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The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, 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.
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Psystar Lawyers-up With Some Experience

Psystar has officially decided to not go down without a fight. They requested more time to respond to the suit brought forth by Apple and are represented by lawyers from the firm Carr & Ferrell, ComputerWorld reports. They have until August 18th, if this motion is approved, to respond to the claims, which is a two-week delay.

Carr & Ferrell specialize in intellectual property suits and are located in Silicon Valley, strategically placed to offer their services to the heart of the tech industry. They represented burst.com in patent lawsuits against Microsoft and Apple. Those cases were settled with awards going to burst.com in the amounts of $60 million from Microsoft and $10 million from Apple (I don’t think they used that windfall to improve their website, though).

[Via ComputerWorld]

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Adeona: Open Source Asset Tracking & Retrieval

Chances are fairly decent that there are a good number of TAB readers who have been impacted by the loss of either their laptop or cell phone (or iPhone) due to theft. Estimates are that 12,000 laptops are lost or stolen each week at airports and that only 30 percent of owners are successful in retrieving the asset. Over half of them (estimated) contain confidential or personal information, making the losses even more costly.

The use of Internet tracking systems – which send (to a hosted service) periodic updates of asset location via a small agent loaded on the asset – can help increase the likelihood of asset recovery. Most of these services, such as Computrace LoJack for Laptops, are commercial (i.e. require a software purchase and a monthly or yearly fee), and some even work directly with law enforcement in the event your system is lost or stolen. If you are willing to go the more open source route, or just cannot afford the commercial options, Adeona may just be what you’ve been looking for.

How Does It Work?

Written by the folks over at the University of Washington, this small agent saves location updates to the open source distributed storage service OpenDHT in such a way that only you, the owner, is able to retrieve and – for systems with a camera – can even capture an image of the current user with each location update via the freeware isightcapture utility (which is included with the package).

When you first install the agent, you create a retrieval file that is encrypted via a passphrase. Keep this file handy – i.e. with you! – as you’ll need it to retrieve the location information! It is a good idea to remove it from your main system once created and backed up since it is a necessary component of the retrieval process and can be of use to the person who improperly obtained your resource.

Adeona works without intervention of any kind, but the burning question should be: how do I recover or locate my system? You can use any OS X, Windows or Linux system to grab any amount of location history you wish, but you will need that retrieval file to do so.

But, Does It Work?

The efficacy of most Internet-based asset tracking/retrieval programs is tied to the level and quality of access to the Internet of the device, the intelligence of the individual who improperly obtained the device and the skill of the law enforcement agency performing the investigation. Adeona requires access to the Internet to store location data and, while it uses port 80 (which should be open almost everywhere), it also uses port 5852 for OpenDHT access. Many corporate and personal firewalls may block this port.

A smart thief (not many are smart, though, otherwise they probably would not be thieves) may also know how to disable tracking software and would be intelligent enough to ensure they are not connected to the Internet while they are checking out your system.

Finally, the type of detail provided in the route tracking information may be difficult for your local law enforcement office to handle. However, under no circumstances should you undertake the investigation into your own hands. If an individual was willing to break the law to obtain your machine, you cannot assume they will be less likely to do you physical harm.

Adeona is a good, free choice in the asset tracking space, but I’d like to get feedback from TAB readers (who install and try to use it) on just how easy it was to work with and collect any suggestions as to how you think it could be improved. Also, if you have any tracking success stories, feel free to drop those in the comments as well.

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Software Updates & New Release Highlights For Week Ending 2007-07-26
It’s been a rough couple of weeks (MacBook Pro was in the shop again) and I’m just getting caught up on some of the updates (again, I use or try these, so it’s not just a product listing/announcement summary). So, convince me to test your app and you can make it to this list!
- Flow - 1.0.3 - Nick wrote about around this time last year but the app is far from vaporware and actually manages to put a fressh look and feel on the task of network file transfers. The app interface is actually well thought out and highly usable. It has support for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and .Mac (a.k.a. MobileMe), has a pretty useful built in text editor (they obviously had web authors & programmers in mind), amazingly robust QuickLook support and the ability to make desktop bookmarks (droplets) for any file. Version 1.0.3 adds Amazon S3 support (when it’s up), bookmark importing from old school apps like Transmit and Cyberduck and bumps to speed, reliability and file editing. Leopard only & 29.00USD.
- CrossOver Games - 7.1.0 - Having used other CrossOver products, this was something that I wanted to try, especially having yet-another semi-virgin system to work from (with much reduced disk space as a result of migraing back to the original 160GB internal drive). While Wine-based gaming is nowhere near the same experience as the real thing (apps designed and written for OS X), CrossOver makes it possible to play games not yet ported and reduces the costs for switchers with large game libraries. I can confirm a working Half Life 2 for this post and will be continuing to experiment with it. This version incorporates the full Wine 1.0 release and fixes many game compatibility bugs. OS X 10.4 & 10.5 Intel-only.
- iLife (iPhoto / iMovie) & iWeb Updates - Apple release a bucket of bits including iLive Support 8.3 (stability improvements), iPhoto 7.1.4 (new greeting card & postcard themes and bug fixes), iMovie 7.1.4 (compatibility & bug fixes) and iWeb 2.0.4 (compatibility & bug fixes). Software Update should catch this, but you can grab the updates manually.
- MarsEdit - 2.2 - My blogging tool of choice issues a full dot release update with AtomPub support, customizable image markup (for fine grained control of image display) macros, a significant speed boost & five other additions. Compatible with OS X 10.3.9 through Leopard, $29.95 USD.
- BibleXpress - v1.01 [iPhone/iPod Touch] - BibleXpress puts the full text of the Bible on your iPhone in an app with a great interface and multiple translations. Version 1.0.1 is not for the squeamish as it has some bugs but adds enough much-awaited new translations - including the ESV (English Standard Version), NASB (New American Standard Version) and LBLA (La Biblia de Las Américas) - that it may be worth the quirks. Free upgrade or $29.99 (pricey, but mostly due to license fees for use of the translations).
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New MacBook Rumors
Last week, during the Q2 financial call for Apple, Peter Oppenheimer does what Apple does best: he stirred the pot. It may seem to the untrained eye that Apple’s less-than-stellar four-product launch was detrimental to the company, but how quickly we forget. Just a few short words left all the bad feelings behind and kept the rumormill going at full tilt once again, “…and we're busy finishing several more wonderful new products to launch in the coming months." In the call, Oppenheimer stressed that he could not talk about these products, and that they would be released at about the end of September. What better way to divert the attention from poor performance than to announce bleeding edge products that will leave the competitors straggling in the dust?

Since the brief unannouncement, the speculation has been plentiful, with some talk of new Apple Cinema Displays (and from January of this year), but most of the rumors have focused on the long overdue MacBook line.

Here are some highlights:
- Thinner and lighter MacBook and MacBook Pros with glass trackpads, to utilize Multi Touch, and will be called MacBook Touch(ComputerWorld)
- No Intel chipsets (the CPU will still be Intel–not going back to PowerPC), looking at AMD, VIA, or nVidia (CNET)
- One long piece of aluminum for the body of all three notebooks (AppleInsider)
I have heard of some others that sound pretty farsical, and of course, a Mac tablet is always bantered about when it is time for a new rumor. What other features have you heard? What would force your hand to upgrade when they are released?

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