Gadgets, Gear, and Drones
Michelle needed a computer for her research, and Jeanne iPad mini just doesn’t cut it. So we decided that I get her an early ;) Christmas present: A MacBook Air. It’s small and light, the perfect ultraportable. As expected, build quality of the aluminum unibody is excellent. It has a 1.3GHz dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage. And most importantly for an ultraportable, it uses the Intel Haswell architecture which has been especially great in terms of battery life.
Apple has sent out invites to their much anticipated September 10 event. This should brighten everyone’s day. Well it, did make my day more colorful. And I expect September 10 to be colorful, too. The new iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5C as well as iOS 7, of course, is expected to be revealed. Based on rumors, I thinks the two will bring in many colors. The iPhone 5S will come in Black/Slate, White/Silver, and White/Gold. The iPhone 5C will come in even more colors: Black, White, Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Pink, and Red. I guess C in 5C stands not only for China or Cheap but also Colorful!
Apple has released iOS 7 beta 6, less than a week after beta 5 which was delayed due to the developer site hacking. With this release, Apple is back on track on its release cycle. The main description of the release is that it fixes a major iTunes bug. I didn’t really encounter it. I couldn’t see any outward changes. In iTunes or elsewhere. Even the release notes is quite short. Looks like iOS 7 is almost good to go!
Apple has released iOS 7 beta 5 yesterday, less than a week after beta 4. I guess developer site hacking incident did disrupt the release cycle. After a day of use, I can see that battery life remains good. But it seems less stable (as betas go) and I’m getting more crashes. There are more UI tweaks especially on the Settings app: icons are more colorful (but still flat). Less like Android Jelly Bean :P
Just when OS X Mavericks is already just around the corner, I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion. It turned out that Xcode 4.6.3 doesn’t support development for the iOS 7 beta 4 on my iPhone (not completely unexpected). So I downloaded Xcode 5 Developer Preview. And it turned out that it requires Mountain Lion (unexpected). So off I went upgrading. Well, upgrading is easier than easy (don’t you just love the Mac?), prettier than Lion, snappier, and I even regained a few GBs of disk space. Not bad for $20.