Fresh Apple: TheAppleBlog (4 сообщения)

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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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Chrome for Mac Beta Available Now
The developer builds of late have been pretty stable, but now you can download the official Google Chrome for Mac Beta. Released today, the Beta should offer Mac users a more stable browsing experience, one that hopefully is more representative of what the full release will eventually look like. It’s been a long time coming for us Mac users, but was the wait worth it?

I’m going to try my best to use Chrome as my default browser for a decent length of time, in order to give it a fair shake. But I am a little worried about potential feature scarcity. As has been reported before, the Chrome beta is missing some things that its Windows counterpart offers. Below is a brief list of what’s been omitted, and why it worries me that some of these things aren’t there with this new beta.
- App Mode: One of Chrome’s greatest strengths is its ability to create Fluid-like single site browser instances that work more like apps than websites. It’s great for Gmail, Google Docs, and any other web app that has its own dashboard, menus, etc. The option is there, it’s just grayed out for now.
- Gears: I know Gears is dead in general, as per a recent announcement, but for now the existing implementation is much appreciated. I’d like to hold on to it as long as possible, pending HTML 5’s gradual rollout, but the Chrome Beta isn’t onboard.
- Multi-touch Gestures: Both the trackpad and the Magic Mouse’s multi-touch gestures won’t work in this beta of Chrome. That’s a big omission when you’ve become as dependent on multi-touch as I have, especially in terms of mobile computing.
- 64-bit Support: Chrome is 32-bit only, despite Snow Leopard’s focus on 64-bit performance. It’s not a major strike against it, since the browser is still blazingly fast in my experience, but it could become an issue down the road if Google doesn’t give its browser a bump up.
There are other things I’ve left off my list, like full-screen browsing, for the simple fact that I don’t use them that often and they probably won’t affect my experience. And despite my complaints about what isn’t in this beta, what is there is very impressive indeed. The speed with which Chrome renders pages never ceases to impress, no matter how many times I take the browser out for a spin on either Windows or Mac machines.

Tabs also still do run as isolated processes, which is the major advantage Chrome brought to the table in the first place. Now when I have 57 tabs open across five windows on three screens, a badly coded Flash ad on one of them won’t force me to start fresh. Wait, that might not be a good thing…
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New Study Says Apple is Most Reliable, Not Asus

Last month, I reported the results of a study detailing notebook reliability numbers. Many commenters disagreed with the results of the study by U.S. warranty company SquareTrade, and provided excellent reasons for doing so. Today, another study reinforces the opinion unsurprisingly shared by many of our readers; namely, that Apple is indeed the top computer maker when it comes to reliability.

The new study, by Rescuecom, which is a U.S. firm specializing in computer repair, puts Apple at the top of the list when ranking computer makers. Previous studies by the repair franchise had seen Asus take the top spot, in keeping with the results of the SquareTrade study, but the most recent numbers (Q3 2009) show Apple with a commanding lead, according to Electronista.

Apple scored 374, which is more than double Asus’ 166. The PC maker scored third. Rescuecom’s rankings are based on the numbers of machines that it sees come in for repairs, as measured against the number of computers each company ships. The methodology for the study also includes factoring in things like system construction quality and manufacturer post-sale support, in order to bring some influence outside of Rescuecom’s operation to the table. Apple’s sales accounted for nine percent of the market in Q3, while only making up 2.4 percent of Rescuecom’s repair calls.

CEO David Millman suggests that Asus’ recent slip may be due to the growing presence of netbooks in its lineup of offerings. “Now that many of the netbooks by ASUS have been out for a while, there is obviously a higher need for service,” said Millman. It’s true that while Asus makes some of the most sturdy netbooks around, to achieve the incredibly low price points they offer to consumers, corners have to be cut in parts and manufacturing quality.

Lenovo also fared better in Rescuecom’s study, placing a strong second behind Apple with a score of 320. Toshiba and HP rounded out the top five with fourth and fifth place scores of 165 and 134, respectively. The common thread? All of these manufacturers offer at least one netbook-type computer.

There’s no way of saying for certain that low-cost netbooks are definitively affecting the reliability scores of computer makers, but it is beginning to look like Apple was wise to abstain from joining the fray, at least in this regard (though not in others). No doubt Apple’s introduction of unibody aluminum construction, which requires far fewer moving parts and better overall structural strength is also contributing to its increasing product dependability.

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Apple Dealt $21.7 Million Judgement for Violating Chip Patent

In a decision made final last week, Apple was ordered to pay out $27.1 million to OPTi, a semiconductor company that now deals only in licensing its intellectual property. The decision came down from Eastern District of Texas court judge Chad Everingham, and it is a penalty for patent infringement on Apple’s part.

The lawsuit, filed in January 2007 and tried before the court in April of this year, centered around the accusation by OPTi that Apple had violated a patent Opti held detailing “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses." I had no idea what it meant, either.

Turns out this is what it means, according to The Mac Observer:

When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes. The controller then allows the burst access to take place between secondary memory and the PCI-bus master, and simultaneously and predictively, performs an inquire cycle of the L1 cache for the next cache line. In this manner, if the PCI burst continues past the cache line boundary, the new inquire cycle will already have taken place, or will already be in progress, thereby allowing the burst to proceed with, at most, a short delay. Predictive snoop cycles are not performed if the first transfer of a PCI-bus master access would be the last transfer before a cache line boundary is reached.

I’m slightly more informed now, but I’d be lying if I said I had the technical expertise to point out where exactly this kind of tech is being used in Apple products. Whatever the case, the judge thought it strong enough to decide in favor of OPTi. Which isn’t to say the matter is over with. Apple intends to appeal the decision, sources say, and it has a few channels to go through before it expends all of its options.

The good news for Apple with this ruling is that the judge found no evidence of “willful infringement,” meaning that any violation that occurred was just the innocent result of having used the same idea that OPTi had patented coincidentally, and not with the express purpose of ripping them off. As a result, Apple wasn’t required to pay OPTi’s legal fees in the matter, according to a press release (PDF) issued by the winning party.

While I understand the need for a system in which smaller companies can protect their intellectual property against much larger ones, cases like this, which aren’t exactly patent trolling but which involve a company whose sole purpose has become the licensing of ideas, really get my goat. The problem being, they affect Apple’s bottom line (which is why they’re fighting it so adamantly, even though $21.7 million isn’t a huge hit to them). Every time one of these suits goes against the Mac maker, the consumer ends up being the one who pays.

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Apple Bans a Thousand Apps Over Review Fraud

A story that began 10 days ago with a blog posting at iPhoneography and a letter to Apple VP Phil Schiller has ended with Apple banning prolific developer Molinker from the App Store. The developer has been charged with review fraud (not to mention poor grammar).

Molinker developed a lot of travel apps, guides, currency conversion tools, translation software, as well as photo editing software. A few reviews from NightCam Pro can be seen above. Like other Molinker software, the reviews are good…a little too good.

A reader of iPhoneography, SCW, thought in the above example it was “a little odd that 42 of 44 U.S. reviews are poorly written & that all users have only written reviews for either All Molinker photography apps…or the same two apps.” Apparently, short, effusive, English-as-second-language reviews are common for Molinker apps. SCW goes further, too, asserting that it is likely the all-positive reviews are derived from apps redeemed with developer promo codes.

Seeing as Molinker has promptly disappeared from the App Store, this could very well be. As for the developer’s response, Appfreakblog contacted the company and received this reply:

Actually, we do not know what’s wrong so far. We had contacted Apple for such sudden changes, hope we can get quick response and actions from Apple.

Well, it appears Molinker got its wish, at least in terms of “quick response and actions,” though it’s not the first company to suffer a mass banning. Content aggregator Perfect Acumen was banned along with 900-plus apps in August for alleged copyright violation and other complaints. Going forward, it’s likely there will be more mass bannings if allegations regarding the use of promo codes and astroturfing reviews are found to be true.

While some will argue this is yet another “black eye” for the App Store, possibly with Schiller doing another interview defending the review process, maybe some new restrictions on promo codes, does it really matter? The App Store, backed by more than 60 million iPhone OS devices and counting, remains the place to be for developers of mobile applications. A thousand bans here or there just don’t add up to much next to that.

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