Clean Install of Mountain Lion The Hard Way

It was supposed to be so easy. That's what the guide I used said. I've been having a few problems on my Mac with applications crashing and taking down OS X with it, so I decided to take the opportunity to download Mountain Lion and rebuild my iMac from scratch.

A quick surf around the web at lunchtime produced a great tutorial called How To Create A Bootable OS X Mountain Lion USB The Easy Way. Having read this it seemed pretty straight forward, so after getting home from work I set about following the instructions.

All went well until I had wiped my Mac internal hard drive and was beginning the install of Mountain Lion. It estimates 6 minutes until is needs a reboot, counts down to 0 minutes then sits there for about 5 further minutes. Then I hit an error message:

"Can't download additional components needed to install OS X"

Oh dear. Never mind, looks like my wireless network wasn't connected. Should fix it. So I re-run the "Reinstall OS X" menu option.

Same message.

I try this several times with the same, frustrating result. At this point I can hear my mates with PCs laughing at me, because Macs are meant to be easy. Right?

So I hit Google again and come across a forum post on MacRumours. Basically, this guy is having the same problem as me and there are a few answers but nothing really helpful to me.

There is a link to a guide on creating a bootable USB that doesn't need the download elements, but I have no OS X in which to do this. Those of you with a 2nd Mac should try this.

A bit more searching reveals a helpful MacWorld article on "Recovery Mode". If you have Lion, or Mountain Lion, installed before attempting a clean build a partition will be created to allow you to access components to rebuild the machine.

Using the cmd+R keys on startup I manage to enter this mode. I am authenticated using my Apple ID and I can begin recovery of Lion. But I want Mountain Lion. So I decide to try the USB one last time.

Still that same message.

So I reboot and hold down cmd+R. This time, I am taken to the Internet Recovery Mode. This I am supposed to get to using alt+cmd+R. Maybe I hit this by accident, but I decide I am taking no more chances. I am offered the chance to recover Lion and I take it. By the way, Internet Recovery Mode takes ages to enter - about 7 minutes on my Mac. So make a nice cup of tea. You will probably need it!

So I have gone with "Reinstall OS X" and I am now downloading Lion. This takes approximately 45 minutes on my Internet connection, but may be faster or slower on yours if you are at this point too...

The screen says "About 0 seconds remaining" for about 10 seconds then reboots. I am now greeted with a nice "Install Mac OS X" screen and an estimation of 23 minute until completion.

I am then greeted with a cheery reboot button. This doesn't reboot, however, but throws me back to the Mac OS X Utilities screen. So I reboot from there. Macs are intuitive, apparently :-).

Hurrah! A clean install of Lion!

So what now... Well, I still want Mountain Lion, so I go to the App Store and start the 4.37GB download AGAIN!!!

Meanwhile, I run Software Update to make sure I'm on the latest version of Lion. I read somewhere you need to be on a pretty high version to run the Mountain Lion upgrade, so best to check I am on the latest build. It turns out that the recovered Lion is the latest version, so I decide to download a few bits and pieces like a new Safari update and a malware removal tool.

Luckily I have a fast Internet connection, and also need another cup to tea....

40 minutes later and I have it downloaded. Not quite. 30 minutes in I have had the "restart computer" death message which I have been hoping to avoid that totally crashes my machine... I suspect my memory is bust, but that's another story...

Then I remember the Mountain Lion install program in on my memory stick. The one I tried to boot from. Doh! I can use that...

I decide to just upgrade Mountain Lion over Lion (after I have rebooted) and call it quits... I could try and do a really clean install of Mountain Lion by recovering it after I have upgraded the Lion, or creating another bootable USB, but I can't be bothered. Especially as my "restart computer of death" message seems to have nothing to do with the OS.

So off we go with the upgrade. I'm nervous as the screen looks the same as it did before. The preparing to install and 6 minutes remaining message appears, as before. This time, I am hoping it actually works... It still decides that there are random minutes remaining, flicking between 6 and 3 erratically, whilst the blue bar inches across the screen.

After 15 minutes of this - the old classic message appears about not being able to download components. Right - re-download from App Store then...

Another 40 minutes, and another cup of tea, move on by. I hope my Internet broadband provider aren't monitoring my connection too much tonight as I am getting through a lot of downloaded data!

I decide to copy the file over to a USB stick. That way, if it goes pear-shaped, I don't have to download it again. It's more delay, but I'm getting used to waiting...

That done I start the installer. I am met with the screen above. Uh-oh. But the good news is it only lasts for a few seconds before we are restarting the Mac and off to the Mountain Lion installer. Hurrah! Getting somewhere! It guesstimates 34 minutes to install....

After watching some tele, I'm back in front of the screen and we are done. It has taken about 30 minutes.

I don't know if this rant is helpful to anyone, but it felt good to document my trials anyway :-)

If I did this again, I would go into the Recovery partition and install Mountain Lion from there. If I were to give you advice on upgrading from Lion, I would probably install Mountain Lion through OS X, then head to the Recovery partition and clean install it from there. After you install Mountain Lion, the Recovery partition will allow a clean install of it, overwriting the previous Lion Recovery.

Record iPad / iPhone Screen Without Jailbreak using Reflection

There is no native way of recording your iPad or iPhone screen. I can understand why Apple haven't put this feature onto their devices, as it opens up all sorts of opportunities for copyright abuse, but nevertheless, it can be useful to do.

I've been looking around for a while trying to figure out how I might do this and I came across an OSX application called Reflection.

Go to the Reflection website (http://reflectionapp.com) and download the DMG file to your Mac.

Once installed, you can then use the Airplay function on your iPad or iPod and you can now view your screen and the audio on your Mac.

Pretty cool.

You can try it for free for 10 minutes of Airplay time, and once you are happy it does what it says on the tin, you can pay a very reasonable $14.99 for a single license or $49.99 for 5 licenses.

A word of warning is that you will need a fast internal network. My 2.4GHz wireless produced less than impressive results. Once I switched to my 5GHz network, everything was fine.

I've made a video tutorial which you can get to via my YouTube channel or by clicking below:

Any questions, please fee free to leave a comment and I'll try and come back to you.

How to Download iTunes Movie and TV Show Artwork Free

Want an easy way to get those high quality iTunes art for Movies and TV Shows? Its free, easy, and doesn't require downloading software or going to any websites except iTunes itself.

And the artwork will be displayed on your iPhone, iPad, iPod etc just like any other.

I blogged before on how to rip your DVD and Blu Rays to iTunes in previous posts:

Ripping your DVDs and Blu Rays for your Apple Mac / iPod / iPhone / iPad etc

Ripping your DVDs and Blu Rays pt.2: Extract Subtitles for M4V / MP4 / iTunes

HD-SD Tag: Having HD and SD movies in iTunes

But say you've got that far, and now want the iTunes artwork. Follow this simple guide:

(1) Find the movie in iTunes

I've used the marvellous Liam Neeson movie "Taken" as my example here:

(2) Right click on the artwork and click "Copy Link"

(3) Open up your browser of choice and paste the link and go to the web address

(4) Now find the link to the picture and navigate to it

In Google Chrome: Right click the picture and select "Open Image in New Tab"

In Safari: Right click the picture and select "Open Image in New Tab

In Firefox: Right click the picture and select "View Image"

(5) Edit the hyperlink address

In the address box of your web browser, you will see the image URL - looking something like this:

Now select everything in the address that is numeric before the .jpg extension:

Delete it, and delete any superfluous dots left behind - so in my example above I would have ended up with two dots because I didn't get my selection and delete quite right. I just want "dj.tciejzpb.jpg" as the filename.

Go to the URL (usually this can be done by hitting <Enter> on your keyboard)

(6) Copy and paste the picture into iTunes

You will now see the large iTunes artwork displayed on the web page. Simply copy and paste it into the iTunes entry for your movie:

You can do this by saving the image somewhere, then going into iTunes, right clicking the movie and selecting "Get Info" then the menu item "Artwork" and clicking on "Add..." and selecting the image you just saved.

That's it! Really simple.

I have on the odd occasion had some movies that don't work. It is usually during the Step 5, where I have the correct URL for the large picture but it just doesn't display anything or gives an error. It's happened once or twice. I usually go away for a bit and try again, and it works. It could be my browser, or some other reason, but it does work eventually...

So no need for extra software, or going to a database website - just go straight to the source!

Music - a word of caution

For some strange reason, this method doesn't work for Music. It does work for Movies and TV Shows. It's odd why it doesn't work, it just gives an error. It must be iTunes codes that artwork in some different way.

And finally...

It won't work if the movie isn't in iTunes (obviously). If that is the case, then Google images are your friend, or if you use Subler, that has a good array of artwork (Go to File / Import... / Search metadata online... then sort out the meta data and the next screen gives you a choice of artwork).

Please let me know if this is helpful by leaving a comment, or post a question and I'll try and answer it.

Google Chrome on iOS

What a great day today is. A momentous day. One I shall long remember... OK, perhaps that is a bit over the top, but I am very excited that whilst surfing the iTunes Store for the Blogger app (being used right now to type this on!) I came across Chrome that became available a few days ago.

So what's it like? Magic.

If you like Chrome on your desktop you will never go back to rotten old Safari again.

You get a similar look and feel to the desktop version. There's the tabs, the type in address box to search and the ability to sync your bookmarks and open tabs between your different Chrome sessions on different devices.

In addition there are some cool bits. First is the ability to swipe between tabs. When you do it, you wonder why nobody has thought of this before in the Safari team. Then there is the speak to search. Siri eat your heart put, understood me every time so far. Then there is the menu on the side that gives you the option to go Incognito ( like on the desktop where cookies aren't tracked) and the option to force the site to load the desktop version if the mobile one is too restrictive.

Both iPad and iPhone versions work well.

Sure, it's just a web browser. But for me it is the benchmark browser and thankfully it is now on iOS

Yamaha Synth Arp & Drum Pad Review

I'm a pretty big fan of Propellerheads' Figure for making quick and simple tunes on my iPhone or iPad (it has an Android release too). I will get round to writing a review at some point for it, but meanwhile, I had high hopes when I saw a Twitter post from the lovely people at Computer Music mag announcing Yamaha's new iPad app: Synth Arp & Drum Pad.

I was hoping that it would be simple enough to get pretty quickly, but have a few more options than Figure does - particularly when it came to creating and saving songs.

At this point, I should say that I've been sucked into music applications and apps since 1997 when I got my hands on a beta tool that would turn into Propellerheads' ReBirth. I've enjoyed using a few, but too many times been frustrated at how complex some of these applications could be. The birth of the tablet offered hope of a quick and easy music creation experience with touch.

The blurb on iTunes sounded good:

Synth Arp & Drum Pad is an iPad app with arpeggiator and drum pad that allows you to easily play the internal synthesizer or any connected MIDI device and produce music with phrases having an abundant variety of musical styles.
(The arpeggiator automatically plays the individual notes of a chord in a selected pattern.)

There are 342 arppegiator patterns that can play phrases from all kinds of music genres like dance music, hip-hop, rock, pops, with one finger.

I love arppegiators. Don't know how much of my life has gone in fiddling with them, but to have 342! Awesome!

The screen shots looked good too:

It looked like a good balance of synth parts and a programmable drum machine

Would Synth Arp & Drum Pad be that killer combination of easiness combined with power?

It started well. The arppegiator is great. You can lock the link between the voice and the arp sequences, or you can break the link and get some pretty wacky effects with the many voices included with the tool. I have to say, I spent a good hour just playing with all that and had a whale of a time!

The tricky bit came to the adjustments. For a start the touch sensitivity is woeful. When you turn the effect pots there is a noticeable lag, making real time or sensitive adjustments pretty much impossible. Transitioning notes during the arp sequences to create chord variations is hit and miss too. I found horrible missed cuts, even with quantization on, as the touch sensitivity just lagged behind.


Once you do get an adjustment going and hit the right notes at the right time you can make some killer leads and bases. Yamaha have put at lot of thought into the arp sequences, and as I said before, the voices are all pretty good.


On to the drum machine screen.


Again, started well. Nice array of sixteen pads. Bashing some of the demo notes revealed some good sounds. On with the programming. And here another hour was lost. But instead of a joyful hour, it was an hour of frustration trying to make the damn thing do what I wanted it to do.

OK - at this point I must point out my drum machine history. Roland. Sorry, it just doesn't get any better and I've never seen a reason to change my view on that. The TB sequencing and step sequencing come natural to me. Yamaha's interface didn't.

Now it might be me. it might be the Korg guys and the Yamaha guys, and even you Roland people out there, just get this interface and make beautiful patterns. I just didn't get it. The manual is rubbish, and was no real help.

You can assign a pad to be a sequence or a hit. The yellow ones in the picture above are sequences. Take a lot at the screenshot below:

When you edit a pad with a Seq that is what you see. The notation is flamming MIDI. I'm sorry, I'm sure lots of people like that, but as a Roland guy I like "House Bass" or "Techno Kick" and I like to rename them if I want to. And I know I can rename them in the Pad Edit bit. But seeing "C1" just means I have to muck about figuring what type of sound "C1" actually is. Life's too short...


The bars below are where the hit occurs in the 16 step sequencer. Just try getting that to work easily. You can see my pathetic attempt on the end of the bar to do a rolling kick. I just couldn't get the levels right and got fed up.


The final kick in the teeth was the measure panel. I thought I could edit each measure so that in four bars I could add variation. Nope. It is an indication of when the sounds are triggering. if you deselect 1,2,3 then the sounds only fire in bar 4. So if you want so variation between bars that has to be done on another pad. Grrr....


So would Synth Arp & Drum Pad be that killer combination of easiness combined with power?


Frankly - no

Sorry Yamaha. I'm sure this may turn out to be a great app, and probably is for some people, but just not for me.

I realise I haven't touched on other aspects of this app, but I got fed up with it. I love the arps, and will probably sample them or use them with another app in some way. The interface is not for me, and the drum machine is - well - pants.

Of course, this is my opinion. What do you think? Is it right up your street? Or do you agree with me?

Alternatives to Thinkfuse.com

Our organisation uses Thinkfuse.com, or rather, it did until the founders sold the company to SalesForce. Whilst they are "excited" about this news (whilst pocketing a few quid no doubt), it does leave those of us using their technology - well - a bit buggered.

You see, they are discontinuing the service. As soon as the calendar hits 25th July, 2012, they will wipe out the data. Lord knows why SalesForce doesn't want to keep the data, and just keep the service going, but it doesn't. So we are in a bit of a pickle.

Having looked for alternatives, I was quite shocked at how few there are on the market. Thinkfuse is so simple, so laughably simple, that I would have thought there would be loads of alternatives. It is basically a fairly poor web editor where you write up a report every week for your manager. You get some reminder emails, and the manager gets a nice dashboard to view your reports. Well, a simple dashboard at any rate.

If I were Theo on Dragon's Den, I'd be thinking "barrier to entry - zero - I'm out...". But it seems this market has passed by many web types. There are lots of heavy weight online tools out there, which have status reporting as part of projects, but not many that have team status updates.

Here's some I have found:

http://www.weeklydebrief.com/

This seems to be a recent tool, and is currently running in beta. This means it's free to sign up, although once it exits beta it will be a paid for service.

There is a short video tour that shows you around the product.

It is different to Thinkfuse in that team members submit their reports via email (in Thinkfuse there is a web-based interface to do this). Two emails are sent; one for "Things achieved" and a second for "Things planned". This many be a good way for your team to do this, if they are wedded to email, but if you are trying to encourage more collaborative tools, perhaps it's not for you.

The manager can then view a rather nice PDF report, that really looks quite flashy. It would certainly be very good to forward on to senior management "as is".

Of course, getting it to look that good for you will need nice photos of your team (tough if you run a development team) and a bit of design flair. Still, it's a good thing to have.

There are also iPhone and iPad interfaces if that floats your boat, as well as standard web interfaces.

http://www.simple-status.com/

This site is a bit more organised than Thinkfuse and Weeklydebrief. Employees are encouraged to organise their activities into categories, shown in the screen shot below:

As you can see, there are Goals, Tasks and Accomplishments. You can add your company's logo to the dashboard, as set preferences to see the information how it best suits you.

It's not too clear on the website how it works, but it appears that status reports are centred around the information in these three categories.

Again, different from the more freestyle entry in Thinkfuse, but may suit some better.

There is a short video to watch, to try and glean more information.

This is also in beta, which means it's free but is limited to 10 users in a team. It will convert to a paid for service at some point.

http://www.15five.com

If you scan to the comments below, you can see Shane  @ 15five got in touch suggesting his company's product. I checked out their website, and it didn't help me much, but have found some good reviews on the web which helped figure the product out.

15five is based on a simple concept; it should take team members up to 15 minutes to write their report and a manager 5 minutes to read it. The manager assigns questions which can be one line answer, multi line answers and so on. The employee gets an email notification and fills in the report on the web. The manager has a dashboard and can then review them.

There is an emphasis in hierarchies too. So in our example, once the manager gets his reports, he can submit a report to his director, who then submits his report to the CEO. That's quite a neat idea.

There is a 4 week trial period and the price is $99 a month for up to 20 employees.


For more information check out an thorough report over at appstorm and also an article from a real-life user over on the Inc. website. Also, email Shane who I'm sure would be happy to help out.

http://www.teamly.com

Many thanks to Scott who posted a comment telling me about his solution over at teamly.com.

Teamly gets you to enter your top 5 daily, weekly and monthly priorities (great for fans of the Nick Hornby novel High Fidelity!). Managers can see all the priorities set. Comments can be recorded by both managers and their reports. Priorities can be made private.

There is an ability to mark priorities according to their status, so the manager can see what everyone is doing. There is some basic reporting packaged too. For a user workflow, check out http://teamly.com/tour. A video tour is available from the home page.

There is a free to use, ad supported option or to remove the ads and access some more features for $8/mth per user.

I can see this being a good solution for some, but for others, it could feel like micro-managing if a boss insists on daily goal setting. The red / amber / green colour coding might induce panic in some employees, which might be a good or a bad thing!!

A word on the website - it's good and the information is well laid out - but strangely no menu options are available from the home page. Click through into the tour, and you get menu options for the pricing, testimonials, etc.

Others

I was also asked to check out siasto. It doesn't have the greatest website in the world, and what was quite odd was that in one screenshot someone seemed to be sharing with their team that they were going to fire someone. I suspect this breaks several EU working laws!

Anyhow, the tool does appear to be very project-oriented, so probably not for us.

Someone also recommended workflowy. This is a real "marmite" tool - people either love it or hate it. It seems most suited to keeping personal lists and sharing with friends/colleagues, rather than sharing them within a team hierachy. If you like lists, take a look. If you like mindmaps - avoid. It's not suited to replacing Thinkfuse, in my view, but you may think different.

I did look at binfire, but it is far too project-oriented and I also took a brief look at estatusreports, but it is software and quite complex, so not a simple, online tool.

Conclusions

Initially I found two comparable services, but as this blog has been read other services have been suggested. There still isn't a like-for-like competitor. which still amazes me, considering how successful Thinkfuse was. Whilst Thinkfuse was great, it was pretty simple and very easy to replicate better than they did it. Now it has gone the way of the Dodo, there is room for a simple tool to replace it.

The market seems to want to focus on helping people organise their worklists, rather than allow a sort-of brain dump. As such, there aren't any like-for-like replacements I can recommend. You are best checking out the ones above you think might be interesting and exploring from there, recognising they all force some kind of structured thinking.

Please let me know if you have any further alternatives. I'd love to hear about them!

N.B Company Websites

Small rant. Throughout this investigation, I have been amazed at how poor some of these websites were. All I wanted was some screenshots, some words on the features, maybe a short video, a pricing plan and a link to some reviews or testimonials. Only weeklydebrief and teamly actually had this (and teamly's is hidden!). The rest required looking for reviews on Google, or trying to work out from other articles how the thing worked. The websites were mainly moody photos and little content, insisting your signed up to see more.

Not everyone wants to sign up for a free trial just to see how a solution works!

Rant over...