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I was using Launchpad-Control to take care of them.

Yea, Launchpad-Control was a great program, but it was annoying that I ever had to resort to that in the first place. Glad Apple managed to fix Adobe's installer/utility mess.

Energy Saver looks weird. In what appears to be yet another random act of of throwing things in the trash, Apple removed most of the preferences

Yeah, the hard disk sleep option is gone. I always turn that off in a new install. So long as I can still do it via pmset I'll be "happy" but it's a bit odd to remove it.

I noticed when I ran Photoshop after updating to DP3 (and then installing the new update) that it said I needed a Java runtime. I guess the DP3 update removes any existing Java installs?

Yeah, the hard disk sleep option is gone. I always turn that off in a new install. So long as I can still do it via pmset I'll be "happy" but it's a bit odd to remove it.

I noticed when I ran Photoshop after updating to DP3 (and then installing the new update) that it said I needed a Java runtime. I guess the DP3 update removes any existing Java installs?

Still had Java on mine, Photoshop CS6. I knew it required Java, since it made me install it when I installed it fresh under DP 3.1.

Really? I've noticed that the video drivers seem better in 10.8 than in 10.7.

Drivers always depend on your video card. nVidia, ATI and Intel drivers are radically different.

I guess I should give Mountain Lion another go with the latest DP and Starcraft II, but last time I installed ML, it screwed up my Boot Camp partition completely (it wouldn?t boot anymore, but it would run fine under Parallels).

Drivers always depend on your video card. nVidia, ATI and Intel drivers are radically different.

Except I'm using a MacBook Air as well. Same generation, just an 11" instead of a 13" (which probably explains the performance difference; less pixels to render).

Still had Java on mine, Photoshop CS6. I knew it required Java, since it made me install it when I installed it fresh under DP 3.1.

I was wondering why Software Update was giving me the Flashback removal tool when it was already a part of the Java update. I guess Apple decided to play it safe with DP3 and remove any existing Java installs. Wonder if that's going to be the trend.

I was wondering why Software Update was giving me the Flashback removal tool when it was already a part of the Java update. I guess Apple decided to play it safe with DP3 and remove any existing Java installs. Wonder if that's going to be the trend.

I do remember installing that in fact, It installed that during DP 3.1 and that must be why it didn't remove it, because I never installed Adobe Suite till after the two updates. So the Flashback tool was in fact the cause. I'm not sure why it needs Java, but can't they tune it out? They reworked a lot in Photoshop CS6, didn't it cross their mind on removing such requirements?... hmm.

Latest Mountain Lion update brings iOS-like automatic downloads for apps

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The latest update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3 seems to have partially enabled iOS-style automatic app downloads in the App Store. Like on the iPhone and iPad, when you buy and install an app on one of your Macs, all of your other Macs logged into the same App Store account will automatically install the app too.

Unfortunately, the feature does not seem to be working completely. While the App Store will still offer to enable automatic downloads (as seen above), it does not actually install anything when you purchase apps from another computer. However, it does apparently show the app as being installed when you view it in the App Store. There is a good chance we will see at least one more developer preview, or at least a GM, in the coming weeks that should fully enable the feature.

Kudos about the new Dock info !

Automatic updates? FINALLY ! Last week I was thinking about bringing updates in the notification center. Now, if only iTunes could update all of my apps without needing my password ?

I?ll be glad to install this on day one, or even before if I can :p

They?re on it, just not on the software side? Apart from putting SSDs in their Macs, I wish they?d do something about it too.

Obviously Apple selling optional SSDs for iMac at insane prices wasn't what I was getting at?

  • Like 2

Reading List gains offline reading in recent Mountain Lion builds

safari-offline-21.png?w=240&h=186

Safari Reading List is definitely a nice, simple alternative to third party apps like Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket for those who use Safari. Reading List allows you to save and sync links for later reading between both your Mac and iOS devices. It has been known that offline reading is coming soon to Safari on Mountain Lion, and it looks like that feature finally landed. Found by Gear Live today and a commenter on Control Your Mac 10 days ago, offline reading was enabled in recent builds of Mountain Lion. However, offline reading is sadly still not available on iOS devices; although, we would guess iOS offline support is coming at some point.

Would be nice if Apple did something to improve startup times like Microsoft did with Windows 8.

I guess it's a combination of not caring much since they're essentially using SSDs in all the new boxes and promoting Sleep over Shutdown. The last time I rebooted my Mac Pro was when I installed 10.7.4 and with an SSD it's <10 seconds to desk and all apps running anyway.

But yes, they could shave off some time for mechanical drives - it seems to wait quite a while at network initialization and certain devices. Perhaps a little optimization there would help a lot.

  • Like 1

Rumor: Siri-like Voice Dictation coming to OS X Mountain Lion?

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Voice is Apple?s next important field of computer-input, and Siri on the iPhone 4S and voice-dictation on the third-generation iPad makes this clear. Siri, in its current implementation, seems perfect for mobile devices like the iPhone 4S, but many of its features don?t make sense on larger screens such as those found on tablets and computers. However, Apple has brought a component of Siri called Dictation to the iPad, and the company appears to be planning on bringing this Dictation feature to Macs as well.

According to a resources file inside of the latest build of Safari in the newest seed of the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion, Dictation might be making its way to Macs next. Since Macs do not sport virtual keyboards or physical keyboards with a microphone-labled key, users (by default) will apparently need to simultaneously click both command keys to start voice input.

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We are yet to find any other Dictation references in OS X Mountain Lion betas, so we?re keeping Dictation in OS X Mountain Lion as unconfirmed until Apple officially announces it. The apparently forthcoming feature is not functional in the current beta. With voice features being exclusive to certain devices in Apple?s iOS Device portfolio, perhaps Dictation is tied directly to certain Macs. Maybe the new MacBook Pros with Retina Displays, faster processors, thinner form-factors, and USB 3 connectivity.

I guess it's a combination of not caring much since they're essentially using SSDs in all the new boxes and promoting Sleep over Shutdown. The last time I rebooted my Mac Pro was when I installed 10.7.4 and with an SSD it's <10 seconds to desk and all apps running anyway.

But yes, they could shave off some time for mechanical drives - it seems to wait quite a while at network initialization and certain devices. Perhaps a little optimization there would help a lot.

Macs are unique in that they can support SSDs or something? Because apparently Microsoft can be bothered to improve things on both sides. Maybe it's a trade-off since Apple's focussing on having a near-pixel perfect interface. :p

Macs are unique in that they can support SSDs or something? Because apparently Microsoft can be bothered to improve things on both sides.

Macs are unique because Apple are a hardware company and Microsoft is not. MS won't make any extra money if you feel the need for a SSD.

Macs are unique because Apple are a hardware company and Microsoft is not. MS won't make any extra money if you feel the need for a SSD.

You really can't say Apple's strictly a hardware company since their software plays a HUGE role as well. It's what sets them apart and makes them a lot of money in the end as well. That said who in their right mind is going to pay ?450 for an Apple-branded SSD just so their Mac will startup a little faster? I'm guessing it's a niche.

You're honestly not going to convince me Apple isn't willing to improve OS X' startup times just so you pay the extra for a SSD.

PS I just came back from the Apple Store for a keyboard replacement and noticed my new one now has a different looking Expos? key and a Launchpad key instead of a Dashboard one. Is that new? Never ever saw It before. Not really OS X ML related I know, but I didn't feel it was worth creating a whole new thread over. :laugh:

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  • Posts

    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • Does anyone here know if these updates are integrated into the UUP dump isos?
    • Motrix Next 3.9.4 by Razvan Serea Motrix Next is a modern, open-source cross-platform download manager built as the official next-generation successor to the original Motrix project. It has been completely rewritten using Tauri 2, Vue 3, TypeScript, and Rust, while still relying on the powerful Aria2 download engine for high-speed multi-protocol transfers. The app supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent, ED2K and magnet links, offering advanced features like multi-connection acceleration, task scheduling, bandwidth control, and batch download management. With a significantly reduced install size (around 20MB), it focuses on being lightweight, fast, and resource-efficient compared to traditional Electron-based download tools. Designed for Windows, macOS, and Linux, Motrix Next delivers a clean, modern UI inspired by Material Design 3 principles, with smooth animations and a minimal workflow. It improves usability through better download organization, system tray integration, and enhanced torrent handling including selective file downloads and tracker management. Motrix Next features: Multi-protocol downloads — HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent, Magnet, .torrent, ED2K, and Metalink tasks BitTorrent — Selective file download, DHT, peer exchange, encryption controls, metadata caching, GeoIP peer flags, and tracker probing Browser extension integration — Embedded Extension API with independent authentication, download confirmation, smart auto-submit, filename hints, referer/cookie forwarding, and real-time controls (Chrome Web Store · Edge Add-ons) Safe filename handling — Content-Disposition, RFC 2047, non-UTF-8, percent-encoded, and extensionless URL resolution with path traversal sanitization Download organization — Favorite and recent folders, optional file-type categorization, stale-record cleanup, and completed history backed by SQLite Concurrent downloads — Independent controls for active tasks, HTTP connections per server, segments per file, and BT peer limits Speed control — Global and per-task upload/download limits with day-of-week and time-of-day scheduling System integration — Tray operation, optional tray speed display, macOS Dock badge/progress, protocol handlers for magnet://, thunder://, and motrixnext:// Lightweight mode — Destroys the WebView on minimize-to-tray while Rust keeps the engine, task monitor, notifications, history, and extension routing alive Notifications and power options — Native task start/complete/failure notifications, keep-awake during downloads, and optional shutdown after completion Network controls — Scoped proxy support for downloads, app updates, and tracker updates, plus system proxy detection Auto-update channels — Stable, Beta, and Latest Across Channels policies with separate download and install phases Diagnostics — Structured logs, exportable diagnostic ZIPs, database integrity checks, automatic DB rebuild, and Linux GPU rendering fallback Personalization — Light/dark/system theme, 10 color schemes, 26 languages, and first-launch system language detection Motrix Next 3.9.4 changelog: Motrix Next 3.9.4 promotes the 3.9.4 beta cycle to stable. This release refreshes bundled engine binaries, improves task detail readability and copy actions, expands link handling for magnet and ED2K workflows, polishes responsive navigation and text wrapping, updates browser extension documentation, and refines network preference controls. New Features Task Detail copy actions — Added copyable values for task metadata and reusable render functions for long text fields. Magnet and ED2K lifecycle support — Added task lifecycle handling for magnet and ED2K links. History cleanup for deleted tasks — Deleted tasks can now remove matching history records. User-Agent management — Added user-agent management and improved related network preference controls. Browser extension documentation — Added the Firefox Add-ons link for the Motrix Next extension. Improvements Engine binaries — Updated bundled binaries for supported architectures. Task Detail readability — Long task names, URLs, tracker values, and copyable metadata now render more clearly. Deletion messaging — Refined localized task deletion text for clarity and consistency. Text wrapping — Improved URI input wrapping and task name multiline display. Navigation layout — Improved sub-navigation responsiveness. Disk allocation default — Changed the default file allocation method to trunc. Proxy controls — Improved proxy button styling in network preferences. Download: Motrix Next 64-bit | ARM64 | macOS ~20.0 MB (Open Source) Links: Website | macOS / Linux | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • NVIDIA officially supports Ubuntu, as linked above with the GeForce NOW Hands on I did in collaboration with Paul Hill.
    • TO be clear I am not running linux today, however I keep thinking about it. And I want to make sure there are minimal obstacles if I decide to make that switch in the coming months.
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