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Adobe is Really Good at Testing Its Software Products

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Wait, that’s not right:

We saw that there were some questions today related to Flash Player 11 support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7) related to hardware video acceleration. To avoid any more confusion, we wanted to clarify:

The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.

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Thirty Dollars

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Paul Miller nails it:

Upgrading to OS X Lion (10.7) costs $30. I don’t say that to comment on the “bang for buck” element. It’s more like a coded transmission from Apple: this OS is an experiment, a departure, a transition. When Apple priced Snow Leopard (10.6) at $30 it was because the OS had very few user-facing tweaks — most of the changes were under the hood. But this time it almost feels like Apple is apologizing for the abundance of experience-altering changes: “look, we know this is a lot to swallow, but at least it’s only $30!”

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Lion’s Linen

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I was digging around in the System Library folder in Lion this afternoon, and found the linen graphic Apple uses heavily in the new OS. It was inside the Dock.app bundle, if you’re curious. I’ve also copied it here, if you can get enough of the new texture. It actually make a pretty decent minimalistic wallpaper when tiled.

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Internet Recovery

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While the fact that Lion installs a recovery partition is fairly common knowledge at this point, a lack of physical media could leave users with a blank hard drive stranded without an OS. Thankfully, for some Mac users, there’s a solution

Apple:

If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online. Internet Recovery is built into every newly-released Mac starting with the Mac mini and MacBook Air.

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Thoughts on Review Writing

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Last week, I wrote a little bit about the complications that can arise when writing about software.

But there’s a whole other side to writing in-depth reviews, like the one I published on OS X Lion.

While I am proud of the almost 3,000 words in that review, it was utterly exhausting to spend so much time digging into beta software, trying to explain things I discovered in a way that would be helpful for my readers. Coming up with ways to describe Launchpad and Mission Control isn’t as easy as it may seem.

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