June 6, the official announcement. Outside of the Up-To-Date program, Lion costs $29.99 through the Mac App Store.

Apple also released a nice video intro to Lion that is worth a view.

Update: For those wondering, you will request the free Lion update directly from Apple. With past up-to-date promotions, you entered the Macs serial number into an online form to verify eligibility. This will almost certainly work the same, and you will most likely get a promo code to redeem through the Mac App Store.

We’ve received a fair share of comments and emails about Mac OS X Lion making some Macs seem sluggish, running hotter than usual, and causing the machines fans to run at full speed. This sounded concerning, but after I went about installing Lion DP4 myself and looked into this a bit further I’m here to report there’s nothing wrong, and here’s what’s going on.

Why is the Mac running hot? The explanation is simple: Spotlight. Yup, Spotlight and it’s worker modules mdworker and mds are at it again. When you update to Lion 11A480b, whether you are upgrading from 10.6 Snow Leopard or just from Lion DP3, your Spotlight index has to rebuild itself, and depending on the Lion installation volume, this can take a while.

After Spotlight is done indexing though, your Mac may still be blazing away and running slower than it should. This is also normal, and that’s because right after Spotlight is done indexing the drive, Mac OS X Lion will rebuild it’s system caches by running kextcache, and this is also CPU intensive activity:

You could get away with killing the Spotlight processes, but you definitely don’t want to do this with kextcache, and the Mac OS X Manual for kextcache tells us why – “Caution: Incorrect use of kextcache can render a volume incapable of startup.” Let kextcache run or you could screw up your fresh Lion installation.

It’s hard to give a time estimate for how long these two normal system functions should take, but on my MacBook Air there was a good 20 minutes of blazing fans and sluggish performance while the CPU was consistently pegged over 100%. The time for Spotlight to index may take even longer if you did a dual boot partition scheme because Lion will most likely try and index your Snow Leopard installation as well. You can always click on the Spotlight menu to get an ETA, but it’s not always accurate and it won’t include the kextcache process.

See, no big deal. Finally, you have to remember this is a developer preview and not a final release OS. It’s clear that the excitement for Lion has caused usage and installation by a wider community than developers alone – heck a handful of my non-dev friends alone shelled out the $99 to get developer access just so they could run Lion – but I think this is adding to some of the confusion about system performance. This is absolutely not a Lion system compatibility issue, it’s normal system behavior. Just let this stuff run and your Mac will be happy.

Even more reason to get excited for iOS 5: 1080p HD video playback looks to be coming to iPad 2, iPhone 4, and quite likely Apple TV 2. Technically at least, any iOS hardware that is physically capable of playing the 1920×1080 movies could be getting 1080p playback support in the Fall.

If you’re wondering why 1080p playback matters on small screens like the iPad 2 and iPhone 4, consider iOS 5’s AirPlay video mirroring feature. Although this is said to be an iPad 2 only option, this would create an HD capable wireless media center out of nearly all the iOS devices if the feature becomes widely adopted. You can see AirPlay video mirroring from an iPad 2 to an Apple TV2 on our list of videos of iOS 5 features.

The screenshot above shows 1080p playback on an iPad 2, and 9to5mac says “playback is very smooth and looks great“.

Yet another reason the public iOS 5 release date can’t come soon enough.

Update: We posted the games link under the assumption that all of the titles were abandonware or freeware, but some commenters are suggesting this may not be the case. We don’t have the resources to independently verify either claim, so we have pulled down the link. That said, you can play many of the definitely abandonware games online in your web browser at Virtual Apple IIgs. Our apologies for any confusion.

Ready to get your retro game on? Don’t miss this massive collection of over 165 classic retro PC games, they’re all free to download and they all run perfectly in Mac OS X in little self-contained DOSBox emulators.

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A new patent for what looks like a touch screen Mac has surfaced hot off the heals of the extended Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 demos at WWDC (PS: watch the keynote if you haven’t already, it’s a great walkthrough of both new OS’s).

This patent is a clear indicator that Apple is at least exploring the possibility of bringing touch screens to the Mac platform, or at least to a desktop OS that is more advanced than iOS. The discovery was made by PatentlyApple, who suggests that “with OS X Lion slowly adding iOS features, we may one day see such a system emerge” as fully touch capable touch screen Mac.

Diagrams from the approved patent clearly show a user interface and file system similar to that in Mac OS X that is being manipulated by touch:

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iOS 5 release includes a built-in Emoji keyboard that is accessible to anyone and is not region restricted. This is a change from past iOS releases where you would either need to jailbreak or install a 3rd party application in order to use Emoji from the iPhone, iPod touch, or iOS in general.

Emoji is a Japanese reference to emoticons, which are little picture characters that have become extremely popular as an enhancement to SMS and online communication. Outside of using emoji to convey messages, you can also use the emoji icons to create customized iOS folder names, like the camera icon alongside the folder name in this screenshot:

Heads up to @manda907 for discovering this.

Who better to show off Mac OS X Lion than Apple themselves? Don’t miss the Intro to Lion video, where Apple execs Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi show you Lion’s new gestures, full screen apps, Mission Control, LaunchPad, installing Lion through the Mac App Store, auto-save files & Versions, AirDrop Peer-to-Peer file sharing, new Mail app, and remind you that it’s just $29.99.

If you somehow missed it, Mac OS X Lion will be released in July, and a single purchase covers multiple installations on all of your authorized personal Macs, making that $30 an incredible deal. Make sure you meet the system requirements and get ready!

The annual Apple Design Award winners from WWDC 2011 have been announced. The awards go to apps and developers that “set the standard of excellence” and excel in design, innovation, and technical excellence.

This is the full list of winning apps and their respective developers, links go to the App Store:

Student Winners

• Grades 2 – Tapity
• Pennant – Vargatron
• Pulse News for iPhone – Alphonso Labs Inc

Mac Winners

• Capo – SuperMegaUltraGroovy
• Pixelmator – Pixelmator Team
• Anomaly Warzone Earth – 11 bit studios

iPhone Winners

• Cut the Rope – Chillingo Ltd
• Golfscape GPS Rangefinder – Shotzoom Software
• Infinity Blade – Chair Entertainment Group, LLC

iPad Winners

• Osmos for iPad – Hemisphere Games
• Our Choice – Push Pop Press, Inc.
• Djay – algoriddim

Lucky winners get a MacBook Air, iPad 2, iPod touch, a cube ADA 2011 trophy, plus a lot of attention and respect from Apple and developer communities.

Congratulations to them all!

Sometimes seeing is believing. I mentioned a fair share these iOS 5 features before but videos do some more justice than screenshots, so here’s a collection of eight great (see what I did there?) videos that show the best of iOS 5’s beta features.

We’ll start it off with Apple’s official Intro to iOS 5 video which is a nice 5 minute roundup of new features and what to expect come public release this fall. Following that up is a series of amateur videos showing off more specific features like Airplay’s wireless video mirroring, the PC free setup of first boot, Notification Center and how you can customize it, iOS 5 performance on older hardware, and more.

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