Computing

Comparing the iPhone 5 with the Nokia 100

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Nokia 100 and Apple iPhone 5

At the moment, I’m one of those annoying people who has two mobile phones. There’s my own Apple iPhone 5, and I also have use of a brand new Nokia 100.

Clearly the iPhone 5 is the better phone – or is it? There are actually several ways that the Nokia 100 is better than the iPhone:

  1. Battery life. All smartphones have pretty poor battery life, with their high resolution colour screens, GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G support all putting strain on the battery. The iPhone 5 claims up to 225 hours – just over 9 days – standby, although most users will find they’ll need to charge it at least every other night. The Nokia 100, on the other hand, can last for over a month on standby from one charge – 35 days is claimed. That being said, the iPhone 5 claims 8 hours of talk time as opposed to the Nokia’s 6.7 hours.
  2. Smaller size. The Nokia 100 is shorter and narrower than the iPhone 5, although it is significantly thicker.
  3. User-replaceable battery. If the battery in your iPhone dies, then you’ll need to get it replaced by a professional. The Nokia 100, on the other hand, allows you to change the battery with ease, and you can even keep a spare charged battery to swap in.
  4. FM Radio. A data connection will let you listen to radio stations on your iPhone, but the Nokia 100 keeps it simple with a built-in FM radio.
  5. Torch. I’m sure there are apps out there that will allow you to use the flash LED on the back of your iPhone as a torch, however, the Nokia 100 includes a small LED in the top that can be used as a reasonably effective flashlight.
  6. Cheap. You can get a Nokia 100 on a pay-as-you-go tariff for only £10.

Of course, that’s about it. In every other way, the iPhone 5 is a better phone – it’s easier to use, with more features and better build quality.

How to use Google Sync without using Exchange

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In a blog post on its official blog called ‘Winter cleaning‘, Google announced that it was shutting down some of its services. They are all features which have either been replaced with something (supposedly) better, or are only used by a small number of people and are therefore not worth keeping. This includes Google Sync, which allows the use of Microsoft Exchange protocols for synchronising Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar.

Unfortunately, Exchange is what myself and a number of others use on the iPhone, as it’s the easiest way to synchronise mail, contacts and calendars at the same time. Now Google isn’t dropping Exchange support completely – users of Gmail and free Google Apps accounts (which recently closed to new sign-ups) can continue using it but won’t be able to set it up on new devices; paid Google Apps users will be able to carry on with no problems.

But it’s clear that Exchange support is not a priority for non-paying users like me and so it’s probably best to look at alternatives. Google is, refreshingly, pushing open standards instead – IMAP for email, CalDAV for calendars and CardDAV for contacts. Luckily for iPhone users like me, Apple supports all three, although Windows Phone users aren’t so lucky.

So, here’s how to replace your Exchange-based Google settings with IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV:

Step 1: Remove the Exchange account

Open Settings, choose Mail, Contacts and Calendars, select your Google Account which is using Exchange, and then select Delete Account. This will remove all contacts, calendars and emails that have been synchronised so I would ensure you have backed your phone up first, just in case there are any problems.

Step 2: Set up a new Gmail account

You should now add your Gmail account in the standard way, by choosing ‘Add Account’ in Mail, Contacts and Calendars and then tapping the Gmail logo. This will set up email and calendar sync, using IMAP and CalDAV respectively, but not contacts.

Step 3: Set up a CardDAV account to synchronise contacts

Going back to the ‘Add Account’ screen, tap ‘Other’ and then ‘Add CardDAV Account’. In server, enter ‘google.com’, your Google Account username and password, and a description – I called mine ‘Google Contacts’.

Now, open the Mail, Contacts and Calender apps on your iPhone in turn to download the data again, which may take a couple of minutes. And then that’s it – you should be back to where you started.

If you find that some of your calendars are missing, open Mobile Safari and browse to https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect – this will allow to select which calendars are synchronised over CalDAV. The changes will take effect the next time you open the Calendars app, after a few seconds.

These instructions are a bit long-winded and it would be nice if the iPhone’s Gmail support included Contacts as well (which would make step 3 unnecessary). However, considering Apple’s uneasy relationship with Google of late I can’t see this being a priority for them, especially as these features duplicate Apple’s iCloud.

Printer sharing with VirtualBox on a Mac

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This blog post will probably be only be useful to a small niche. If you have a Mac, with a printer, and run Windows in VirtualBox, here’s what you need to do to get it to work.

Step 1: Make sure your printer is shared on the network

On your Mac, open System Preferences, choose Print & Scan, and then select your device on the list on the left. Tick ‘Share this printer on the network’.

Step 2: Check network settings for your virtual machine

In the VirtualBox manager, open your Windows virtual machine’s settings, and under Network, ensure you’re using ‘Bridged Adaptor’ rather than ‘NAT’. This will make your life much, much easier later on.

Step 3: Install and set up your printer using Bonjour

Bonjour ships on all Macs, but not on Windows, which is a shame because it makes setting up network connections much easier. Thankfully, Apple offers a cut-down version for Windows computers, so download Bonjour Print Services for Windows, and install it. This will add a ‘Bonjour Printer Wizard’ icon to your desktop.

Run the Bonjour Printer Wizard. If you’ve done the first two steps correctly, your printer should be listed. Click Next, and, if you’re lucky, Bonjour will install the correct driver and add the printer to Windows for you. Sorted. If not, then…

Step 4: Install the printer driver in Windows

Sometimes Bonjour won’t be able to identify which printer driver you need and will ask you to select it. Again, if you’re lucky, your printer will be one of those that Windows ships with, but if not, you may reach an impasse here. Some people have had luck with using a driver that is similar to their printer, but this doesn’t always work.

Instead, we’ll connect the printer directly to Windows to convince it to install the driver that way. VirtualBox lets you bridge any USB device which is plugged into your Mac, so that the virtual machine can see it. Turn your printer on, and then whilst Windows is running, click on the Devices menu in VirtualBox, select USB devices, and then choose your printer. Windows should detect that the printer is now ‘plugged in’, and so it will install the necessary drivers. Complete the installation, disconnect your printer using VirtualBox and then shut down both your virtual machine, and your Mac, to ensure that your printer is correctly picked up by your Mac on the next boot.

Start your Mac again, and then open Windows in VirtualBox, and try to run the Bonjour Printer Wizard again. Hopefully, this time you’ll be able to select your printer driver from the lists when presented (annoyingly it’s not searchable).

This still didn’t work for my printer, so I had to do one final trick. I clicked ‘Have Disk’, and then browsed to the c:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository folder, then sorted the sub-folders by date. My printer is by HP, and one of the newly-created gobbledegook folders had ‘HP’ in the title which turned out to be my printer. I selected this, and was finally able to get the printer working, with the above test page as proof.

Why not just connect the printer directly?

In step 4, I mentioned you can simply connect your printer directly to the virtual machine, thus avoiding the dilly-dallying around with Bonjour. This works, but it’s flaky; once you’ve connected your printer to Windows, you may need to reboot your Mac before any Mac applications can print to it. Whilst setting up Bonjour is more effort initially, once it’s done, you should find it easier to work with.

If anyone’s interested, I went through all of this because I wanted to print out a coupon for a free one litre carton of grape juice and couldn’t get the Coupon Printer to work correctly on my Mac.

Windows 8 Installation Experience

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A screenshot of Windows 8 being installed on a VirtualBox virtual machine running on a Mac

On Saturday, I decided to upgrade to Windows 8. I’ve been running a virtual machine with Windows Vista Business for some time, firstly in Parallels Desktop but later converted to VirtualBox. I never bothered upgrading to Windows 7 due to the lack of differences between the two; obviously 7 is a big upgrade from XP but not from Vista.

Another major factor is that, at the moment, existing Windows XP, Vista and 7 users can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for a mere £24.99 as a digital download, or more if you need it on DVD. It’s a very good deal, but it’s only valid until early next year. And since I’d also heard that Windows 8 should run faster on the same hardware, upgrading seemed like a really good idea.

To upgrade, you should download the Upgrade Assistant which checks your current installation for compatibility and then downloads the files. You can then either proceed with the upgrade, or save an ISO file to a USB drive or DVD-ROM. I decided to proceed, but told the installer not to keep any of my documents or settings; after all, it was a virtual machine and anything important had been saved to Dropbox and was therefore available elsewhere.

This turned out to be a mistake, frankly. It installed the files, restarted a couple of times, and then froze. No animation, no CPU activity, no disk activity. So, I hard reset the virtual machine. At which point, setup decided that the installation had failed, and set about restoring Windows Vista. So, after a few hours, I was back at square one.

This time, I told the installer to save the ISO file, which I placed in a shared folder so it was accessible by my Mac as well. I then shut down the virtual machine, and created a fresh, new VM in VirtualBox with the optimal Windows 8 settings. Bear in mind that my previous VM was originally a Parallels VM, was then converted to the VMWare format, and then used with VirtualBox 2; now I’m on VirtualBox 4.2. I mounted the ISO file mounted as the CD drive, booted up, followed the instructions, and within the hour I was up and running with Windows 8. Success!

…or so I thought. Opening the ‘classic’ desktop environment saw the little icon for the Windows Action Centre pop up, telling me I needed to activate Windows – which was odd because I had entered the product key during installation. So I re-entered it, only for Windows to pop up a 0xC004F601 error, telling me that the product key was only valid for upgrades and not a clean installation like this one.

Some expletives were issued by me at this point, but thankfully Google saved my sanity as I found this blog post which explained a workaround. I had to edit the registry to change a value, re-run the activation manager and then reboot, but after this Windows activated with no problems. Phew.

Obviously I still have the old Windows Vista VM lying around but as that license is now invalid due to the upgrade I’ll be deleting it. That, and I shouldn’t need it anyway.

I’ll write more about my actual experiences of using Windows 8 when I’ve had a longer opportunity to use it. So far, it seems okay, and the ‘classic’ desktop is almost exactly the same as Windows 7. I’ll have to play with the new desktop (formally known as ‘Metro’) a little more before passing judgement.

iBought a new iPhone

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iPhone 4, meet iPhone 5

So my new iPhone 5 has finally come. It’s not quite the model I was intending – I had ordered a black 16 GB model, but an order mix-up with 3 meant that I didn’t receive it as planned on Friday and after talking with a very nice person at customer services I ended up with a white 64 GB model, at no extra cost. I’d have preferred a black one, but I can’t argue with getting four times the space for the same price. I’ve saved in the region of £150 as a result.

Because I backed up my iPhone 4 to iCloud, when it came to setting up my iPhone 5 I just needed to connect to wi-fi, give it my iCloud login and tell it to restore from the cloud backup. This meant that all of my settings and apps would be automatically installed, just as they were on the old handset, which saved a huge amount of time getting the phone set up. It wasn’t totally smooth – stored passwords didn’t seem to copy, for example, and some apps like Pocket needed re-installing – but much better than starting from scratch. In particular, my progress on games such as Angry Birds was carried over, to my relief. Many of the apps I use regularly, like the aforementioned Tweetbot and Pocket, have been updated for the new larger display, but older apps do work okay. Apple did a good job of implementing the letterbox mode for these.

Physically the new phone is much nicer to hold – it’s noticeably lighter and thinner, and the edges don’t feel as sharp as they do on the iPhone 4. You can still use it easily with one hand too, unlike the wider screens on some Android phones which require you to change hands to reach far off corners of the display. The new Lightning connector is nice, although I’m a little less happy at the prospect of forking out £15 for an extra cable; plus, with 2 iPods and an iPhone 4 in our household we’ve no shortage of the old cables. I’ll also need to look into buying a case for the iPhone 5, as Apple haven’t released any bumpers for this model like they did for the 4 and 4S, nor do they sell any third party cases in Apple Stores, as Dave found out.

The new phone is much more responsive than my old one – apps work faster, especially Foursquare and Tweetbot. Support for HSPA+ also makes web pages download more quickly, and provides a small speed jump ahead of 3 rolling out 4G LTE services next year.

I’ve also had a play with Siri – I’m quite impressed that it understands almost everything I say (I have a northern accent) although it can’t always find data. I asked it about a local rugby league team, Bradford Bulls, and it interpreted it as the Chicago Bulls. For information about local places it uses Yelp, which is rather rubbish in the UK – searching for a nearby Nando’s found one in Leeds but not the two in Bradford which were much closer to me at the time.

All in all, I’m really impressed. Whilst it’s definitely an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary device, it’s a clear improvement over the iPhone 4.

First Thunderbird, now Sparrow…

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The logo for the Sparrow email client in Google's colours.

I’m not having a good time with email clients. Earlier this month we learned that Thunderbird would not get any major feature updates in future (development will continue but Mozilla has reduced Thunderbird’s resources). And now Sparrow, my favoured email client on Mac OS X and on my iPhone, has been acquired by Google.

This may not sound like bad news but, alas, this is a ‘talent acquisition’ – a bit like when Facebook bought Gowalla last year. In other words, the people behind Sparrow will be working on new projects at Google, specifically on the Gmail teams, and won’t be doing any further work on Sparrow itself – this was confirmed by a Google spokesperson to Macstories. We can expect ongoing support for Sparrow, but no new features.

The Mac OS X version is reasonably complete in terms of features – in fact, it has just been updated for the new Retina displays in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, and presumably will work with Mountain Lion without any problems. As for the iOS version, it can do almost everything that the stock email client for the iPhone can do (and more), but with the notable exception of push notifications of new email messages. This was likely to be a premium feature due to how push notifications work on iOS with background apps. Presumably, today’s announcement means that this won’t be forthcoming; similarly, a rumoured iPad app is now unlikely to be released.

Whilst I’m happy for Sparrow’s developers to be recognised for their talent, and presumably Google were able to give them an offer that they could not refuse, this potentially leaves Sparrow’s users in the lurch. Of course, there’s a limit to what you can do with what was always intended to be a simple email client – part of the reason for the slowdown of Thunderbird development – but the iOS client in particular showed a lot of promise that now won’t be realised.

The likelihood of Sparrow finding a new home in Google was slim in any case; Google doesn’t tend to do much in the way of desktop software (Chrome, Drive, Earth and Picasa are the only major exceptions) and there’s already an official Gmail app for iOS, which has been updated recently and, crucially, supports push notifications. And keeping Sparrow going at Google whilst its developers focus on other things would have been a distraction.

I hope that, instead, Sparrow offer to sell the branding rights and source code to somebody else, to keep it going. Or, better yet, make it open source, so that the community can keep it going. On iOS, the jailbreak community have already written various enhancements, such as Sparrow+.

I suppose I’ll have to investigate Apple’s own Mail app in Mountain Lion. I tried to use it recently as an alternative to Thunderbird, but in Lion it feels over-complicated and poorly designed.

Addendum: There’s an interesting post from Elezea which I also agree with.

The technical superiority of Dropbox

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Icons for cloud storage services

Although I’ve made a few edits to my SkyDrive vs Dropbox vs Google Drive blog post from last week, I haven’t gone into much detail about some of the more technical aspects of the services. Dropbox, being the more mature of the three, has some clever tricks up its sleeves which Google Drive doesn’t have, and SkyDrive also appears to lack too.

LAN sync

LAN sync is a DropBox feature that will share files between computers on the same network. If you have Dropbox open and signed in to the same account on two computers on the same network, and save a file into your Dropbox folder on one computer, then as well as uploading that file to Dropbox’s servers, that computer will also send the file to your other computer over the network. This is much quicker than the other computer waiting for the file to be uploaded to Dropbox’s servers to download it again, and saves on your bandwidth. Google Drive doesn’t have LAN sync, and I don’t think SkyDrive does either.

Sadly, LAN sync only works between desktop computers; if you save a file on your iPhone, it won’t appear on your desktop until your desktop has downloaded it from Dropbox’s servers, even if you have Wifi enabled on your iPhone.

Delta syncing

If you edit a file that’s already in your Dropbox, Dropbox will detect which bits of the files have changed, and then only upload those changes. Google Drive isn’t quite so intelligent and will just upload the whole file again. So if you have a 750 MB high definition video in your Dropbox, and change some of the metadata in the file’s header, Dropbox may only need to upload a few kilobytes (and other computers on your Dropbox account will only need to download those few kilobytes too). Google Drive will instead upload the whole 750 MB file again. Coupled with the lack of LAN sync, as mentioned above, that’s a lot of bandwidth being used unnecessarily.

Duplicate file detection

If you put two identical copies of a file in your Dropbox folder, Dropbox will detect that they’re the same and just upload one copy, but make sure that both copies are on its servers (note that both copies will count towards your total storage space). Google Drive will still upload both files regardless of the fact that they contain the exact same data.

Resurrecting deleted files

Dropbox keeps a file history going back 30 days, meaning you can recover deleted files and also revert to older versions of existing files. Google Drive doesn’t appear to let you revert file versions but deleted items go in a trash folder. But Dropbox is also clever about deleted files. Say you have a file in your Dropbox folder, which you then drag to the Recycle Bin; Dropbox will delete the file, but let you recover it on the web if you wish; but also, if you undelete that file on your desktop and put it back into your Dropbox, Dropbox will detect that the file was already on its servers and just make the file live again – it won’t need to upload it again.

Memory efficient desktop client

Client name32/64-bitIdle CPU UsageReal memory usageVirtual memory usage
Dropbox32-bit0 %41.7 MB56.6 MB
Google Drive32-bit1.5 %61.7 MB64.6 MB
SkyDrive64-bit0.3 %17.1 MB22.5 MB

I ran all three clients at the same time and compared their performance using Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor. SkyDrive is arguably the clear winner here – although it uses a little more CPU than Dropbox, its memory usage is tiny, and it’s the only one of the three to take advantage of OS X’s code operations for 64-bit applications. Google Drive is a hog by comparison, using almost 3 times more memory than SkyDrive and much more CPU – and this is whilst idle, i.e. not syncing files. Furthermore, this is despite not having the advanced features that Dropbox has.

Obviously Google Drive is new and it’s likely that future releases will reach closer feature parity with Dropbox, but right now, Dropbox is technically superior than Google Drive, thus working faster and saving your bandwidth. I haven’t looked into SkyDrive as much as I possibly should have and will revisit this post when I have more information.

Much of the information for this article is sourced from this post on Dropbox’s foums.

Distracted by a Pictionary clone

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A screenshot of the game Draw Something. The drawing is a crude depiction of a king on a throne and the word is 'throne'.

So I would have blogged more this week, but I’ve been spending my time playing Draw Something. I’m sure the novelty will wear off, and I sort-of agree with TechCrunch’s analysis – i.e. it sucks – but right now it’s rather addictive. The use of push notifications is a stroke of genius.

We probably all know by now that the game’s creators, OMGPOP, have just been bought out by Zynga, creators of FarmVille, for millions of dollars. Which would have probably been unthinkable merely a few weeks ago, when the game was only playable online and maybe only had a few thousand players. Then it launched on iPhone and Android, and suddenly millions of people have downloaded it. It’s currently the biggest-selling paid-for app on Apple’s App Store, especially now that it’s available for 99 cents (69p) for a limited time.

SkyDrive vs Dropbox

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Update (April 2012): I have since written a new article comparing SkyDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive which is more up to date. You are best reading that guide, rather than this one, as some of the information about SkyDrive mentioned below is now wrong, although I’m keeping it here for reference.

Sunset Sky

If you’re like me, you’ll have a free Dropbox account for keeping files in sync between multiple computers, as well as having documents available on demand wherever there’s an internet connection, or on your mobile phone. Here’s my referral link. It’s a good, simple service that works well, and it’s free – although you can pay for more storage.

Microsoft has been working on a competitor called Windows Live SkyDrive which also offers integration with its Office Live suite of web apps. There’s now also an iPhone app (and presumably a Windows Phone app as well). Plus, with up to 25 GB of free storage, it starts to compare quite favourably with Dropbox. So, which is best?

Storage space

On the face of it, SkyDrive wins – 25 GB versus 2 GB for a plain vanilla free Dropbox account. However, it’s quite easy to get more space on Dropbox – you should be able to manage at least another 1 GB for free, and with a bit of effort even more – some have even taken to buying AdWords campaigns for around $20 to get up to 16 GB. And whereas Dropbox lets you use all of your space for anything, with SkyDrive, you can only use up to 5 GB to synchronise between computers using its Live Mesh service (more on that later). The other 20 GB has to be used via web uploads, iPhone app, Microsoft Office or Office Live. On this basis, it’s a draw.

Platform support

Dropbox has official clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, plus mobile clients for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Its open API means that unofficial clients are available for further platforms as well. SkyDrive is available on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion – i.e. not available for Windows XP or Linux; alternatively you can access specific documents in Microsoft Office, on the web or on a mobile app. And as yet, SkyDrive doesn’t work on Android or any Linux desktops, nor is there an open API for third-party developers to use.

Simplicity

Dropbox’s main draw is simplicity – there’s one folder that gets synced on all of your computers, and you can also access this folder online or on a mobile app. As mentioned, with SkyDrive you can only sync up to 5 GB; furthermore, those synced folders then cannot be edited by Office Live apps, so it’s a bit more complex. Plus there’s the whole confusion between the SkyDrive and Mesh products.

I could go on, but frankly having reviewed both services Dropbox wins purely by being simple and ubiquitous. SkyDrive does give you more space for free, and also integrates well with Hotmail if you use it, but it also adds a layer of complexity by only letting you use a portion of your allowance for syncing files between desktops. And because the un-synced portion doesn’t mount as a folder on your desktop, you can’t save files to it directly, so really it’s only useful for more long-term storage, or files that aren’t edited frequently. I’ll therefore be sticking with Dropbox.

The state of MacFUSE & NTFS-3G on OS X Lion

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So I’ve been running Mac OS X Lion (10.7) for a week now, and it’s mostly been fine – most programs run okay and others have had minor updates to improve compatibility. However, there’s some flakiness with MacFUSE and in particular the NTFS-3G package which allows read-write access to hard drives formatted with the NTFS file system.

(If you’re short of time, scroll down to the ‘So what are the options’ section.)

Firstly, a bit of MacFUSE history…

MacFUSE was a project to allow file system packages designed for the Linux FUSE project, which in turn allowed file systems to be loaded in ‘user space’ rather than requiring extensions to the operating system kernel, to be run on Mac OS X. This meant that FUSE did all of the kernel work, thus much simplifying the development of file systems. MacFUSE wasn’t a port of FUSE – it’s a separate project that happens to be compatible with existing FUSE file system packages. It was also developed by a Google employee in his 20% time, i.e. the time that Google allows engineers to set aside for their own projects.

Now, the latest official release of MacFUSE was version 2.0.3,2 which is 32-bit and designed for Leopard, i.e. Mac OS X 10.5. We’re now on Lion, and there hasn’t been a subsequent official release even for Snow Leopard, nevermind Lion. Version 2.0.3,2 ran okay on Snow Leopard provided you used the default 32-bit kernel, but in Lion, the kernel task is 64-bit.

Thankfully, some other developers have picked up the baton – in particular Tuxera, who offer a commercial solution for running NTFS on a Mac. It seems to work fine on Lion, even with a 64-bit kernel. Alternatively, there’s a fork called OSXFUSE, which is in beta at time of writing, although if you want to use OSXFUSE you will need to remove MacFUSE first.

NTFS support

Lion, like other versions of Mac OS X that have come before it, supports read-only access to NTFS disks when a product like MacFUSE isn’t installed. This means that you can read files from an NTFS-formatted disk, but you can’t modify or delete existing files or copy new ones to it. It’s a shame that Apple still hasn’t unveiled official read/write support for NTFS after all these years.

Currently, the only free software I’m aware of for enabling read/write access to NTFS drives is NTFS-3G. The most recent binary release is from October 2010, and whilst this does work on Lion, even with MacFUSE 2.2 you will encounter errors when mounting the disk – namely that it’s taken more than 15 seconds to do so. However, once it is mounted, it seems to work okay, although admittedly I’ve only been working with a seldom-used external drive and not a drive where I expect strong read/write performance.

If you fancy compiling code from source, or have MacPorts, you can get a newer version released in April 2011 which may or may not work better – I haven’t tried it yet.

So what are the options?

There are basically four options you can choose, if you use NTFS drives on your Mac:

  1. Don’t upgrade to Lion just yet. If everything works fine now, you may wish to stay with Snow Leopard until there’s a new binary release of NTFS-3G. Lion is still very new and there aren’t many third-party applications taking advantage of its new features as yet.
  2. Use NTFS-3G and MacFUSE 2.2 as before. In my experience it works, but you do get an error each time your disk is mounted (which could be on every boot up for some) and it is slow at mounting the disk. If you’re reliant on an NTFS drive you may not want to try this just in case things aren’t working properly and you lose data.
  3. Buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac. If you are reliant on an NTFS drive on your Mac, you may want the piece of mind of a commercial, supported product, in which case you can buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac which states that it is Lion-compatible.
  4. Use exFAT instead of NTFS. If you need the drive to be usable on both Windows and Mac, don’t need file system level encryption or compression and are willing to copy all of your data off it, reformat it, and copy the data back, then maybe you’d be better with the exFAT file system. It’s the successor to FAT32, and supports disk and file sizes of over 500 terabytes. It’s also quite well-supported – Mac OS X received support for it in the 10.6.5 update to Snow Leopard, Windows XP supports it with the KB955704 update and Service Pack 2, Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 supports it out of the box. You will have issues with Linux machines, however, in which case FAT32 is also an option.

I personally have gone for the fourth option for my external drive; the Disk Utility in Lion lets you format drives as exFAT and I don’t need any of the advanced features of NTFS. But another of these options may be best for you.

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