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- Spy shots show OS X without the 'Mac'; could clones return?
No run-up to Macworld Expo or WWDC is complete without the spy shots of the banners inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center, and this time is no different. No making the rounds is a Flickr photoset of banners hung outside the keynote hall posted by Gernot Poetsch. One in particular is especially interesting. It shows two banners: one referring to the iPhone’s OS as “OS X iPhone” and another referring to Mac OS X 10.5 as simply “OS X Leopard.” No mention of “Mac” anywhere. This would mark the first time, well, ever, that Apple has referred to the Mac’s operating system without including “Mac” or “Macintosh” in its name (before Mac OS 7.6, the operating system was known as “Macintosh System” and then the version number).
Okay, so why on Earth would Apple do this? John Gruber of Daring Fireball seems to think that Apple is simply unifying the iPhone OS and Mac OS branding, and this is probably the simplest and most logical explanation. But another part of me wonders if Apple is up to something else.
This is the part where I come up with some absurd speculations.
Has anyone noticed that Apple has been remarkably silent in regards to the Psystar Open Computer? I’m not the first to speculate this, but maybe Apple is testing the waters to open up Mac OS X to the wider world beyond Apple-branded Macs. Would it hurt Apple’s hardware sales? Maybe. But I think Apple makes good enough hardware that many would want to buy an Apple-branded machine regardless. Also, opening up OS X to the wider PC world would allow Mac OS X to compete in areas that Apple hardware doesn’t compete in (in other words, another company could sell a $400 desktop system with Mac OS X preinstalled, while Apple sticks to the mid-range and higher-end of the market). And maybe removing the “Mac” from Mac OS X is a strategic move so Apple can spread OS X without diluting the Mac brand. You want OS X? You can choose from a number of PCs with OS X installed. But if you want a Mac, you still have to buy through Apple.
Will this actually happen? I’m not holding my breath. But with Steve Jobs, you never know what’s next. Sure, he killed the clones in the late 90s, but a lot has changed since then.
So is dropping the “Mac” from OS X a sign of things to come? Or is it just to unify the marketing between the Mac OS and iPhone OS? Stay tuned.
Переслать - Will the iPhone Pummel the Nintendo DS?
Forbes has an interesting article up that claims that the DS needs to be fearful of the iPhone come June 9th. Brian Caulfield points out the features of the iPhone combine the motion sensitivity of the Wii with the touchscreen of the DS. While this may be true, I don’t see the iPhone becoming the dominant handheld gaming device as Caulfield purports.First, Nintendo has already sold 73 million units since 2004 (that is an average of 18.25 million per year). They sell about 350,000 per week. The numbers have been pretty solid for the last two years.
Second, Mac gaming. Macs have historically been woefully inadequate for gaming (except for Oregon Trail, that game rocked!). This may all change with the iPhone, and I personally hope that it does. Apple does have some pretty good games for their current iPods, though. Those games are certainly not killer apps.
Let me put it this way, people buy a DS for the games. In order for Apple to be a player in this arena, people need to buy an iPhone or iPod Touch for the games, otherwise, it will not be worth it for developers to create games for this platform.
[Pic via iPhone/DS Band]
Переслать - Mac OS X 10.5.4 to be released soon; fixes Adobe CS3 file corruption
When Mac OS X 10.5.3 was released at the end of last month it was a massive download, tipping the scales at 420 MB. Unfortunately with the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update we didn’t see the three known iCal bugs resolved but we saw numerous fixes which made many Leopard users happy; however, others faced major issues.
Adobe Creative Suite users quickly discovered that they could no longer correctly save files from inDesign, Photoshop, along with other CS3 programs to a location on a remote server. The files were becoming corrupted which made them useless. Reports of these issues flooded Apple and Adobe forums as frustrated users looked for a way to get these issue resolved.
On Tuesday Apple reported that the first beta release of Mac OS X 10.5.4 would be delivered to developers ahead of the WWDC. Keeping its promise Apple delivered Mac OS X 10.5.4 to developers on Wednesday evening. Mac OS X 10.5.4 isn’t as large as Mac OS X 10.5.3 it only weighs 55MB; however, Creative Suite users should be able to work properly with files that reside on a remote server.
What else should we see in the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update? We should receive additional bug fixes within this update and rumors have been flying that we should receive support for the soon to-be-announced Mobile Me service. That’s right it has been reported that .Mac will be changed to Me.com. The name MobileMe has been reported in many iPhone SDK files.
Also, in the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update it will supposedly include support for a new piece of Apple hardware. Although I would love to see a Mac Tablet I don’t think I will get my wish. Any guesses what it will be?
Переслать - Apple unveils Leopard security guide
If you are an advanced user looking for additional information about the Leopard I would suggest that you check out the Security Configuration guide for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leoapard.) You can log onto the Apple website and download Mac OS X Security Configuration it’s in PDF form.
When I finished printing out my copy, I had the chance to skim through the book. First off, it’s obvious that this was written for the advanced user. In order to take advantage of the Leopard Security Guide you need to be an experienced Mac user who is familiar with the MAC OS X user interface, and has experience using the Terminal application’s command-line interface.
If you flip to the About This Guide Page it states…
“Some instructions in this guide are complex, and deviation could cause serious adverse effects on the computer and its security,” Apple said in the guide’s introduction. “These instructions should only be used by experienced Mac OS X users, and should be followed by thorough testing.
The Leopard Security Configuration is chock full of useful information and covers numerous topics. I’ve listed a few below.
- Introduction to Mac OS X Security Architecture
- Securing the system administrator account
- Using open directory
- How to encrypt data
- How to use Secure Erase
- How to avoid secure fast user switching
- How to protect your data while using Apple applications
I’ve listed a handful of the topics that are discussed. The guide has 13 chapters total and is 240 pages. I’ll be reading my copy over the next few days.
Leopard has received a massive amount of security updates along with the handy feature that marks downloaded applications to protect it against Trojan horses. If you remember last week Apple released a Leopard security update that included a large amount of stability, compatibility, and security improvements and enhancements.
Although iCal received 8 fixes the 3 iCal bugs that were discovered by Rodrigo Carvalho who works for the Core Security Consulting Services Team at Core Security Technologies were not fixed. It has been reported that Apple repeatedly asked them to not release its findings. However Core Security Chief Technology Officer Ivan Arce said at the time the company felt that it could not wait for Apple to address this issue.
Apple has been receiving a lot of attention recently (Its Mac sales were up by 50% in April) companies like Core have been paying a lot of attention to it.
Mike Davis analyst for Ovum said this in it Straight Talk Bulletin…
“The fact that OS X is now on the radar of both the security vendors and the bad guys indicates that the OS has become a ‘worthy’ target.”
If you are like myself and haven’t upgraded all your Macs to Leopard (I will eventually) you can download OS X 10.4 the Tiger Security Guide or if you are using OS X 10.3 you can download the Panther security guide.
Переслать - Why Selling "Only" 8 Million iPhones Won't Be a Big Deal
Recently there has been a little buzz swirling about the fact that Apple is on pace to fall short of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. Last week, a New York Times article noted, “After almost a year of strong sales that have made it one of the dominant smartphones in the United States, the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company.” Now, never mind the fact that Apple still sold over 1.7 million iPhones last quarter. That number was down from the previous quarter, but the previous quarter was the holiday quarter, making a direct comparison, well, pretty much worthless for mostly obvious reasons.
And just yesterday, MSNBC’s Gary Krakow said in a video that Apple will need to license RIM’s Blackberry OS or Windows Mobile for the iPhone in order to gain market share in the business world. Gary says that Apple needed to do this because, in a nutshell, while Apple has done well in the smart phone market as a whole, they haven’t done well with businesses, and in order to do well in business they have to adapt a competitor’s OS. Is this guy serious? Never mind the fact that Apple’s iPhone roadmap event in March outlined the new business-friendly features coming so to iPhones near you, which should make the iPhone more attractive and more useful to big businesses.
Just… just watch the video and prepare to be completely astounded by the insanity of it all. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Anyway, I digress.
The bottom line here is that whether Apple meets a certain sales figure just doesn’t matter, even if Steve Jobs himself set the 10-million-iPhones-sold goal. In the end, the only people who will really care about whether Apple misses 10 million iPhones sold are those who want to see Apple fail.
I don’t think we’re going to see Steve Jobs lose sleep if Apple sells “only” 7 or 8 million iPhones in 2008. Consider this: Apple had zero share of the cell phone market a year ago. Today, they have around 20% of the US smartphone market, according to IDC. That’s down some from the holiday quarter (October-December 2007), but still, going from zero to roughly 20% of US smartphone sales in less than a year is nothing to sneeze at. And it goes without saying that if Apple unveils a 3G iPhone next week as expected, we’ll see sales get a big boost.
Apple has laid a great foundation with the iPhone. It’s a great gadget that has been praised by almost anyone who has used one. Customer satisfaction is very high. And there are new goodies in the pipeline that are sure to make the iPhone even more drool-worthy.
Personally, I think Apple will reach 10 million iPhones in 2008 despite the slow-ish start to this year. After all, it has only been available in a handful of countries to this point, and it’s possible that some are holding out for the 3G iPhone (which, as I mentioned earlier, would probably give iPhone sales a shot in the arm). But even if Apple sells, say 8 million iPhones in 2008, I think it would still be a success. What’s important here is that Apple is building a strong foundation to build upon in regards to the iPhone. It’s still early in the iPhone’s development, and since it’s so early, straight sales numbers are not as important as building a strong foundation so that the iPhone can be an even better option for consumers a year from now.
Anyway, that’s my take. What do you say? Does it really matter that Apple sell 10 million iPhones in 2008?
Переслать - Versions for Mac now in public beta
The long-discussed “Versions” for the Mac is now open for anyone to download, for free (for now). It’s pretty slick. It’s not as awesome as the hype built it up to be, but it’s definitely worth checking out.
Versions is an app that provides a strong GUI front-end for the “svn” (Subversion) command-line application. I, personally, prefer a GUI over command-line, but the benefits of Subversion were worth the hassle to me in my Cocoa development. We’ve discussed Subversion and its uses and benefits in quite a few places here on TAB before, so it’s nice to finally see an app like this come along.
Scott Stevenson had posted an earlier sneak peek of the app last week, and his comments area sparked a “war” of sorts amongst users of other version-control systems, saying that SVN is no longer “cool”.
John Gruber posted a quick ping yesterday, noting how nicely it works with Beanstalk, to provide a nice end-to-end solution for newbies.
Check out the Versions beta, and decide for yourself.
Update: Be careful about using it with any projects for which you already have version control activated in Xcode… the two apps, for some reason, don’t work in sync. I’m not entirely sure what the problem is, but Xcode will give errors for projects that Versions touches, and isn’t able to sync until you re-checkout the project (using Xcode). Versions also runs every single file, and freaks out when my PPC machine makes an extra or different build file than my Intel machine. Again, I don’t know what it’s doing - only that I’m going to keep using only Xcode for this project until the authors of Versions work to integrate the two programs better.
I also had a problem where my Versioning provider had an out-of-date ssl certificate, and it was throwing an error that required response, but I wasn’t given any way to respond in Versions, so I had to load up the command-line svn first to get around it. Versions needs a way to present possible options/answers to the cryptic errors that svn throws.
Переслать
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