This morning when I woke my MacBook Air from sleep I found a nice prompt asking me to upgrade from .Mac to MobileMe, being a good Apple fan I followed its instructions (well not really instructions, just a software update). The update included iTunes 7.7 as well as a MobileMe preference pane.

The MobileMe update added a new preferences pane to System Preferences, the new icon is titled MobileMe and replaces the .Mac icon. Most of the settings are identical inside of the preference pane except it cannot communicate with the MobileMe servers as of 8:40 eastern on the 10th of July 2008. The iDisk is still titled iDisk unless Apple updates it to a new name sometime soon and the same sync-able items are still listed under Sync (no new ones yet).

Check software update for your copy of MobileMe today.

Automator is a powerful application provided by Apple on every copy of Mac OS X. Although every Mac has Automator installed most users have never experimented with it, and that’s the goal of this article: to introduce you to Automator.

Automator is location in your Applications folder (/Applications/Automator.app), when Automator is opened you’ll get a workflow template chooser. Custom will start you off with a blank workflow, allowing you to add your own actions.

This is meant to be a simple article on Automator, and as such I’ll show the steps required to make a basic Automator workflow that will quit all of our open applications. (I use three primary Automator workflows, one to open my favorite applications (the ones I leave running), one to quit all applications, and finally one to put my Mac Pro to sleep.)

The workflow I’m showing you today will be based off of a Custom workflow. The screenshot below shows a empty workflow in Automator.

In the search box above the list of available actions type “quit” and Automator will show you a few actions, the one named Quit All Applications is the one we are interested in for this article. Drag the action Quit All Applications over to the blank workflow space on the right.

In the workflow pane you’ll notice a new action, the Quit All Applications action and that it has several options. 

Now we want to add some applications to the list for the action to skip over, that is, to not quit them. Click the Add… button and choose a few applications, I would suggest Safari if you are following along here. For my list I added Quicksilver and Safari, as example applications.

To get a little visual feedback, and assuming you have Growl installed, we are going to add an action named Show Growl Notification. Just as before, we are going to drag the item into the workflow pane to the right, position this notification under the existing Quit All Applications action. Give it a title and description.

You can test run your workflow by clicking the Run toolbar item in the top right corner of the Automator application (first make sure that you’ve added Safari to the Do not quit list). If you have Growl installed and added its action you’ll get a nice confirmation when its complete.

To save our workflow so we can open it at any time, choose Save As… from the File menu. Give it a name and choose Application for the File Format.

Once your workflow is saved, go to the folder you saved it to and launch your workflow. You’ll notice that by saving the workflow as an Application we can open it without having Automator open.

If you like the idea of having an application to quit all your open applications, you may want to edit the workflow to include Safari in the Quit All Applications action.

It’s easy to edit your Automator workflow, reopen Automator and choose the Open an Existing Workflow… option at startup. Choose your workflow from the list (the .app) and Automator will import all your actions. From now on when your editing a saved Automator application you don’t need to Save As…, simply saving the application is enough to update your workflow.

Automator and Quicksilver are a powerful combo, on my Mac Pro I used an add-on action called Sleep to quickly sleep the computer (I’ve found this easier than reaching for the power button or choosing it from the menu).

Apple also has a great getting started article on Automator, Mac 101: Automator.

It appears that Apple will be including Sun Microsystem’s ZFS file system in 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. For those of us who dislike HSF+ and all the issues that are associated with it, this informal announcement by Apple on the Snow Leopard site is a welcomed change. We can only hope this will be available in the regular, non-server version of Snow Leopard.

For those who want more information about ZFS and Snow Leopard, read ZDNet.com’s article on ZFS for Snow Leopard or check out Apple’s Snow Leopard Server site, which mentions it officially. Also, Wikipedia has a great article on ZFS.

Although this is being posted about a year before WWDC 2009 kicks off, what I discuss here is something for potential attendees to read. WWDC 2008 was the first time I attended WWDC and overall it went well for me, but I do have some “tips,” that I wish I knew before I attended. My tips are listed below, if you have any tips or questions of your own email me or post a comment below.

WWDC Registration - Register early for WWDC, get there a day early (Sunday), and grab your badge so you’re not having to wait in line on Keynote day (Monday).

The Keynote - Make sure you get in line early, at registration on Sunday, the Apple guy who was assisting me recommended I get there around 5:00am, I arrived at 6:10am, almost a full 4hours before the Keynote began at 10:00am. At the Keynote, get greedy: my friend Jason and I managed to grab seats in the tenth row (which were reserved for VIPs) because we went up to the front and the ushers pointed us to our tenth row seats. 

Lunch - I didn’t know that Apple supplied lunch until after the Keynote on Monday, everyday except for Friday Apple had lunch. The food was mostly sandwiches and salads, each day had a choice of three unique meals, which rotated daily. Tuesday through Friday Apple also supplied a breakfast with free juice and bagels.

Sessions - Most of the session rooms have power plugs, the only sessions I attended that did not have power plugs were in the Keynote room, if you’re attending more than two sessions in that room, make sure to conserve your laptop’s battery. It also helps to read the session description to see if the topic for the session is over your head or too novice.

Beer Bash - If you’re under twenty-one don’t plan on having any alcohol, Apple checked everyone’s ID, even people who were clearly over twenty-one. Wear something warm, a strong breeze in the park can chill the area quickly. Food at the beer bash is all free and at WWDC 2008 it was done to themes, like Italian and Asian; all mostly finger food.

Hotel - If you’re flying into San Francisco book at a Hotel close to Moscone West, I didn’t find out until after I arrived that WWDC was at Moscone West, I assumed Apple had all of Moscone Center (this matters because I stayed at the W Hotel, which was right across the street from the Beer Bash, but a block away from Moscone West). Each day WWDC starts early and ends late, other than sleeping there isn’t much time to spend at the Hotel.

Steve Jobs’ Keynote was THE event here at WWDC, the event that everyone wanted to attend. While many people I spoke with in line waiting to grab a seat at the keynote came to WWDC strictly to watch the keynote, many others are here primarily for the sessions and labs. See my posts: Waiting in Line @ WWDC, The line moved… A little, and On the way to the Keynote.

At the keynote Steve introduced iPhone 3G, MobileMe and Snow Leopard, all of which were in one way or another predicted beforehand. The iPhone 3G is slimmer, blacker/whiter (in 16Gb only), faster, cheaper and available July 11th. MobileMe is replacing .Mac as Apple’s syncing and online storage service, Apple also extended support to Windows computers and added push services. Snow Leopard, the next version of OS X (10.6) was also announced and should be available in about a year. See my posts: Snow Leopard is the next OSX, iPhone 2.0 Software, MobileMe, iPhone’s First Birthday, iPhone 3G and WWDC: Day Two + Snow Leopard.

 

OS X 411’s coverage of WWDC08 was superb and I wasn’t expecting to to go so smoothly. Since I’m attending WWDC as a student I was worried about even getting into the keynote, last year Apple denied access to students. Luckily, this year Apple allowed everyone into the Keynote and I was lucky enough to grab close seats. Just how close? Well, we were less than twenty rows from the front, my friend Jason guessed about ten (see the picture below for the pure awesomeness). We had the actual iPhone development team sitting in the row in front of us, I’m not sure we could have gotten any closer, VIPs were in the closest rows, Al Gore was one of them.

In addition to having great pictures I updated the site with new information within seconds of it being said and had photos up shortly after I updated the text. Although I did not cover the keynote word-for-word like other sites, I got my readers the information FAST. The person I was attending WWDC with checked sites like Engadget, and I had photos and news up before them on a few announcements (I guess there is something to be said for the “little guy”).

I just arrived in San Francisco, and the first thing I did was stop by Moscone to grab my badge for WWDC and check out what all Apple had done to the location.

   

Apple has two huge Apple logos on the building, which make it easy to spot. The inside is also covered with Apple stuff, mainly about the iPhone and OS X.

I’m scheduled to attend Apple’s 2008 WWDC, and providing I can grab a seat at the Keynote (Monday @ 10AM PST) I’ll update OS X 411 with live updates. Check the tag wwdc08live for up to the minute updates as well as the main page. I will also be posting all announcements to the blog as individual posts.

Counting the days until WWDC08? Download the OS X 411 branded countdown widget for Apple’s 2008 World Wide Developers Conference today. Above is a screenshot of the widget.

Download the OS X 411 Countdown Widget for WWDC08 now, its only 153.3KB.

Today Apple posted the session schedules for their 2008 World Wide Developers Conference, WWDC for short. 

See Apple’s WWDC08 Schedule here.

I plan on posting more about WWDC08 soon, what I can say is that I will be attending it as a student courtesy of Apple and their Student Scholarship program. See my personal blog for more on my attendance.

Owners of the 2006 Mac Pro have been waiting for Apple to release NVIDIA’s 8800GT for them to install in their Macs. The 8800GT shows significant performance increases on the 2008 Mac Pro over other video cards but this is not the case with the earlier Mac Pro. In fact, the 8800GT in Apple’s own Leopard operating system benchmarks below ATI’s X1900XT and the standard NVIDIA 7300GT in some tests.

Below I’ve created a table comparing the NVIDIA 7300GT (standard in the 2006 Mac Pro), the ATI X1900XT (an upgrade still available for 2006 Mac Pro owners) and the NVIDIA 8800GT for 2006 Mac Pro (just released with high expectations).

The higher the number, the faster the test result. All these tests were performed using the same 2007 Mac Pro (MacPro1,1) with results averaged from three consecutive tests, all tests were ran after restarting the computer. Computer specifications: 2007 Mac Pro with dual 2.66Ghz dual-core Xeon processors, 4Gb of RAM, two 10,000RPM SATA hard drives in RAID 0 on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 using Xbench 1.3.

Below is a chart comparing the information from the table above. Taller bars equal a faster result (taller = better).

Conclusion: Since Apple and NVIDIA have just released the 8800GT for the older Mac Pro it is safe to assume that Apple has not yet written drivers that fully utilize the 8800GT’s full potential. I expect to see a software update in a few days or weeks to address the performance issues in OS X. This is the problem with Vista and Apple’s 8800GT for 2006 Mac Pros under Bootcamp, Vista (x64) recognizes the 8800GT as a standard VGA video card and does not allow any 3D applications to run, Vista uses a standard video driver and NVIDIA’s driver utility don’t recognize the card either (but thats another post at a later time).

A graphic showing the chart, table and test information can be found here.