Down the Mountain came a Lion

A couple of hours into using the new Apple operating system and I can already tell you a few things. The first impression you will have after the update is that nothing changed. Everything pretty much looks the same. You'd think you just spent $20 on nothing. And then you start noticing little things. Suddenly Mission Control and Launchpad, both functions I had previously removed from the Dock, are back again. When you try dragging them off, nothing happens. They're stuck. Thanks to Jason Snell of Macworld for letting me know that I should right-click on the items to remove them. 

I dictated a few email messages in Mail. Worked flawlessly, although every once in a while the computer waits for the Apple servers to return the written sentence back (the process of transcribing your words to typed text does not happen on your computer). 

So far no complaints yet about Notifications. I like seeing new email message notifications appear at the top right of my screen. ​I am a bit peeved that my everyday computer, a late 2010 MacBook Air, will not support Airplay Mirroring. My video production machine, a more recent MacBook Pro, does show the Airplay icon in the menu bar, but that one rarely moves from its spot these days.

I am including two videos of short reviews that appeared today as soon as Mountain Lion hit the App Store. These are, in turn, from Macworld and Cult of Mac. Enjoy.​

Sparrow

For Mac and iPhone users who have been looking for a great Mail alternative, check out Sparrow. This is an elegant, simple, straightforward email program that I have been using concurrently to Mail for a while now and love dearly. Version 1.3 for the iPhone now adds POP email support (originally it was IMAP only and at first was just a Gmail client but has evolved since) which, from that perspective, brings it to parity with the Mac version. The site's iPhone page has a cute "emulator" that shows you what happens when you apply specific clicks or swipes to the app. If you integrate it with your FaceBook account it will pick up your friend's profile pictures into your mail messages. Definitely worth the detour.

Email with Elegance

Every once in a while I get excited about a new piece of software. Email has always been very important to me so when Sparrow was announced I really got excited and I got my hands on it as soon as it was made available to the public.

Now a new piece of software popped up that has got me salivating. Once again it is an email client, but with a twist. Check out the video for Persona to get a feel for this little beauty. I am not sure how this would scale when you take into account the amount of business email I deal with on a daily basis, but I am willing to give it a whirl once the software is made available. For now I'll just follow them on Twitter until I can get my hands on the program and see for myself.

More on bird addiction

As I posted earlier, the Angry Birds addiction is still quite prominent out there in the mobile world (as well as on less mobile equipment ever since the introduction of Apple's App Store on the Mac with its own version of that famous franchise's game). So last week we heard of an interesting development: another famous iOS game, apparently the "Top Paid App Of All Times", Doodle Jump, will get a Hollywood tie-in. Universal have announced that the main character of their movie Hop will feature in Doodle Jump as a promotional download. 

Now the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, will release a version of the game set in Rio. Why Rio you ask ? 20th Century Fox will be releasing a movie by that name and some of the characters from that movie will appear in the game as well. Check out the trailer below for more on that.

This new trend of Hollywood-iOS tie ins is interesting. While for now it seems to center on "games to cartoons" connections, it would be interesting to see what other forms such tie-ins might take. Other than that, so long as we get new birds to fling at pigs, who are we to complain ?

Who still uses fax ?

Some institutions just can't get rid of the "fax" concept. Here we are, deep inside the internet era, where so much gets done almost instantaneously whether via email or the web, at a time when communication is purely digital and immediate, and yet banks and other organizations are demanding that you confirm things by actually dialing a phone line, stick some paper into some sort of scanner and listen to weird beeping sounds to confirm that your communication has gone through.

And yet, over the past few years we have seen the internet step into the world of fax as well. Personally I have been using the efax.com system for a long time and have been very satisfied. In essence the idea is that sending a fax should be as easy as sending an email message, and receiving it shouldn't require more than checking your email inbox. 

Recently however this innovative way of using the old-fashioned fax system has once again been rejuvenated. You guessed it: there's an app for that...as well. I had occasion to test the efax iPhone app yesterday. I took a picture of a document with my iPhone camera and proceeded to send it as a fax straight from my iPhone. I did not expect much. Great was my surprise when I realised that the fax came in as an extremely clear document, certainly not worse than had I sent it through a fax machine the old fashioned way.

So then once again we are in a position to take old technology, one that will clearly die off in the coming years only to be replaced by something way more exciting and new, and give it a new twist. Suddenly every person with a smartphone in his pocket becomes a walking fax machine, and one that, maybe surprisingly, works quite well.