Actually I think it purrs.

* Warning – nerd alert! *

Basically Apple are updating both the iOS on the iPad and migrating MobileMe users to iCloud. If I have lost you already don’t worry, it’s just that this post isn’t for you.

So, for apple users like me, who have been delaying the inevitable tech upgrade because they live by the motto ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, Apple have decided they’re going to grab us by the balls and make us take the upgrade or become obsolete.

So this week has been spent testing Lion. Now you won’t get any further tech nonsense from me other than that I simply cloned my Mac, running Snow Leopard, to an external hard drive, downloaded Lion and burned that to DVD (you’ll find plenty of other online sites about how to do that), installed Lion on the clone, did an update and hey presto.

Touch fake Apple texture wood (one of the things that is a bit shit about Lion) all seems to work okay. Initially I was worried none of the Creative Suite design apps would function, but even CS4 appears to be quite alright. So far, so does everything else I use.

I am even using my iPad as an advanced trackpad. Geek! Yes, and I’ve organised my Launchpad so I get all my useful apps up first. Having been the owner of a white iMac that blew up when installing an OSX update on it back in 2009 and getting a bum deal from Apple’s so called ‘customer service’, I was a little hesitant all could go quite so smoothly. But the Lion, it really does purr.

As part of the testing process I decided to have a go at solving one of two problems that has been bugging me. I have my own branded wallpaper for use as the background on my iPad but each time I sent it to the iPad it became compressed, resulting in awful jpegging in the red and on some of the type. It simply looked awful. I won’t run through all the methods I tried, but after failing to find a solution on the web, I will tell you how I finally solved the issue.

I uploaded the image to Flickr, on my Mac, as a private photo, after all it’s just a wallpaper, then downloaded the image to photos, from Flickr, on the iPad. For some reason this is the only method I found that avoided compression. All that’s left is to find a similar solution for my avatar on Facebook…

And then to repeat the upgrade process, as tested on the clone, on the actual iMac itself.