Fresh Apple: The Apple Blog (6 сообщений)

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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.
http://theappleblog.com
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The Omni Group Gets "Sneaky" With OmniFocus Pre-releases
For all TAB readers interested in getting access to the most cutting edge (dubbed “sneaky peek”) releases of OmniFocus (their task management app) you can sign up for advance notifications via their Sneaky Peak page.

The “Omni” apps are well-crafted products and their programmers do their part to make code available to the developer community so folks can use components that work well without having to reinvent the wheel. As a company, they also seem to care about the users of their products given that they went out of their way to cite a review on their blog which contained both praise and pummeling.

(D&D fans will also appreciate this entry which explains how to use OmniFocus to manage your 4th edition character sheet).

If you use OmniFocus for “getting things done”, drop a note in the comments with what works and what needs improvement.

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iTunes 101: Batch Edit iTunes Video Types
I recently ripped a few seasons of my favorite TV shows from DVD’s to MP4’s so I could put them on my iPhone for when I travel; however, when I imported them into iTunes they imported as movies, not TV shows. No big deal I thought, I would just select all, hit ⌘ + i and change them all at once. To my horror and dismay, when I tried to batch change the video type the option wasn’t available…are you kidding me Apple?

After a quick Googling I ended up at Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes site and found the following script:

Set Video Kind of Selected v3.1

“This script will change the video kind property of the selected tracks to your choice of “Movie”, “Music Video” or “TV Show”. Additionally, “Show Name”, “Season Number”, and “Episode Number” can also be set or cleared for each selected track.”

After you download it, just follow the instructions for the install. If you are successful you will have a new menu bar icon that looks like a scroll:

To use the script to change the video type to TV show:
1. Select all the TV shows you would like to edit (⌘ + a - select all)
2. Click the scroll and select “Set video kind of selected”
3. A box will pop up allowing you to edit: Video Kind, Show Name, Season Number, Episode Start Number
4. Select Video Kind and then click the “edit” button
5. Another pop up box will appear. Select “TV show” from the list and hit the “ok” button
After a few seconds or minutes (if you have a lot of videos) all your video types will be changed to the correct video type. Enjoy!

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Apple Says "No Thanks" to Intel
Although the speculation was rampant when Apple bought PA Semi earlier this year, Intel made it official: there will not be Intel processors in the iPhone.

Intel is preparing more x86 versions of their processors for mobile devices, and “Apple chose not to take that road map at their next generation of platform…That was disappointing,” said Patrick Gelsinger, general manager of the digital enterprise group at Intel.

Disappointing is right. Apple plans on selling 10 million iPhones this year, and analysts are predicting that they may sell up to 15 million in 2008! It also means you won’t be able to run Windows Mobile on your iPhone anytime soon. I was really hoping for Boot Camp on the future versions of iPhone.

[Via Forbes]

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OS X 10.5.4 Released To The Wild + Other Apple Updates
Apple has released OS X 10.5.4 (59 MB via Software Update) to the masses which includes the content of Security Update 2008-04. The update also includes improvements to AirPort reliability and speed, many iCal improvements, two secure surfing improvements to Safari and three Spaces & Exposé bugs.

The Security Update fixes 21 security issues in OS X 10.4 and 14 security issues in OS X 10.5. Fixes for especially nasty bugs include:
- CVE-2008-2309 which adds .xht and .xhtm files to the system’s list of content types that will be flagged as potentially unsafe under certain circumstances, such as when they are downloaded from a web page. While these content types are not automatically launched, if manually opened they could lead to the execution of a malicious payload. This update improves the system’s ability to notify users before handling .xht and .xhtm files.
- CVE-2008-2314 which disables hot corners when the screen lock is active (When the system is set to require a password to wake from sleep or screen saver, and Exposé hot corners are set, a person with physical access may have been able to access the system without entering a password prior to this fix.)
- CVE-2008-0960 which performs better validation of SNMPv3 packets (SNMP can be used to retrieve information about your system).
OS X 10.5.4 can be installed via Software Update or downloaded directly from Apple.

Users still running OS X 10.4.11 can also (along with the Security Update) look forward to a Safari 3.1.2 update as well, which includes a fix to a security issue (CVE-2008-2307) involving a memory corruption issue that exists in WebKit’s handling of JavaScript arrays. Without the patch, users who visit a maliciously crafted website may see unexpected application terminations or be vulnerable to arbitrary code execution. Apple engineers improved bounds checking to fix the problem.

If you have installed any of these updates, drop a note in the comments if you experienced any issues or if you can confirm whether a particular issue you have been seeing has been fixed.

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iTunesU-K12
Today Apple quietly launched iTunesU-K12, a resource for K-12 schools and districts throughout the United States. So far, only a few states have contributed (Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Utah) with varying amounts of content available.

iTunesU-K12 was announced at NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) at the “Apple’s Big Splash” event.

A district employee from Utah, Kelly Dumont, participated in some development of the content being launched, “Here K12 ed will have a central gathering place for resources, be they audio, video, text-based, etc.”

All of the resources are free. The best one is Arizona’s IDEAL eLearning page, which basically is a mini-iTunes store. It has hundreds of podcasts about many things, including my personal favorite, “Ask a Biologist.”

As part of iTunesU-K12, you can find resources on learning about technology, languages, chemistry reactions, history, and much more. Here is the link to the surprisingly plain new page. Go take a look and see what it has to offer.

[Via The Educational Mac]

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Slimmer Snow Leopard?
In the wake of reports from TUAW and RoughlyDrafted.com that 10.6, also known as Snow Leopard, would be the smallest Apple OS in years, many have been scrambling to figure out how exactly Apple was going to be dropping that much heft from their mainline apps. An especially big loser was Mail, down to 91 MB from 287 MB.

Speculation has been running wild that this was an indication that this dramatic weightloss is an indication that Apple is looking toward minikernel type operating systems and the types of platforms that this would indicate - mainly leading to more ‘real OS X on the iPhone’ discussions. Others have speculated that the weight reduction is due more to the loss of the PPC code in 10.6, or the switch from language (.lproj) files in each app to a system-wide localization database.

While there’s no denying that the loss of size is dramatic, it’s actually less of a reduction than I can get by running running XSlimmer - to use Mail as an example, the xslimmed Mail weighs in at a svelte 24.7 MB - significantly lighter even than the version shipping with Snow Leopard. This, I’d think, very much argues that the size reductions can be entirely explained by loss of the PPC code and the language files. In fact, the extra 70 MB might even be new features - hey, we can hope, right?

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