Alsoft has released Diskwarrior 5

After a very long wait, Alsoft has released DiskWarrior 5. It has been a long time since anything but a point update, but that hasn’t kept DiskWarrior from remaining the single best utility for Mac OS X repairs around. And I am excited to see how good this next version is, especially now that it ships on a bootable USB Flash Drive, so it can start up faster and be updated more easily (the CD/DVD upgrade process always took a while).
Check out the new features, including 64 Bit for speed, the ability to update your Diskwarrior Recovery Flash to to the latest OS X, it can even run from OS X Recovery.
This is great news, as this has always been the best repair program! I do like TechTool’s emergency repair partition feature (on my machine I created it on a second hard drive and have Diskwarrior installed), but the USB will make this really use, especially to do repairs on my wife’s MacBook Air!

Video Copilot releases Element 3D V2

After a slight delay (they seemed to have some issues releasing yesterday) Video Copilot has released Element 3D V2 with shadows, 3D Noise and Deform, Bend and Twist, and a whole slew of new features for $199.95 with a $99.95 upgrade price.

Here is a video with more of the new features:

They also upgraded Pro Shaders to 2K graphics for $99.95, and upgraded Backlight with 8K HDRi Environment and Light Maps for $99.95. And Motion Design 2 High Tech and Industrial 3D Models also for $99.95 or you can buy the full Motion Design for $349.95 or $249.95 upgrade.

Element 3D is a fast and powerful 3D program for use within after effects and is really a must have plug in, so I am excited to see what the new features can do.

Apple OS X Yosemite Kills 3rd Party SSD Support!

This is huge news that is all over the internet, it seems that Apple with OS X Yosemite has removed support for third party SSD in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. If you are using it as a boot drive with TRIM enabled (which cleans up garbage on an SSD) it will not boot of of it. This is due to a security update called KEXT SIGNING. It is possible to disable KEXT SIGNING, but if you do it does it across the board and not just for TRIM and will leave your system insecure.

Now this doesn’t affect may except power users, and neither does it affect SSD’s from Other World Computing, which do not need TRIM to work correctly.

I wonder what this means for Hackintosh’s? Probably means turning off KEXT SIGNING.

I have always waned to upgrade my old MacPro to SSD to speed it up, but just couldn’t afford it. I was thinking a Sonnet Tech Temp SSD Pro Plus 6 Gb/s Host, and one 6 GB 480gb Mercury Extreme Pro 480 GB, but that would be around $700, but would leave room for a second SSD. It would be a pain to move everything from my personal drive to a second drive, but I think not only would the SSD speed things up, but it would be great to start with a fresh system again, as my system has some serious issues that a fresh install would likely fix.

Still not something that is going to happen any time soon.

BlackMagic Design releases Fusion for Windows for Free or $995 for Studio Version!

BlackMagic Design has done it again, and they have released their recently Purchased Fusion compositing program for free or $995 for the Studio Version with advanced 3D tools, OpenFX plug In support and unlimited distributed rendering.

Awesome news, and I would love to learn this. Going to give me a reason other than gaming to fire up BootCamp and boot into Windows 8 on my Mac, because since learning Shake back in the day I have loved Nodal compositing software. And the true 3D compositing and even 3D model rendering all in one will be pretty amazing.

PVC on wringing new life out of an old Mac Pro Tower

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition takes a look at extending the life of the old Mac Pro Tower.

I have been trying to do the same with mine. Have not yet been able to afford an SSD boot drive, or an NVIDIA K5000 (though I do have a PC GTX 670), and have added USB 3.

Would love to have an expansion chassis, but it almost begs the question of is it worth it to stay Mac. I would love to be able to get a MacBook Pro to keep me Mac and then build a huge PC tower with all the expansion and ports I will ever need. Thunderbolt is great, but it is expensive, and not as fast as PCI, and I would rather have all the internal storage I could have than have to get external storage.

FitBit will not be integrating with Apple HealthKit and it’s Health App

Well it seems that FitBit will not be integrating it’s Fitness data with the newly released Apple Health App via HealthKit.

You can see this very commented post at Fitbit’s Forums, where FitBit gives the following statment:

 Status: Reviewed By Moderator

We do not currently have plans to integrate with HealthKit.

It is an interesting new platform and we will watch as it matures, looking for opportunities to improve the Fitbit experience. At the moment, we’re working on other exciting projects that we think will be valuable to users. The question we want you to keep in mind when providing feedback is: What do you imagine a HealthKit integration would entail and what do you expect to get out of it?
Your voices are being heard. We’re actively reviewing your responses and providing feedback to our product development team.

Now they say they are listening and want to your feedback, but there are already 32 pages of feedback of people wanting this integration, and they do say they have no plans to integrate with HealthKit.

FitBit does have a $49.99 a year premium service called Benchmark to get better info on your fitness data, so they want to make money off of your data, but they already offer free integration with Microsoft’s Health Vault, which negates any argument about having to pay to access your data how you want to.

Health and HealthKit are one of the most exciting new features of the recently released iOS 8. It is a new central repository for your health data, that eventually will even be able to pass information to your doctor if something changes with your health. It is meant to not only work with the new Apple Watch, but with other fitness trackers and devices. And Apple even showed the FitBit app in their presentation, hoping that Fitbit would integrate.

Now I have been a FitBit user from the beginning, with an original, a One and a Force (which I returned because it was giving me a rash) and an Aria for weight, and got a FitBit for my mom as well. So I have been a very good customer. And I have even been saving my refund check for my Force to see what FitBit would be replacing it with, but this makes me think I would be better off putting that money into an Apple Watch.

I have been quite excited by the Apple Watch as it is a Fitness tracker and also a replacement for my Pebble Watch, but the one day battery life and lack of waterproofing has me quite nervous, but the Fitibt Force was not WaterProof and neither is the One.

So maybe it is time to start thinking about moving away from Fitbit. I could sell my One and my Aria and get an Apple Watch and either an iHealth Lite or iHealth Body Analysis Scale (iHealth already has HealthKit intergation from their 4 apps and 9 devices!).

FitBit really needs to get on the ball here or they are going to lose a lot of customers who don’t want to be stuck only within their ecosystem.