What Machines will OS X Yosemite’s Handoff work on?

Macgasm has a chart, and it shows may users won’t be happy.

Handoff is the very cool new feature where with OS X Yosemite, you will be able to hand off things from iOS to your Mac, such as composing an e-mail or looking at a web page. And even answer phone calls from your cell phone via your mac and it’s microphones.

That’s a no for non 2013 MacPro’s. Hopefully a 3rd Party bluetooth 4.9 adapter will solve that (or some 3rd party software), as it shouldn’t matter if it is built in or via a 3rd party adapter. Or at least we can hope!

LaunchBar 6 has been released by Objective Development

Objective Development has updated their awesome all purpose launch for Mac OS X to version 6. This is an awesome program that allows you to launch applications or documents using keyboard shortcuts, but is smart and learns your shortcuts so you can quickly launch apps or do things on the computer with a few simple keystrokes. And you can do custom keyboard shortcuts for different thing, even launching an e-mail addressed to a specific person. It is $29 for a single user or $48 for a 5 user Family License.

The new version adds a new interface and themes, and is now extensible. You can do live searches of Google, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo or dict.cc. It adds information browsing to items by hitting shift and the right arrow.

Personally I have replaced the command-space spotlight search with Launchbar (moving spotlight to ctr-space), and can hit a few simple keys to launch apps. Such as command-space ap to launch adobe photoshop. or command space apr to launch adobe premiere. It is an amazingly fast and versatile app.

Honestly it has so many features that I don’t even know, but is worth it just for it’s launching features. It will speed up your computer usage so much. Honestly I miss it whenever I am on a clients computer as it really speeds everything up. This is the power user app that you should really check out.

Yes Final Cut Pro 7 runs in OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Yes I upgraded to Mavericks and ran Final Cut Pro 7 last night, and yes it runs and plays back. Haven’t done extensive testing, but it does seem to work. And it has to have been on purpose as even After Effects CC had an update to make it work right in Mavericks, but Final Cut Pro 7 without an update still seems to work.

OS X Issues, Quicktime died but I fixed it, but Finder is still slow

Been having some serious OS X issues of late.

First quicklook died in my finder. Couldn’t see any quicktime movies, and I realized also could not open then in Quicktime, quicktime was basically dead. I tried booting as Root and the issue persisted so I realized it was not my user file, and was something with my system. The problem also persisted in Safe Mode, so it had to be a system issue.

Since my last major issue was a major system fault, I currently have a spare 2 GB hard drive, so I installed OS X on it and moved my user over to it using migration assistant to see if the problem persisted. Twice when I did it the computer froze. It was on, but all USB devices were unpowered, and pulling them and plugging them back in didn’t help, and the monitor was black. So I re-installed OS X a second time, and then started it before migrating my old user, and turned off sleep and it migrated fine. And that system worked fine, quicktime was good and everything was there. Since everything had moved over OK, and I now had a backup (beyond my Time Machine), I decided to try re-installing OS X over the old one using my new 10.8.4 recovery partition, and after that OS X booted fine (well a few things are weird, like Sugar Sync, X-marks and it seems Java is now gone for CrashPlan).

After the install my computer boot much faster. I have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 for my graphics card, so it doesn’t show the mac startup screens until it goes gray and the desktop appears, and it was taking a good minute to boot, but now it boots in under 30 seconds, so that is great. And Quicktime now works fine, as does quicklook. No idea what happened to cause it, it just happened.

And I have already run Diskwarrior and TechTool as well as ClamXav, so I have no issues with drives or viruses. No idea what tanked my quicktime.

The one issue I have been having that persists is a slow finder. For the last 6 months or so my finder has been very slow and gets the beachball of slowness all the time. I mean all the time, and I have not been able to fix the issue, no matter what I do.

I have been trying to clean out my user to see if that is it, and have been using CleanMyMac 2, and manually cleaning as well. Nothing has helped the finder issue so far.

I even found this Apple Support forum thread, where they tell you to try this terminal command to see what is installed as finder extension. “kextstat -kl | awk ‘ !/apple/ { print $6 } ‘”

For results I get:

com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboard
com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboardUSB
 
For my Microsoft Ergo Keyboard
 
jp.plentycom.driver.SteerMouse
 
For my Trackball
 
com.razer.common.razerhid
 
For my Razer gaming keyboard
 
com.sonnettech.driver.SonnetSATA
 
for my Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P PCIe via which I run my SATA drives for editing
 
com.SafeNet.driver.Sentinel
 
How I run Lightwave 3D
 
com.makemkv.kext.daspi
 
For makemkv
 
com.AmbrosiaSW.AudioSupport
 
I am removing this WireTap Studio KEXT to see if that helps
 
com.nvidia.CUDA
 
For my Geforce GTX 670
 
If anyone has any ideas on how to speed my finder back up without having to re-install everything on a clean OS X install I would greatly appreciate any help!

MacWorld on why you should use OS X Spaces

A great article on why you should use OS X spaces. I love it personally, though I think you had more control with older versions. And it is especially great for laptops, but I use it to separate power apps on my macpro and couldn’t function without it at this point.

It is now part of Mission Control (though should be it’s own thing). It makes your mac have a virtually bigger space, as if you have a bigger desktop and are only seeing part of it and can set individual apps to different spaces.

MacMatrix Updates SideEffects to work with Mountain Lion

MacMatrix has updated SideEffects which combines SIMBL and and ColorfulSidebar to return colored icons to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The best part is having your custom drive icons back (as they really do help you hit them).

The only thing that did not work for me was the finder restart added to your Users startup items, and I had to use my own I made with Automator, but I am back to color icons.

SideBar
Don’t these look so much better, and I love my custom icons as well!

I am still have some SIMBL crashes though, but have been in contact with the creator to see if we can clear them up, as I love my color finder icons!