Built right into OS X Lion, Lion Recovery lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc.

To do this all you’ll need is an external drive and the Recovery Tool available here http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433.

To create an external Lion Recovery, download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application. Insert an external drive (no bigger than 1GB), launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive or partition you would like it to install on, and follow the on screen instructions.

When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

F.Y.I. the Recovery Partition is usually 650mb in size.

OSX Lion is the latest incarnation of Apple’s flagship operating system and last week the official GM seed was sent to developers for testing. Yesterday I put it through it’s paces and have been happily surprised with the performance and improvements laid out in the latest release, attached is a quick video of Lion in action in all it’s one solid O/S.

To note,

• Launchpad for Apps (iOS)
• Mission Control
• FaceTime now integrated
• Address Book UI upgraded (more like iOS Books)
• Reset User Password via Apple ID
• Touchpad Gestures now a core part of the O/S
• Masses of UI improvements, gone and the rounded corners.
• Can set specific desktop background per Virtual Desktop / Space
• Fancy drag animation when moving files (gets out of the way of the cursor)
• Loads more…

On the App side everything still works pretty well, the following apps operate fine on Lion:

• Photoshop CS5
• Transmit
• Coda
• CornerStone SVN
• CSS Edit
• OmniGraffle
• VLC
• Tower
• TextMate
• MAMP & MAMP Pro

These Apps have visual problems that need fixing for Lion:

• Versions (opens main window & other regardless, sidebar cut-off)
• Espresso (desktop background seeps into interface)

Regarding official release date for OSX Lion my gut feeling says mid-July, in all the builds done and dusted just up to Apple to sign-off on things so you may be lucky and find it in the App Store this Tuesday.

Nice work Apple.

Streaming video from the Apple Time Capsule was one of the major things we wanted to do, thankfully now with a couple of Apps it’s easier.

• FileBrowser …with this App you can access the Time Capsule by IP or name (e.g. smb://mybox), once connected you can then play native MP4 videos or just access the file system with auto-resume.
• OPlayerHD …there’s a free version or paid, both work well and allow you to access the Time Capsule easily. However to play MKV, AVI, etc. files you will first have to copy them to the iPad via the App, once there they play without a problem.

Note about the Air Video app,

Although this works great at video streaming to the iPad you have to have the Air Video Server installed and running on a host machine (MacBook, iMac) to access it, and so will not work with the Time Capsule as you can’t install software inside the TC’s O/S.

Hope this solves some peoples problems.