The latest update to Mountain Lion may restore some MacBooks’ battery life, but the OS can also stop certain applications in their tracks. Meanwhile, Facebook’s iOS app gets a new lease on life, thanks to the injection of some native code. The remainders for Friday, August 24, 2012 have infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Mountain Lion update can improve battery life for some Mac notebooks (Ars Technica)
If you’ve been experiencing battery life issues since installing Mountain Lion, you may want to consult a physician—or, possibly, install the 10.8.1 update that dropped yesterday. According to Ars, some users say that the latest version of OS X has increased portable battery life, while others just claim that it’s revitalized their computers, restoring the MacBook’s healthy sheen.
Exceptional Apps (Red Sweater Blog)
Developer Daniel Jalkut uncovered an OS X capability that allows Apple to code exceptions in OS X for specific applications. Jalkut discovered the ability while trying to launch an older version of VMware Fusion on Mountain Lion—it turned out the two pieces of software no longer played together nicely. In theory, though, this could be abused by Apple for malicious purposes—such as playing a raspberry sound effect every time you launch Google Chrome.
Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS (Facebook)
Facebook software developer Jonathan Dann explains the under-the-hood changes in the latest revision of the Facebook iOS app. Long story short, the new version relies more on native iOS code than previous versions, which emphasized HTML5 Web views. Using native code has significantly improved performance in the app, making it that much faster to scroll past your friends’ constant engagement and baby announcements.