The update also bring other fixes. Users can download the update directly at the links below or by using the Software Update feature built into OS X, which you find under the Apple Menu.

The MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 2.3 not only enables the Internet recovery of Lion but also fixes a problem where the system might restart if you press the power button right after your computer wakes from a deep sleep. Get the update here.

If you have a 2010 MacBook Pro, then you get the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.6, which you can download from Apple’s support site. It only addresses the recovery feature. 2010 iMac’s get an update to version 1.8 with a download found here.

For those who might now remember, the Internet Recover feature of Lion creates a sector on the hard drive that runs a special operating system installation that will connect your computer to the Internet, download Lion from Apple’s servers, and install it on your computer. You don’t need to carry around a USB or DVD to recover your computer so long as your hard drive doesn’t stop functioning.

If you don’t have OS X Lion, you can purchase an upgrade in the Mac App Store for $29.99 to gain the ability to restore form the Internet and many other features. If you purchased your 2010 MacBook Pro as a refurbished unit from Apple, it may have come with the ability to upgrade for free.

Apple Updates 2010 MacBooks EFI Firmware for Internet Recovery is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

Apple took down that update after users said their systems became unstable and applications began crashing. As a result Apple now would rather have users update with a large 1.3GB file which they will have to manually download and apply instead of using Software Update from the Apple menu with OS X.

A second snafu came about when a security update caused problems with Rosetta, the virtual interface that runs older PowerPC applications on top of OS X made for Intel based Macs. Users can run older software that doesn’t run natively on the Intel compatible version of the Apple operating system. A second version of the security fix came out that shouldn’t break Rosetta.

Apple normally doesn’t send out updates that cause this much trouble, causing the folks at The Inquirer to speculate that Apple moved some quality control people over to the iOS. Apple released financial earnings showing that iOS provides a larger percentage of their earnings, so it would be natural that they would move people to that side of their business, the post says.

That’s highly speculative and we have no evidence this is true. One failure doesn’t make a pattern. It does mean that Apple needs watch their updates carefully if they don’t want to tarnish their previously good reputation for stability.

To get the new full 1.3GB update from Apple, download it or check out the support page with the “client combo” file.

Via The Inquirer

Apple Takes Down OSX Updates Due to Stability Issues is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

You can get the update by running Software Update from the Apple menu on your Mac or by going to iTunes.com on a Mac or PC to download the new version and install it yourself.

Here’s how Apple describes the update from Software Update:

iTunes 10.5.3 allows you to sync interactive iBooks textbooks to your iPad. These Multi-Touch textbooks are available for purchase from the iTunes Store on your Mac or from the iBookstore included with iBooks 2 on your iPad.

iBooks textbooks are created with iBooks Author — now available as a free download on the Mac App Store.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

iBooks received an update that lets you buy these new interactive textbooks announced at an Apple event today in New York City. The company released a new Mac OS X application in the Mac App Store to go along with this change. With iBooks Author you can create these multimedia-rich interactive textbooks and publish them to the iBooks bookstore. You can download the app for free.

In addition, a new iTunes U came out in app form. It combines the iTunes U lectures and podcasts that you downloaded from iTunes with some course tools in a single iPhone and iPad app you can get free from the iTunes App Store. Teachers can use the app to offer a syllabus, communication with students about things like schedules of classes and office hours, and it incorporates any notes or highlights you’ve added to the iBooks textbooks related to that course so you have all the material in one place ready for studying.

iTunes Update Syncs New iBooks Textbooks with Your Computer is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

[Please read How to Get the Most Out of Lion's Launchpad]

I’ve got a tip for you that includes involves blowing away all the icons with one single Terminal command and then adding back only the ones you want by dragging them from the Applications folder in Finder to your Launchpad icon in the Dock.

To start, open the Terminal app and enter the following command by copying it and then pasting it into Terminal:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db “DELETE from apps; DELETE from groups WHERE title<>”; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;”; Killall Dock

Now, all of your Launchpad icons will be gone. If this freaks you out and you want them all back, you can do so by entering the following Terminal command:

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db; killall Dock

That reverses the action and puts them all right back to their default locations.

The next step is to add back the icons you want. Open the Applications folder and then select all the apps you do want back in Launchpad.

If you want certain apps in a folder, then do this step in parts. First, select the apps you want to have grouped into one folder in Launchpad by doing a Command + Click on each app icon in the Applications folder you want in your Launchpad folder. Then drag those onto the Launchpad icon in the Dock. To create the folder in Launchpad drag one icon onto another, which creates a folder. Keep dragging the other icons onto the folder to group them all into one folder. Now repeat this step to create another folder of icons. Keep doing it till you have all the apps you want in folders. The last group of icons dragged onto the Launchpad Dock icon will be those you don’t want in folders.

You now have a nicely grouped collection of icons in Launchpad, making it cleaner and easier to find your favorite apps. Now, if only you could launch Launchpad and use it as the default OS X interface.

Source: MacWorld

Quickly Clean Out and Organize OS X’s Launchpad is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

The new Hitachi powered G-RAID and G-DRIVE external hard drives with Thunderbolt connectivity are aimed at answering this need with a combination of offerings up to 4TB of external storage with a Thunderbolt connection.

G-Technology drives from Toshiba are powered by the 1TB Travelstar 5K1000 and the 4TB Deskstar 7K4000 drives which are packaged into a portable enclosure with a Thunderbolt port and designed to work with Mac products like the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and MacBook Air.

The drives are ready to go with Macs out of the box, including Time Machine support, and can be used on Windows machines with a short setup process.

The G-RAID is now available with Thunderbolt connectivity.

The new G-RAID and G-DRIVE external hard drive enclosures are similar to the previous models, but thanks to the Thunderbolt connection, Mac users can enjoy much faster file transfers. If you have other ports, don’t worry, you’ll find a full complement of ports including  3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 via included cable) and USB2.0 ports.

Hitachi shares the following descriptions of the new drives for professional creatives.

G-RAID – The G-Technology G-RAID is a blazing fast, dual drive RAID 0 storage solution with capacities up to 8TB. Ideal for professional content creators, it supports simultaneous playback of multiple layers of HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD and ProRes 422 HQ with the leading video editing applications including Final Cut Pro™, Adobe® Premiere® and many more. The G-RAID solution is capable of delivering up to 200 MB/second transfer rate when connected to any Mac or PC via eSATA. Its soft-touch On/Off switch and thermo-regulated “smart” fan keeps the G-RAID reliable, cool and quiet in the editing suite.

G-DRIVE – The G-Technology G-DRIVE is a professional strength external hard drive in a single-drive desktop solution. With capacities now up to 4TB, G-DRIVE is the perfect high-performance solution for storage intensive applications including A/V editing, digital photography, music libraries, and high-speed data backup. The drive features a fan-less cooling system for a quiet operation. The 4TB G-Technology G-DRIVE will be shipping in limited quantities in Q1’12.

Look for the new drives to ship in the first quarter of 2012. The 8TB G-RAID will retail at $899, while the G-DRIVE will retail for $449.99 for 4TB, $349.99 for 3TB, $249.99 for 2TB and $199.99 for 1TB.

Hitachi G-RAID with Thunderbolt Adds 4TB of Snappy Storage to Macs is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

After installing and running Tunesque, you have a new menu bar item that looks like a magnifying glass with a musical note in it. Click the icon and you get a search box that looks just like the Spotlight search box. Type your search string into the box and after a brief pause a menu will drop down from the search box showing you a list of items it found in both stores grouped by category.

The tiny Settings icon at the end of the entry box lets you change how the program works. Hit Preferences to change what kinds of things it will find.

Here’s what it returns in each search by default:

• Music
• Movies
• TV Shows
• Artists
• Mac Apps
• iOS Apps
• eBooks
• Audiobooks
• Podcasts
• iTunes U

Turn them off by unchecking them in the Preferences. Other customizations available include a dark (see above) or light (see below) interface, the ability to create a keystroke to invoke the search box, changing your country’s results, and a check box that I hope will one day let you tell the app to start up when you log into your computer. Right now, even if you check that box, it fails. I’m sure they will likely fix this in the future.

The menu of results breaks them down by category. Keystrokes let you expand each category of results. Music will expand by default. Hit Command+2 and you see all the movies it finds. Command+3 returns TV Shows and so on, depending on whether you turn them on/off in the preferences. Hover over an item and a description pops out with the star rating, price and an icon for the item.

I love the ability to quickly search both stores without even having to open them. Unfortunately, as we said above, the app doesn’t open at login now. In addition, when your search would normally produce more than a nine items, you won’t see them in the drop down menu. Tunesuqe limits the results. At first it only shows a handful of results, but if you hit the keystroke to expand a category it will show more. One example: I searched Christmas and it returned only a few Christmas songs. I know there are hundreds of Christmas songs in the iTunes store. When I entered Command+1 to expand the song category it showed many more songs, but it still only gives the top songs in the store.

I wish the app would let you click on the category so you could open the corresponding store and search just that category for that search string without doing another search. Instead, it only opens the store to that item’s page after you click the item in the resulting list.

The app has room to improve, but for now I like it and will keep it open most of the time. It’s great for finding a specific app or song quickly in either store. Fortunately, the free price tag means you can try it out yourself and see if you like it. Get it in the Mac App Store where it has a four of five-star rating, which I think is fair.

Tunesque Unifies iTunes and Mac App Store Search is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

“This update fixes critical issues and also helps to improve security. It includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, please visit the Microsoft Web site.”

Office 2011 includes Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The new version will be 14.1.4 and updates Office 2011 Service Pack 1. It comes in at a whopping 377.7 MB, so be patient if you’re on a slow connection.

To get the update, just open one of your Office 2011 programs and click on Help and then Check for Updates or you can go to the Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac website. An auto updater will download first and then the critical patch will be downloaded by the auto updater.

Microsoft Office 2011 Updated with Security and Bug Fixes is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

Most commonly theses systems are referred to as a hackintosh, aka a hacked Mac. There are a number of guides out there for building your own hackintosh mini or hackintosh desktop, but if you want to run OS X on a notebook or laptop you need to be careful which notebook you purchase.

Because this is a hack, you can’t always guarantee perfect results, but with a little bit of research, you can find compatible laptops and notebooks.

The best resource I have found is the OS X 86 Project Wiki. Here, you can find compatible OS X Laptops. You can see which laptops work with which versions of OS X from Snow Leopard to Lion. These notebooks claim to have been tested by contributors to ensure that they work with OS X.

Each of these listings will tell you what system components work, and which need special configurations. Before you buy one of these notebooks, I highly suggest searching the model name and hackintosh to see how smooth the process is for other people. Also, look closely at the final model numbers, as small variances in parts can cause issues. Wireless is often not working, or requires much fussing about.

Below you can see a user who has gotten OS X Lion running on his HP G62-b53SE notebook. You can check out the YouTube description for more details on how he got OS X Lion running on an HP laptop.

If you can use a smaller screen, netbooks often offer easier compatibility with OS X. The Dell Mini 10V was a perfect netbook to hackintosh, but has been discontinued. There are other netbooks out there that are able to function as a hackintosh, which you can see on the Mac OS X netbook compatibility page, a portion of which are listed below.

The basic installation process for OS X can be performed by most tech savvy users. If you aren’t comfortable messing around with files to get the machine working, a hackintosh laptop may not be for you. You can get a feel for the installation process at the OS X 86 Project Installation Guides.

It is important to avoid automatic updates, which could break your system. Keep in mind that if you don’t purchase a copy of OS X Lion from Apple, you are pirating software, which has the potential to land you in trouble.

How to Find a Hackintosh Notebook That Runs OS X Lion is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

The update to Safari includes the following:

• Addresses issues that cause hangs and excessive memory usage
• Addresses issues that could cause webpages to flash white
• Allows PDFs to be displayed within web content

The update brings the version number of Safari to 5.1.2 and contains 40.2MB of data.

The update to Keynote fixes a problem caused by using rather large Keynote presentations while working in OS X Lion and brings Keynote’s version number to 5.1.1 with the 35.2 MB update.

You can get these updates through the Software Update item on the Apple menu in OS X. The Keynote update will show up on the Mac App Store if that’s where you bought your copy of Keynote. You can also get the update via Apple’s website (Keynote update, Safari Update).

The Windows iCloud Control Panel also got an update. The update brings compatibility with the above Safari update if you are running Windows. It requires Vista or higher and brings the version number to 1.0.1 in a 40.03MB update.

Apple Pushes Minor Updates to Safari, Keynote & Windows iCloud is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

If you’ve used DropBox or SugarSync, then you know of the beauty of putting a file in a folder on one computer and having it show up on another computer without having to do anything other than signing up for an account and installing the software. Now you can get the same functionality in Lion without installing their app or using up the limited amount of storage you have available via those services.

The magic folder resides in your hidden Library folder. You can go one of two routs – un-hide the Library folder to open up some interesting usefulness or just navigate to the folder using the Go menu in Finder. But first, let’s make sure you have iCloud files sync turned on.

Go to System Preferences and click on iCloud. Make sure there’s a check box next to Documents and Data.

Now you have a choice to make. Do you want to un-hide the Library folder? We have a How To on that you can follow. If you don’t want to bother, then open Finder and click the Go menu. Type in the following:

~/Library/

This will open the hidden folder. Find the Mobile Documents folder. If for some reason you don’t see one, you can create the special folder, but not by the traditional means of just making a new folder in Finder. You have to open an iWork app like Pages and create an iWork document. To do that just open Pages, Numbers or Keynote. Create a new document and click the Share menu and choose Share via iWork.com.

After sharing the document, the folder will be created with Apple’s magic sauce for syncing between all of your Macs.

Now, just make an Alias to that folder somewhere. I dragged the folder to the FAVORITES list along the left side of the Finder Window.

Now any file you save to that folder will automatically sync to your other Macs, if they have iCloud Documents & Data turned on in Settings. You may want to repeat these steps on other Macs to ensure they all have the folder setup and an easily accessible shortcut to it configured.

Using this solution in place of DropBox or SugarSync means you don’t get cloud based backup or web browser access to the files from another location. For quick and dirty sync of a file this works better than the woefully horrible AirDrop feature. I can see using this to quickly move a file to another computer that you don’t really need ongoing access to after your done with it.

Thanks to Apple Insider for the idea.

How To Use the Built-in DropBox-Style Sync in Mac OS X Lion is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.