Category: Apple

My work notebook was recently was upgraded to a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Here are my thoughts on the machine, in no particular order.

Construction

This notebook is the sturdiest I’ve ever used. The whole thing feels like one, solid chunk of awesome. Apple’s unibody construction makes the black MacBook I was using feel like a toy. Since there aren’t any seams on the top case, the edges and corners are very slick. The PowerBooks and MacBook Pros used to have rubber gasket around the edges which could chip and bend. Nothing like that here — the whole thing is one slab of metal.

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Only the Mac community could have enough to say to fill over 18 pages with comments about a leaked photo of an upcoming OS release’s packaging.

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It seems that Apple is having employees — retail employees, at least — post some fine print on their Twitter accounts.

Here are a few examples I’ve come across over the last few days:

The comments and views shared on this or any other site are not shared by Apple or any affiliated parties…They belong to me and Apple can and should not be held responsible in any way for my postings on this site or any other.

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Before Apple allowed third-party apps on the iPhone, jailbreaking was the only way to run native applications. Then, many of the apps were simple and usually didn’t run very well. But the community behind those apps made the iPhone do all sorts of things Apple didn’t include at the time — most notably copy and paste. Those (along with UI tweaks) were compelling reasons to jailbreak.

Today, Apple’s App Store offers many of the things that the jailbreak community once did. However, the jailbreak repositories still house some great software that Apple won’t allow you to install or run on your device.

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The Loop:

Speculation of an Apple event in September broke earlier today, but The Loop has learned the event will not include the introduction of the rumored Apple tablet.

Very reliable sources familiar with the product have said speculation of the tablet being introduced during the September event are flat out wrong. The Apple tablet, they said, would not see the light of day until the first part of 2010.

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Macworld:

Microsoft announced Thursday that the next edition of Microsoft Office for Mac will be released in late 2010. The new edition of the venerable office suite will include Outlook for Mac, a new application that will replace the Entourage.

“We’ll bring forward all the functionality from the Entourage Web Services Edition, including public folders, managed folders, and category syncing, but with Outlook we’re going even further and building a whole new application,” said Microsoft Mac Business Unit general manager Eric Wilfrid.

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Adobe’s John Nack:

It’ll probably come as no surprise that Adobe is following Apple’s lead & going Intel-only with the next generation of the Creative Suite. That is, CS4 is the last version that’ll run on PowerPC-based Macs. You can read the details in the FAQ on Adobe.com.

By the time the next version of the Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They’re still great systems, but if you haven’t upgraded your workstation in four years, you’re probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either. Bottom line: Time & resources are finite, and with big transitions underway (going 64-bit-native, switching from Carbon to Cocoa), you want Adobe building for the future, not for the past.

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AppleInsider:

• Options to “Erase and Install” and “Archive and Install” are no longer present in the Mac OS X 10.6 installer. According to those familiar with the software, this was done for convenience, so that users do not accidentally erase and install their Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard partitions. However, “Erase and Install” remains available through Disk Utility, which is also included on the installation DVD.

• If you need to reinstall 10.6, it automatically archives and installs for you.

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Ars Technica has info on a new Mac trojan horse:

The latest version of this trojan, dubbed OSX_JAHLAV.D by Trend Micro, comes from a number of websites like comandtryx.com, simplexdoom.com, and sinisteer.com—all which originate from a server with the IP address 91.214.45.73. When clicking to play the videos on these sites, you’ll be prompted to install a QuickTime update or plug-in. If you agree, a file called QuickTimeUpdate.dmg will be downloaded.

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Read Write Web:

AdMob just released some data about how iPhone users discover new apps in the App Store and how they use them once they have downloaded them. According to AdMob, most users download apps from the App Store directly from their phones. Only 7% go through iTunes to download apps. To find new apps, 62% of all respondents searched for a specific app and 60% looked through the lists of top selling apps in the store. AdMob also found that the majority of users (62%) install between 1 and 6 new apps per month and 22% of all iPhone users download more than 11 apps per month.

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From the creators of Things, a wonderful to-do manager for the Mac and iPhone:

Believe it or not, we have been working on over-the-air sync since the beginning of this year. In the meantime, our goal changed from “something that works” (check out our competition if you want to know what we mean by that) to “a really sweet solution”. The tough challenge here is to develop a highly performance-oriented solution that works for everybody. In particular, we wanted it to work for Mac and iPhone users alike, without requiring a MobileMe account (or any WebDAV disk for that matter).

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Each year, the Newton hardcore have a conference to discuss development and survival of the platform. This year, they’ve posted a PDF containing all of the presentations given. (I’ve decided to post a copy of the PDF here, since the site they have it at is real, real annoying.)

Presentations include a history of the Newton platform, a history of tablet computing as a whole, tips and tricks on programming for the Newton OS and some nifty hardware upgrades. If you’re a fan of the Newton, this is heaven.

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