With some Hackintosh hints.

AirDrop is a new feature in OS Lion which allows easy ‘drag and drop’ transfer of files between Macs (not iPads or iPhones) separated no more than 20 feet or so. What it lacks in range it more than makes up for in ease of use.

The ability to network Macs has been there for years – use MobileMe, switch on Back to my Mac in SystemPreferences->MobileMe and Finder will display all other Macs on your network configured in a like manner. I use this often for transferring files but it’s not especially fast, owing to lousy American broadband speeds. A big file – like a movie – is stll best moved using SneakerNet. Put it on a USB flash drive and walk it over.

So AirDrop caught my attention and I duly tried it out between one of my Hacksters (the HP10 with the i3 CPU) and my MacBook Air after HP10′s creator, FU Steve, had worked his magic (more below). A 13mB G1 RAW picture file took 25 seconds to make it across and was placed in the ‘Downloads’ folder. Using traditional networking (which is not as range limited the way AirDrop is, requiring only a shared wifi connection) it went over in 40 seconds, so AirDrop is faster if your Macs are in range. The main appeal is how easy it is to use. You do not have to login to the other Mac or remember its username and passwords and you save a few seconds required for the traditional login to ‘take’.

If Airdrop is available on your Mac it will appear in Finder thus:

Here it is on the MacBook Air:

Here’s the HP10 Hackintosh asking if I want to send files to the MBA, having drag-and-dropped them onto the MBA’s icon (the HAL9000 from ’2001 A Space Odyssey’!) in HP10′s Finder:

The MBA meanwhile flashes a similar screen asking for approval of receipt.

It’s simple, intuitive and fast, and very handy for sending snaps around to anyone’s Mac within range. Unlike the networking alternative, there is no need for the recipient to be on your network. Very clever.

Use with a Hackintosh and with older Macs:

The Hackintosh fora are abuzz with AirDrop not working on various Hacksters. They do not, however, have access to ace Hackintosh builder FU Steve, who writes the remainder of this piece.

When Apple introuduced AirDrop it did owners of older (not much older) Macs a disservice. This handy tool will not work with Macs more than a couple of generations old. The reason is that the technology is very hardware specific, depending on the use of the latest Broadcom or Atheros wireless cards in the Macs if AirDrop is to work. These only exist in recent Macs, so it’s not just the Hackintosh community which is missing AirDrop.

While Thomas’s MacBookAir (late-2010) supports AirDrop, neither of his HackPros supports it. Nor does his MacMini (mid-2010). His HP1 uses an internal PCI-e TPLink 802-11n 2.4gHz wifi card with an older Atheros chip and the AtherosFix kext to make OS X recognize the card as an Airport one, and display it in the menu bar (fan display) in the usual way. The other machine, the brand new HP10 uses an aftermarket USB 802-11n 2.4gHz external wireless dongle and Ralink software to access broadband wirelessly. The wireless technology in both these machines is too old to support Airdrop.

So for the Hackintoshes there were two alternatives. One was to buy a used current Apple Airport mini-PCIe card and install it in the machines using a PCI-e to MiniPCI-e adapter card in an available PCI-e internal slot. The problem is that current Airport cards sell on eTheft/eBay for $100. Ridiculous.

The second approach was to figure out the model of the chip used in the current Airport card and buy the MiniPCI-e card with the orignal manufacturer’s imprint, thus avoiding the Apple premium. Sure enough, one that works is the Broadcom BCM94322MC Mini PCI-e Card 487330-001 which you can search out on the web or on eBay. Be very specific about getting exactly this card, right down to the numerical suffix in the previous sentence. $20 shipped. Many older Macs use the Broadcom BCM94321MC card (the designation is clearly visible on the card) which does not work – I know because I tested mine.

The older Broadcom BCM94321MC card – AirDrop will not work with this card installed.

The right Broadcom card for AirDrop use.

Mac users with older MacBooks, iMacs or MacBook Pros can open them up (check ifixit.com for instructions) and replace their Apple branded card with the above Broadcom model to get AirDrop working. Here are the Mac owners who are SOL:

Then buy the PCI-e to MiniPCI-e adapter from Amazon (or pay the same and wait one month for it to arrive from the Far East) – another $20:

MiniPCI-e to PCI-e adapter.

Attach the two outside antennae to the card using fine nose pliers to snap the catches on, then insert the card in the adapter. The center antenna is not used. The assembly is installed in the Hackintosh (or Mac Pro for that matter) in any available short slot, the provided antennae are screwed on from outside the computer’s case and you have plug-and-play AirDrop functionality for $40. No drivers or hacking required. As I wrote years ago here, a Mac is nothing more than an assembly of PC parts, invariably overpriced and under-designed.

A related advantage of this card is that it supports the 5gHz spectrum for wi-fi as well as 2.4gHz. In some environments the latter is interference prone (lots of cordless phones and baby monitors use 2.4gHz). Try both with your Airport Exreme router, checking speeds using Speedtest.net.

Here’s System Profiler in Thomas’s HP10 showing the card installed and working:

The Broadcom card installed in HP10.

Here’s the fan display showing use with the 5gHz spectrum – to get this display hold the Option key then click the fan in the Meu Bar:

The antennae on the rear of the PCI-e wifi adapter card protrude from the rear of the computer case and can be rotated in all directions. Don’t just wiggle them and hope for the best. Use the Wi-Fi Diagnostics tool included with Lion, which you can find in System->Library->Core Service->WiFi Diagnostics. While watching the signal and noise traces, adjust the antennae until the space between them is at its greatest – here’s a trace:

AirDrop on wired and older Intel iMacs:

For the older MacMini, the card is not easily changed as it integrates Bluetooth with broadband. However, this tip from MacOSXDaily works fine and has been successfully implemented on Thomas’s MacMini. It should work on any older Intel Mac whether wired or wireless, as long as the machines concerned are on the same network. It does not work on older PPC G3/4/5 iMacs – at least not on my old G4.

FU Steve comes through again. Thanks FU!

The DropCopy alternative:

If you have an early MBA (where the ‘wireless card’ is too integrated to permit replacement, or simply do not want to dismantle your Mac to replace the card, you can use DropCopy, the snag being that every Mac has to be running the app for file transfer to work. Still, what it lacks in elegance it gains in function on older machines. Why, DropCopy will even run on older G3/4/5 PPC Macs which Apple has now completely abandoned.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

A hype update, so far.

The real story of Lion.

While committed Mac OS X users have little choice but to update to Lion sooner or later and, at $30 it’s hardly a big deal economically, how much better is Lion than its rock stable predecessor, Snow Leopard?

I think there are two answers to this. For the casual user who grew up with iOS on the iPhone or iPad and who has a Mac laptop or is willing to spend another $80 on a trackpad for his desktop Mac, Lion probably works well. Many of the familiar iPad gestures are there, software is available by download only from the Mac store and eye candy in the guise of Mission Control and the like is there in abundance. Further, if you like the rendering of ‘Conversations’ in Apple iOS Mail, where it’s easy to scroll through a thread of exchanges, then you will also like this added feature in Lion.

But for longer time users Lion is nothing more or less than a pain in the you-know-what. You lose all your prized PPC applications, Apple having deleted the Rosetta emulator to force those with PPC iMacs to upgrade their hardware and software, making Lion the most expensive OS upgrade ever for these users. If your broadband is slow or bandwidth limited, forget about downloading the OS and many of the larger apps from the App Store. Life is too short and the telcos and cable companies too greedy. And if you use peripherals which require dedicated drivers, then you are going to be hunting around for these – or waiting for them to be released – before your hardware can be ‘un-bricked’. This happened to my external USB wireless dongle and my third display driven by a USB-to-DVI adapter. Mercifully, both vendors were really on the ball, and new drivers have been installed and functionality recovered. Also, thankfully, my Brother HL-2170W and HP DesignJet 90 printers continue to work every bit as well as they did with Snow Leopard.

Those suffering from confirmation bias – you paid for it so it must be good – will regale you with tales of how much faster Lion is than Snow leopard. Utter nonsense. Objective test measurements show it is 2-5% slower and your machine will run 5-7F hotter. Good luck if you are using one of Apple’s cooling-challenged iMacs where sleek design has made CPU and GPU cooling an afterthought. And if you choose to install your own SSD, search out TRIM Enhancer for garbage management because Apple has made sure that Lion’s built-in TRIM capabilities will be denied you, reserved for Apple-installed overpriced SSDs only. An indicator, if ever one was needed, of the growing ‘make a buck at any cost and squeeze your customer until the pips squeak’ mentality becoming increasingly pervasive at 1 Infinite Loop.

And those same long time OS X users will find they have to spend time reversing all the garish, dumbing down of Lion to make it look and feel like what was so well done by Snow Leopard. I address many of the more common issues here.

So what’s good? After one week of intense use with many applications I have had no lock-ups or glitches on any of my HackPro (Core2Quad 2.83gHz, 8gB RAM, Nvidia 9800GTX+ graphics, 2 SSDs, 2 HDDs), MacBook Air (11″ mid-2010 Core2Duo 1.4gHz, 2gB RAM model with integrated Intel 320M graphics. SSD) or Mac Mini (2010 model, Core2Duo, 5gB RAM Intel 320M, HDD). On my main work machine, the HackPro, hacking Lion for installation was the easiest yet, Hackintosh support having improved mightily in the past few years. Further, running a half-dozen big apps simultaneously is no big deal. This includes Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, iPhoto, Safari, Firefox, iBank, Word 2008, Excel 2008, Numbers, Pages, you name it. Just like Snow Leopard.

For that we should be truly grateful. Most of the other ‘enhancements’ are simply a waste of time – the time it will take a demanding user to reverse them. But if you do not want to be locked out of the Apple ecosystem and its upcoming iCloud, updating to Lion becomes a requirement.

Lion with three Dell 2209WA displays.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Saving space.

If you use a Solid State Drive for your Mac OS and apps, then you know that the small, costly SSD can fill up quickly. If you download Lion from the App Store onto a machine with Snow Leopard installed, the download is what Apple calls an ‘incremental’ one. Only changed files are updated. OS X aficionados swear than the only real OS X installation is a ‘clean’ one, meaning you install Lion on a fresh drive or partition and then migrate over from your Snow Leopard drive or partition just what you need. I have never seen any comparative performance measurements to substantiate this claim so, until I do, I disregard it as so much urban myth.

So assuming you do an incremental install, one thing the installer will not do is erase apps and files you no longer need.

Which are these?

First, any PPC app – one written to run on Apples using IBM G3/4/5 CPUs, will no longer run. The brilliant PPC emulator software known as Rosetta, included through the last version of Snow Leopard, is no more. Which of your apps are PPC? Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor and click on the ‘Kind’ column heading to sort your apps by Intel, Intel (64 bit) and PPC.

Activity Monitor displays which CPU apps run on.

Well, guess what. As long as you have copies of your PPC apps in a Snow Leopard disk or partition, you might as well delete these from your Lion installation because there’s no way they will ever work.

Well, how about all the other crud which has built up from generations of machines? Time to fire up the free Omni DiskSweeper which, after a few minutes grinding (or few seconds if you use an SSD) will tell you where all your files reside, sorted by size in decreasing order. Now you can get serious about purging stuff, but do make a backup before you go ballistic.

Here’s my Users directory – the biggest part of which is MobileSync (backups of iPad/iPhone etc which could be erased); Music can be moved to an HDD. VirtualBox is only needed if you must run Windows. That lot comprise some 18gB of the 30.3gB,meaning you only really need 12gB for Users:

Add to that Applications, which means Applications+Library+usr:

All the Lion stuff adds another 5gB.

Here are my biggest Apps:

From the above approach you can figure what you need on an SSD boot drive which is to contain OS Lion + Users + Apps/Library and hence how large the SSD needs to be, allowing +10% for free space used for temp/scratch files, Mac OS X updates and any new apps you decide to add.

I suspect that, unless you have tons of big apps and/or a huge mail database, 40gB will do it nicely for you – meaning use 36gB and keep 10% free. My SSDs are 120gB but if I was normal you wouldn’t be reading this.

Update:

Reader Fazal Majid has pointed out below in his Comment to this post that there’s a free app named Monolingual which does all of the above and more. I used it and gained 0.51gB on my SSD (Monolingual erroneously reported a gain of 1.0gB) compared to the status immediately after upgrading to OS Lion. It took a couple of minutes to run and I could see it extracting PPC code from many current apps like iPhoto and Lightroom. The apps remaining on my HackPro continue to run fine.

You can download Monolingual by clicking below:

Click to download Monolingual.

However, a check of the Library->Application Support directory disclosed that related files in this directory were not removed. They are, for the most part, small, but it’s a shame the app authors did not go all the way. Still, the price is right.

Thanks Fazal!

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

For the masochists among you.

My prime, nay, sole, motivation for installing Windows on my Lion Hackintosh was to allow me to look at some computer games our 9 year old had programmed which run on Windows only. (At this juncture feel free to speculate at the wisdom of a parent who sends his son to a class which uses Windows).

If you have your original Windows discs it’s free, as easy as any Windows task ever is and works. Mine is Windows XP SP3, but any version through Windows 7 is supported, not to mention many flavors of Unix and, for those unwilling to hack their PC, you can even run Mac OS X from within Windows.

The product is the updated version of the one I ran under Snow Leopard and is named VirtualBox. Created by Sun it’s now part of Oracle and it’s free. Set it up right (the instructions are good but ‘techie’) and you can run Windows in an OS Lion window and cursor directly to that window like any other OS window. Windows runs in its own space and viruses cannot migrate to the OS installation. Several years with VB under Leopard and Snow Leopard have not resulted in any problems on the Mac side. Yes, I still get the inevitable lock-ups on the Windows side.

You can download VirtualBox here; it’s professionally supported and I have found it to be bug free.

Here’s a snap of Win XP running in Lion:

By all accounts Windows 7 is far better than XP or Vista so if you must have Windows and do not want to have to boot into a separate partition or use another machine, this is one way to go. Speed is fine on my Hackintosh and you don’t have to be Einstein to do this successfully. Sound worked out of the box as did wireless broadband. Once I installed the included ‘Guest Additions’ software (it’s under ‘Devices’ in the VB menu) I was able to set screen definition to full screen and the mouse cursor no longer had to be clicked in the Windows window to make it work. Looking at the simply awful font rendering in this OS I can’t help wondering how anyone with any aesthetic values could use this garbage. Whatever.

During the long, rambling installation process, which I had to redo from scratch as the Lion installation trashed my previous VB/Win, I grumbled about Windows to my mother-in-law, who is an iPad/Mac babe. Her reply was priceless:

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Getting rid of the silly things.

Apple’s latest OS, Lion, tries hard to dumb down the user experience compared with its awesome Snow Leopard predecessor. Mercifully, much of this silliness is reversible and I address some of the issues below.

This dumbing down reflects the effort Apple is making to have Lion’s UI more like that in iOS on the iPhone and iPad and I see where they are coming from. Nonetheless, I liked the way Snow Leopard worked, do not propose to use a touch tablet with my Hackintosh and therefore prefer things like they were. If you want to go the touch tablet route for your desktop, try one in an Apple Store first. I found the ergonomics did not work for me; they may be right for you.

Scrolling:

Scrolling has been reversed. Drag the scroll wheel down on your mouse and the screen scrolls up. That works with touch devices but is counterintuitive with a mouse. Go to System Preferences->Mouse and uncheck this box to revert to the old way:

Spell check:

Apps like Mail add the spell checker. It’s every bit as awful as in iOS, uses a rigid rule set, does not learn from mistakes and is insanely frustrating. A friend reports that he wrote that he wanted to “kick some ass” but ended up sending an email promising to “lick some ass” instead. He’s with his lawyers right now.

Disable spell check in System Preferences->Language & Text by unchecking this box:

Finder:

Finder has made many retrograde steps. Color is poorly used, directories hard to find. First, delete the ‘Show all Files’ choice. It’s useless. Right click, Remove from Sidebar.

Then make Finder show the Library directory. Go into Applications->Utilities->Terminal and copy and paste the following into Terminal:

Hit enter, quit Terminal and go to Apple->Force Quit->Relaunch Finder for this to take effect.

By default, Finder does not show your boot drive, though it does show attached drives. Duh!

Go to Finder->View and click ‘Show Path Bar’.

Click on any Boot directory in the Sidebar and you will see the path at the base of the Finder window. In this example I have clicked on the Desktop in the Sidebar.

Click on the word SSD Boot (or whatever your boot drive is named). Finder will display the Boot directory.

Now click-drag the word ‘SSD Boot’ into the Sidebar. You can now access the boot directory.

Mail:

If you prefer the old look of Mail, go to Mail->Preferences->Viewing and check the top box:

Launchpad:

This one is about as dumb as it gets. The Launchpad icon appears in the Dock by default. Drag it out. The app purports to show an iPad-like screen with all your Apps on the display. Snag is, there’s no way of editing what shows so every Apple app, no matter how obscure or rarely used, shows up. And, in yet another childish knock at Adobe, Adobe apps – or any other apps for that matter – only display on the second and subsequent pages, out of alphabetical order. Too silly. This is a prime example of what I call ‘dumbing down’.

Launchpad. Can you spell ‘Duh!’?

Auto saving:

Apple made a big deal of this feature, long available on just about every app on a PC. Plus, it only works on amateur-hour apps like Numbers and Pages. For heavy duty pros who use Word and Excel, just save your work regularly like you always have or enable auto save. Even Microsoft added that feature a decade ago. Pure Cupertino hype, that one. If Jobs was selling water, his would be wetter and clearer than anyone else’s, I suppose. And 50% more.

Further, if you use TimeMachine for continuous versioned back-ups, it’s hard to see what this feature adds.

Safari:

Safari now wants to open with the last page you were using. Go into Safari->Preferences->General and change the New Windows and New Tabs settings to Homepage.

Then go to System Preferences->General and uncheck this box:

In this way, if you last quit Safari with many tabs open, you will not have to wait for all those pages to be reloaded when you next start Safari. Instead, you will be taken directly to your home page only, with no tabs open.

Mission Control:

I have saved the worst UI error for last. If you liked the ability to display multiple Windows of all your loaded apps as an app switcher (this was named Spaces in Snow Leopard), Mission Control makes sure that you now have a mess to work with. Use multiple monitors as I do and this mess is spread in random order across all three:

Suffice it to say that if Houston’s Mission Control was organized like this, Apollo 11 would still be searching for a landing site on the moon. Just drag this silly icon out of the Dock where it is installed by default.

Do the above and Lion starts to resemble the robust desktop OS which was Snow Leopard.

Why bother even upgrading from Snow Leopard?

• Because your Mac will be ‘bricked’ earlier if you do not.
• Because flaky MobileMe will disappear and be replaced by (hopefully less flaky) iCloud Q3/2012. As Snow Leopard and earlier OSs will not support full iCloud functionality, how else are you going to keep all your Macs and iOS device in Sync for Contacts, Mail and iCal?
• Because new apps will increasingly only run on Lion. Remember Rosetta and PPC apps? Cynically excluded from Lion to obsolete your great PPC iMac.

Finally, let’s not complain too loudly. This, my favorite Steve Jobs quote, remains as true today as it ever has.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

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