How to Install Mac OS X Yosemite on a USB Flash Drive

You might want to try out Yosemite but not modify your primary Mac. You can install Yosemite on an external drive (at least 8GB, but 16GB is better). For the best experience, you should install Yosemite on the fastest external drive you can, otherwise it might be very slow. Other than the thumb drive, all you need is a Yosemite compatible Mac (2007 iMac, 2008/9 MacBook, 2007 MacBook Pro, 2008 MacBook Air, 2009 Mac Mini, or 2008 Mac Pro or later models).

1. Download a copy of Yosemite from Apple. Prior to launch you can get it here, and post launch it will be available in the App Store.

2. Reformat your USB drive using Disk Utility. Choose format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and name it “Yosemite” and then click “Erase.”

3. Select the drive and switch to the Partition tab. Choose “1 Partition” and make the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).”

MORE: How to Find Downloaded Files in Mac OS X

4. Click on the “Options” button and Choose “GUID Partition Table.” Click OK and then Apply. This will make the USB drive bootable.

5. Start the install of Yosemite and agree to the user agreement. Then click “Show All Disks…”.

6. Select your thumb drive and click “Install.” You will be prompted for your admin password. Your computer will reboot, and Yosemite will then install on your thumb drive. Once it’s installed, you can choose to boot to that disk by holding down the Option key as your computer restarts.

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Enable Flash in Chrome Only When You Want It With FlashControl

Adobe Flash is slowly being replaced with HTML5, but many websites still use Flash for videos, banners, and games. Flash videos and animations take up resources, and may even make your browser unresponsive. And of course, they also move and bounce around, sometimes making it difficult to focus on what you're trying to read. FlashControl (free) offers a simple solution, letting you selectively enable Flash in Google Chrome.

FlashControl makes it easy to enable or disable Flash in Google Chrome.By default, Flash elements show a simple static placeholder. Click the placeholder, and the Flash content loads and starts playing. FlashControl also lets you whitelist websites, so you can enable Flash on Vimeo, YouTube, and other websites on which it is essential.

FlashControl lets you decide how deep you want to dig into its preferences: The default configuration interface is very simple, with only a handful of options. Switch on the Advanced interface, and new tabs and options suddenly appear, letting you deeply customize the extension, right down to changing the placeholder color.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

—Erez Zukerman

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OnLive Desktop Plus Brings Blazing IE Browser, Flash to iPad for $5 Per Month

Priced at just $4.99 a month, OnLive Desktop Plus includes all the (already commendable) features of OnLive Desktop–quick refresher, that’s MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, 2GB of cloud storage space, a few other touch game apps and Windows Media Player for HD videos–and now, they’re tossing Adobe Reader and Internet Explorer into the mix. Since the lack of a browser was one of our previous quibbles with the original app, it’s nice to know that the company listened to feedback.

The Browsing Experience

It gets even better: OnLive Desktop Plus offers the browsing experience at stunningly fast gigabit speeds, since the actual processing is done on the company’s powerful remote servers hosted thousands of miles away. And this is no dinky mobile browser, either. Internet Explorer behaves exactly as you would expect the browser on your desktop back home to behave, so you can load full Flash websites in all their glory–and have these sites completely remade to respond to your touch. That’s a first for any app on iOS, as far as we know. You can also download Web mail attachments from Gmail, Yahoo, and cloud storage files like Dropbox directly onto your cloud desktop.

We loaded the animation-heavy Mercedes Benz website, and were thoroughly impressed by how quickly it loaded. The picture of the desktop blurred periodically before coming into focus, but that was an issue with streaming the desktop to our tablet (rather, an issue with our sluggish Wi-Fi network at the office), and not a connection problem that has to do with OnLive’s servers.

Browser Speeds

In order to test browser speeds objectively, we visited speedtest.net and check what sort of upload and download speeds we got. The results didn’t disappoint. We found that we notched a download speed of 92.77 Mbps and an upload speed of 72.32 Mbps.

Bottom Line

OnLive has managed to make an already-impressive app even better with this latest iteration. “Experiencing a full Flash-enabled Web experience at gigabit speeds on iPad is nothing short of breathtaking, and OnLive Desktop Plus is your ticket to ride,” said Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO. “Combine that with OnLive Desktop’s full-featured Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader PC applications and not only do you have the world’s fastest mobile browser, but the world’s most powerful productivity tools literally at your fingertips.”

The app is available for the iPad now in the US. Android users can look forward to their own dedicated version coming soon, and native variants for the PC and Mac are slated to follow as well. If you need the added functionality of OnLive Desktop Plus, you can sign up for an account at www.desktop.onlive.com.

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