Making Lion look like... well System 7.5-ish

Great as Mac OSX is i do miss the old Finder and UI from pre-OSX Mac days. Of course it crashed a lot, didn't have very good multitasking and less toys than OSX but some charm and fun was lost when Apple transitioned. I miss the days of trying a funky extension (remember the one that rendered your desktop in ASCII characters?) and Resedit to do weird (and dangerous things) to your Mac.

Well we can't go back to those days on a modern Mac (though maybe i'll boot up one of my relics one of these days) but we can do a few things to make our uber-modern Macs more classic, more retro, only without da bomb. One thing i have done is use the excellent Displaperture.app to give my desktop rounded edges, as Steve insisted rounded rectangles are everywhere ok?

Another thing is to use a retro wallpaper. I used to like the green tartan wallpaper, luckily some other people had a yearning for the old wallpapers too and they are available to download. Now all i need is Chooser and i will be in retro-Mac hog heaven.

Getting down with the iCloud

Over the last few days, and after the downloading of many megabytes of operating system updates for my Macbook and iPad, i have started exploring Apple's new cloud based service, iCloud, which is intended to supplement your assorted Apple devices, the cloud becoming a kind of glue?

So the basic premise is this, your "stuff" is available on whatever you use, you don't have to worry about your files being on device A when you want to use device B and if you make changes on device B you can later view and edit them on device A, the cloud makes it all work without you noticing. Well that is the theory anyway, does it actually work?

So far i am pretty impressed, my bookmarks have been seamlessly synchronised between the Safari instances running on both devices, as is my iCal calendar, which i can also view online and edit the calendar there if need be. I installed Pages, Apple's word processor, on both devices though found that only the iPad version can save to the cloud. Yet anyway.

There is still work to be done, especially programs getting iCloud support, but hopefully this will happen over the next few months. The Mac version of Pages able to write to the cloud would be good, especially when i start writing essays again later in the year.

Micro Life (9) : Apple iMac

Working at a web design agency exposed me, for the first time, to Macintoshes. At first i thought they were rather aloof and strange with their big monitors and tendency to crash all the time but then i started to get used to the Apple way and found it was good. A friend showed me, on his 7200, how to stop thinking the Windows way and to think the Mac way with drag and drop and other amazing GUI thrills. I was hooked and it was time to buy my own Mac.

I did already have an old SE by then but i couldn't do much with that. The thing about Macs of course is that they are a bit more expensive than PCs and as i was probably only on about 14K at the time buying a new Mac, new monitor and all the other paraphernalia was a bit daunting. But then Apple introduced the iMac which was an all-in-one computer with monitor and networking already built in. So i bought one.

This was the original iMac of course, PowerPC equipped and running at a speedy 233Mhz. I think it ran Mac OS 8.1 out of the box though 8.5 came fairly quickly afterwards. For the next few years it gave me trouble free  computing, though was short of grunt for the move to OSX (i did experiment with OpenBSD at one stage) though did serve OK as a web server even if it took about an ice age to boot up.

I upgraded to a faster iMac in the early 2000s though i have kept this original iMac to the current day. It hasn't been turned on for a while though and is kept under my desk, so i end up accidentally kicking it several times a day.

The Micro-Life series will end at this point but to conclude this iMac was superseded by a 350Mhz dark blue iMac (which my ex-wife made off with), then i returned to the dark side for some reason and bought a Dell PC (which i still have) and finally a couple of years ago returned to the fold and bought my current Macbook. Over the last decade i have also bought or been given dozens of old Macs and other old computers, many i still have and you can see them here.

My current Macbook has a Dual Core processor running at 2.1GHz and 2GB of RAM, my first computer the ZX-80 has a Z80 processor running at 3.5MHz and 1KB of RAM. So there has been a bit of progress over the last 30 years.

Micro Life (8) : Tulip 486DX-100

Now we are in the PC age in my weekly recounting of my past computers there might be a sense this Micro Life series is getting a bit boring now? But stay with me as there is a twist soon. Last time i wrote about my lovely Unisys 386 that introduced me to the world of GUIs, 32 bit computing and even CD-ROMs! However by the time i had graduated i needed a more powerful computer and finally had a salary so could buy one. So i went down to Morgan Computers again.

I ended up with a 486 by Tulip Computers. Another nice solid box, though not my first choice actually. I first took home a no-brand PC box which had a faster specification however this lasted precisely 22 minutes before it conked out. I was offered another one but didn't like the rather flimsy system to be honest so got the Tulip instead. This had a 100MHz 486DX processor, i think the hard drive was 500MB and 8MB of RAM.

For the next couple of years it gave me trouble free computing. The monitor did blow up at one stage though so i bought a hernia-inducing 17" monitor instead. It was fine... but i was now working at a web design agency full of funky Mac boys. It was time to switch...

Micro Life (8b) : Macintosh SE

To be honest the story does get a bit complicated now, as i had money at last i was able to have more than one computer at a time. I'll just stick to my main computer in this series but i think the first "incidental" computer is worth a mention. I bought a Mac SE from Cash Converters for 50 quid, as you do! There wasn't a great deal i could do with this ancient Mac especially when i discovered there was a flaw with the floppy drive which meant, while it could read floppies it formatted itself, these floppies were unreadable in any other Mac. So my first Mac was an island... well until i got my hands on some more old Macs later on and installed a Localtalk bridge on a Mac IIci so i could access floppies on the SE over the network.

A load of old junk... or an 8-bit treasure trove?

Last night i finally got around to photographing as many of the old computers and calculators i have in my loft as i could. In the loft i have some old Apple computers (a couple of Apple 2s and some early Macintoshes), a few old PCs, old game consoles and a collection of 70s and early 80s calculators. In the early 2000s i went through a phase of collecting these old calculators, that was before it became fashionable and prices on Ebay soared by about 1000% of course.

Have a look at the photos in the slideshow below or check out the Flickr set. So an 8-bit retro computing treasure trove or a load of old junk that should have been chucked in a skip decades ago? Well you decide but i know my answer.

Lion talk

I upgraded the operating system on my Macbook to Lion yesterday (or 10.7 if you prefer numbers). It was fairly painless and cheap, being done all online, i just had a 3+ GB download to do first. There are apparently over 250 new features i can now play with.

Many of these new features i am not that interested in though such as Launchpad (Applications from the menu does the same thing already) but the overall look and feel of Lion is nice and it seems to run pretty swiftly too. I have yet to take advantage of some of the more interesting new features like Auto Save and revisions but hopefully my apps will catch up with the OS.

I think this will be an upgrade that will take some time to be fully appreciated but i'll let y'all know if i have any problems or otherwise.