I installed OS X Lion the day it came out and this was my experience.

The install went relatively smooth from App Store buy process and had to do a couple of reboot but it was up and running just like Snow Leopard when done, except things were totally upgraded under the hood and on some obvious places. While upgrading made things work fine, I saw quite some minor glitches here and there and ended up reinstalling from scratch just to feel better. If you want to do that, you need to create an install disc by following its creation step. (To re-download Lion installer, you need to ‘Option’ click the ‘Purchased’ icon, so that it does show ‘Install’ instead of ‘Installed’ in greyed out form. And you don’t need to copy the dmg file but just drag it to Disk Utility sidebar to start burning it.)

First few things noticed were it had Launchpad and Mission Control app icon appearing in the Application list.

As for Launchpad, this was just like the icon display in iOS but this is just plain not working on OS X as, simply putting the Application folder in the dock folder section is enough to get a good view of all the apps installed and jumping onto another screen just to see it never made sense on screen size of a normal computer. So, I’m guessing this either gets updated to be useful at all or just gets removed since it is redundant.

Mission Control, on the other hand is a nice stretch from the previous Expose and Spaces feature and while it may make some people’s life easier, in the end I didn’t like it and not really using it except for its Expose part of the features. Mission Control allows to have different desktop spaces as in a space with web browsing, a space with email, a space with image editing but not clutter a single desktop space with all apps open but separate them under different desktop spaces and a nice single swipe on the trackpad can make the space switch relatively easily but this was not good for me as, when I’m working, I have about 6 or so apps open at a time and swiping and watching the desktop space swap with animation takes too long compared to the good old command-tab switch when going back and forth. It may have been better if the space swapping animation can be turned off. I use two displays, one from the laptop and an external one attached to my front, so, I have even less reason to use Mission Control.

Also to a similar feature, there is the ‘Full Screen’ feature which allows apps that support being full screened to get rid of all the toolbars and docks and become the sole window on the screen (and being able to be swapped with trackpad swipe to other full screen windows). While it may make you concentrate well on it, that didn’t happen to me. I feel rather nervous that when rest of the things are hidden… Besides, when under full screen mode, it seems to always take my primary display and shows some empty grey background on the secondary display, even the window was on the second display. And on current implementation the performance has a little problem and it feels somewhat sluggish.

Next big change was how scrolling went up side down… And I think it makes sense that it does feel intuitive when reversed but for many people who might use Windows at work at Mac at home or vice versa end up scrolling in different directions when scrolling to the same directions under those 2 OS… And maybe they will just revert the option back to the previous scrolling model. But the scroll bar being invisible until it needs to show itself is a nice change.

Safari finally can reopen tabs that were open from last session without needing extra extensions by turning such option in the ‘General’ preference in the system preference. Lion also supports opening up the apps that were open before reboot when rebooting but while it sounds nifty, the apps themselves must be supported to do so and basically I don’t find it useful because while it can reopen stuff, it might not necessarily mean to restore the states to the exact state, for example, if you’re logged into sites with a user account in Safari, rebooting may not get back you logged in, even if the page gets restored and obviously my third party text editor (MacVim) does not want to reopen all of what was open or my database management app (Sequel Pro) will not reconnect back and show the table I was viewing. So, at this point, reboot is still a reboot which will lose most of what was there on the screen.

The FileVault has took some decent step forward by being able to encrypt the entire disk, which is good for corporate use with good performance. I have written a separate post on this topic.

Finder also made some changes and I will say that Finder is the worst piece of software Apple can create… Everyone (my bet) loves Windows Explorer and uses with ease and I agree with that but Finder is just making life so difficult, I cannot understand how to use this in any comfortable way… The view option, windows position and size seems to reset itself upon occasions and while it can finally sort folders first before files by arranging by ‘kind’, after 5 years of using Finder, I just cannot feel comfortable when it even resists to have ‘cut’ feature of files or to create a new empty file (very useful when I just want a simple text file created in a folder) to this day. There are a few efforts to make something better like TotalFinder, Path Finder and those remote file apps like Transmit and ForkLift somewhat do a better job as a file manager too, I wish someone would create something like Windows Explorer before I make one myself out of rage. There was an attempt to create such thing in the past, but it seems the app is buried now. (Funny enough it was created by people called Rage Software.)

Other minor changes include that now FaceTime seems to come free with Lion, so Apple made a nice extra cash for making it non free under Snow Leopard. PhotoBooth becomes so slow when under full screen mode, that it was unusable at this point.

The space usage seems quite low for modern OS as it uses less than 10GB for Lion use and it’s probably around 15GB with XCode installed on my machine. So, I still got plenty left with 64GB disk even after having couple Windows OS images for virtual use. Using Monolingual will save about a GB or so for removing redundant language files throughout the system.

For older Macbook Air owners, be warned that CoolBook is not properly supported under Lion at this moment and while removing and installing it again suppresses kernel_task from going crazy, the undervolting setting is not honored and machine may get too hot to put itself in sleep after heavy use, since you cannot throttle it down the way you want.

Generally, OS X is a good OS. It looks sexy, acts fast, third party apps also look sexy and have their own qualities by having affordable price tags but it seems I have failed to gain much from the Lion’s new features… I can definitely see the Apple developers took great time to tune to the great details of the OS for Lion. Basically all apps I have seem to work ok under Lion too, so nothing too bad.

Don’t miss out on this great long review of Lion by ArsTechnica. It covers so much into such detail, it is an exceptional work.

Introduction

These days, data security is becoming important as many important data are kept inside computers including personal computers and considering when a laptop gets stolen or gets left behind somewhere, it is good idea to give a little encryption to some of the files that you want it kept secret.

Just giving a password lock onto user account is never useful as if the whole machine is stolen, they can always detach the hard disk inside and read the content by attaching it on another machine without booting the OS inside, which circumvents any password protection, unless the files themselves are encrypted.

Usage

Luckily, OS X has a nifty feature to create a ‘box’ that you can dump files in encrypted quite easily. By using this, the files placed inside that box are kept encrypted giving no access to anyone under any condition, unless you provide password and open the box to read the contents. If you do not mind files like your photo being looked at, maybe you do not need to put them in there, but you may put text files containing passwords, contact addresses of your people or any private notes which you feel that they are somewhat sensitive to be put under public eyes by any chance.

To create the box, in the Finder’s menu bar, click on ‘Go’ -> ‘Utilities’ and open ‘Disk Utility’. Click on ‘New Image’ in the tool bar and specify the file name of the box, folder location, the name of the box itself and the maximum size limit of the box. (If you only store texts, 500MB is enough, but if you are going to dump in many pictures you should make the box around twice bigger than what you are going to put in, just so it won’t be filled up so soon.) There are two types of encryption to choose from, but as it recommends, you could safely choose 128bit and pick ‘sparse disk image’ as the ‘Image Format’. After you hit ‘Create’, you will be asked for passwords which is the important bit as this is the key to opening the box and do uncheck ‘Remember password in my keychain’ checkbox as this really lowers the point when the system remembers your password… And make sure password is not something other people can figure by mistake or by intention but then again, if you lose the password, there is absolutely no way to recover the contents inside, so this must be considered carefully.

When the box gets created, you can see that on the sidebar in Finder. You can toss files in this opened box as much as the box’s size permits. You should be ejecting this disk image (Right click and select ‘Eject’ in Finder sidebar) when you’re done dealing with it because otherwise it stays open for access. It will be closed if you shutdown or reboot the machine though. The actual encrypted box file should exist on the folder you have specified (Defaults to ‘Documents’) having an extention of ‘sparseimage’ and it’s a single file containing all of the files inside squeezed into one encrypted and this can be stored anywhere. You can double click on that file and enter the password to have access inside again.

Conclusion

This way, you now have a little safe on your Mac where you can store sensitive information and not risk having them accessed by someone else in case of loss of your machine or by someone sneaky trying to sniff your machine while you are off the seat.

Other implementation

There exists a feature called File Vault under OS X that turns your entire home directory (For Leopard, Snow Leopard) or the whole hard disk encrypted (For Lion) and by doing so, you do not need to even think about opening the box for specific files but your entire files are encrypted as in your whole stuff are placed inside a big safe. This usually is a safe bet to do, especially under Lion, as previous implementation under Leopard series could affect a bit of performance issues under certain condition because every file you interact must be decrypted on the fly and encrypted back when stored and since many files are dealt behind the scenes when using programs, it had that little side effect.

But under Lion, my impression of encrypting the whole disk didn’t really make me feel any performance issues, even when running Windows (using VMWare Fusion) on top of OS X and Windows ran just as decent as before. This makes more things safer because literally everything, your browsing history, cache files created by programs you were dealing with or any of your email histories are all encrypted as long as the machine isn’t logged in by that user but then again, if you’re logged in, then you aren’t hiding anything on your machine… So, this doesn’t really provide protection in all scenarios and that is why I keep this little safe ‘box’ to keep naughty hands off of my files and better part of it is that when you backup your files (which you really should do), File Vault does not help you there, but that disk image stays encrypted anywhere it goes.

There is another third party implementation that does similar called TrueCrypt, which works on Windows and Linux as well and has quite advanced feature sets but can be a little more complicated than OS X’s native disk image implementation. The great feature about TrueCrypt is that you can even try to hide the presence that you have anything encrypted. It puts that encrypted file in some random location which is pretty hard to detect as is and thus you may not be seen as hiding anything at all, whereas creating a disk image will reveal that something sensitive should be sitting there, except there is no way to look inside without a password.

Extra Story

This is all theoretical but if you are in a serious situation about your sensitive information being encrypted or not, and if you are offended that you must tell where your information is, then letting people know that you are using TrueCrypt puts you in a tough position as no one can prove if you have anything encrypted on your machine or not which also means, you can never prove that you do not have anything sensitive yourself…

These are the iPhone games I’ve enjoyed in the past.

GeoDefense

This is the best tower defense game I have played. The game does not provide much in terms of graphics, although neither does it look bad with its simple wire frame objects with colorful effects.

It’s quite a typical tower defense game as in, ‘enemy’ forces go through pre determined path wave after wave and you place your attackers beside those paths and stop them from reaching their goals.

What makes this apart from the rest is that the balance of difficulty is just amazing that even if you get to know the game well, it is still challenging and thus some levels may feel way out of balance on the first few tries but eventually you will get to know how to beat them.

There are plenty of levels to play from easy, medium and hard and there’s a single additional level pack you can buy to add some more. All in all, this is a great fun and it can last too.

GeoDefense Swarm

This is a variance of GeoDefense, which does not have much of a pre determined path but the ‘enemy’ forces move freely to their exit from the entry points and you will need to create the path yourself to make that hard for them.

Some people prefer the freedom of path creation but I liked the pre determined path style better. But still, this is pretty enjoyable that comes with a lot of levels with variety of difficulties which once again puts you into hair pulling moments as some are pretty hard and needs couple dozen tries to figure out to get any close to beating it.

But like the author states, what good is a game if it is not challenging at all?

GeoSpark

This is a totally different type of game from its predecessors but only brings the same ‘enemy’ force characters down to a different play style.

Your screen is filled with enemies which just randomly move around and you drag a type of enemy and crash it onto another that is the same type and they both vanish and you score but letting a type hit another type, game is over. This is what you have to do throughout the entire game.

The more you keep dragging the same enemy around to crash the same type, the more you will score but it will slowly generate gravitational power to it to bring other types closer and sooner or later you need to start taking care of other types not to crash onto different types.

This is a very simple concept and can be addictive if you got some free time. But in my opinion, wasn’t as fun as the first 2 games but still not bad. There are no levels but all you can do is score more and more and more…

DungeonDefense

This has been a pretty superb experience on me and too bad its nowhere to be seen these days in the ranking.

This is another tower defense type game, except you can only place attackers on a pre determined spot against enemies going through a pre determined path.

For one, the game has a great graphic and what’s better, the graphic is still detailed even if you zoom in.

For second, I think the game balance is very good and while generally thinking, the game should end up the same with pre determined spot and path as you place and upgrade your attackers the same way, they can end up quite differently upon slight different maneuvers by the characters which you don’t have much control over. And while you can’t freely place your attackers everywhere, you still get to think quite a lot on how the levels can be beaten, because if you don’t know what you are doing, you are dead in no time.

It has 3 levels to play which are all great but I have figured a seriously challenging way to play this game for those who think the game is already too easy. If you can beat the level that is inside the castle with the big ‘lord’ at the end of the path WITHOUT using the middle 8 attack points sitting close to each others in medium difficulty (because hard difficulty is impossible this way), you are totally great. I actually got to beat that about a few times out of maybe 50 tries. This game is interesting because while its genre is strategy, it sometimes rely on luck partially.

They have recently released a higher definition version for iPad with a fourth level. Although I’d say the initial 3 levels were more polished.

Nick Chase : A Detective Story

This is a novel reading style game with interesting puzzles packed here and there. It has a very good graphic (or rather drawing), voice acting and at the same time puzzles are pretty entertaining throughout. These days, these good games are hard to be found buried since they are released at older dates and there are practically no way to find them unless someone get to tell other people about it.

Everest / Buckingham Palace

This is created by the same developer as the above and it’s about finding objects in a picture. While the goal is simple, it’s quite entertaining trying to find items within various locations.

Settlers

I never really like games that just take so much time to get the fun out of it but this can be quite entertaining. You manage villagers to create a settlement and avoid enemy troops from taking your areas. It has a lot of elements and you need to control a lot of aspects, but that becomes the fun part of the game. Initially things look kind of complicated, but once you get the idea, things look logical and watching all those people work is quite fun.

iDracula

This is an action game viewed from the top to stop waves of monsters approaching to you from all directions. You get to use various weapons and perks to upgrade to save yourself. The graphic is very nice and it has a lot of fun due to the nature of involving luck to be able to get real far.

OMG Pirates!

The developer has a great sense of creating a simple, intuitive and fun game. It is side scrolling action game and it has a lot of fun while keeping everything simple. Quite comical and even addicting to challenge the survival mode.

MetalWars 1 / 2

If you like machines fighting each others, this may be of some fun. At first, things look simple, but the game is quite challenging. Being able to upgrade machines reminds me of Front Mission game series.

Supercross

This is one of the earlier games I have played on iPhone but this has a real good graphic and it gives a lot of excitement as the game balance is pretty well done. You race on a bike on various tracks. Exciting nice game.

X Games SnoCross

This is the snowmobile version of the above game. Graphic stays very nice set on snow fields. The game is probably a little easier than above.

Virtual Pool Online

Game of billiards. The controls are decent enough and the graphic is quite good. If you like billiards, you might like it.

Solomon’s Keep

This is little like rogue-like, except of course, it doesn’t have as much elements as real rogue-likes but then again, it has a good balance and can be enjoyable. The developers are very motivated to make good games and keep updating the game with new features.

Solomon’s Boneyard

This is an upper view survival game based on the previous game. It is pretty well balanced throughout (until to a point where things are simply impossible… this needs a fix) and can be quite fun with upgrades and many items to use.

Labyrinth 1 / 2

This famous game of rolling a ball to an exit is very well implemented on iPhone device and can be quite fun. The second version has much more new features than simply roll and win and looks really polished. Recommended for some quick fun.

Sentinel 1 / 2 / 3

I think this is one of the most famous tower defense game on iPhone. The first installment already gave a surprisingly high quality with serious great balance even for expert players with great graphic. Second and third installment gives extra features, new levels but the balance has somewhat got easier in my opinion.

CAUSE OF DEATH

This is a reading novel style game that you get to read stories and pick actions from time to time. The pictures are well drawn (even though they have limited scenes and you get to see same locations repeatedly on different stories), characters are developed individually, story is quite entertaining and they keep making new episodes weekly, so you get to enjoy it continuously. Good fun overall.

Sword & Poker 1 / 2

This is a really polished game with unique ideas involving the card game poker. It mixes in RPG element and you get to fight opponents by using cards based on poker rules and the developer has blended good amount of extra ideas on top of it to make it a fun game. It has plenty levels to play from and can get you hooked for hours. Good one.

Where’s Wally?

Developers polished this one out pretty well. Instead of just presenting the users with static pictures and just be done with it to grab some cash out of the franchise, they made changes such as giving motions to some of the characters and other parts look polished as well. Very nicely ported.

iPhone

Eliminate:GunRange

Dead simple, shoot the moving target, but since it’s simple to the point, it’s rather fun.

Third Blade

While it can be seen that they took some time creating it, being not too fun in the first 30 minutes was a major problem for me…

Metal Storm

This is kind of fun making you feel piloting an aircraft to shoot down enemy aircrafts but then again, that is about it.

No story and system is somewhat not sophisticated when you can launch infinite amount of missiles…