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Latest Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0 OS (With Tethering) On Bittorrent

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The latest developer build of Snow Leopard and the iPhone 3.0 OS software (which aqllows tethering) are available on the Bittorrent file-sharing network.

Programmers at WWDC got the latest version of Snow Leopard on a DVD, but now the same build (10a380) is available on Bittorrent. The build is 5.84GB and will require a dual layer DVD burner to install. Apple said on Monday the developer build of Snow Leopard is “near complete,” but will likely see extensive changes between now and September, when it will be officially released.

Likewise, the final version of the iPhone 3.0 OS — which will be available officially next week on June 17 — can be downloaded from the file-sharing networks. And for some inexplicable reason, the software supports tethering.

The 3.0 software can be easily installed via iTunes onto an iPhone or iPod touch. However, users have to download the correct version of the software for their device. That is, the firmware for the original iPhone will not work on the iPhone 3G. The 9to5 website says the software may make it harder to unlock the phone’s SIM. In the comments, the site’s readers report no major problems installing or running the software.

“It works fine,” said one commenter. “You can upgrade your current 2.0 firmware in iTunes and not lose any data – all my apps still work perfectly and the phone has been running fine all day (installed last night), snappier than before even. seem to be losing the cool ‘fade’ action you get when quitting an app a lot of the time though.”

Previous developer builds of the 3.0 software have been available on Bittorrent for some time, but installing it required registering the device’s ID through a developer’s account. The latest OS build however does not require device registration, and is said to the same software that will be officially available next week.

To enable tethering, go to Settings > General > Network > Set Up Internet Tethering

NOTE: Only a desperate freak installs dodgy software off the internet onto their cell phone just a week before getting it officially, and for free. Proceed at your own risk.

Opinion: Apple Has The Finest Lineup of Products Ever

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With or without Steve Jobs, Apple has the best lineup of hardware and software it has ever offered.

All in all, the WWDC keynote showed that Apple is paying attention to all the right things. It’s got a great line-up of affordable hardware that’s fast, feature-packed and environmentally friendly. The software loaded on top is designed for user-freindliness and ease of use. And Apple is no longer alone: it has thousands of partners in software and hardware who will push Apple’s platforms in new directions.

And while Apple is making a stealth enterprise play by supporting Micorosft Exchange, it’s not devoting features or resources to taking on Microsoft head on. Instead, Apple is concentrating on its core market: home users. And it’s got a killer lineup for consumers, especially in software.

* The new iPhone 3GS is a killer device. The speed bump, better camera and digital compass (which will enable a raft of amazing location-based services) will tempt iPhone users to upgrade in droves. The iPhone is becoming finally a true mobile computer, and no one has anything that comes close.

* The $99 iPhone is the Palm Pre killer. Who now will pay $199 for an iPhone-imitator on Sprint, when the original costs less than half the price?

* The new MacBook Pro laptops running Snow Leopard are the best laptops on the market, bar none. Even if other laptops have good hardware, Microsoft’s Vista is their Achilles heel. With a great built-in battery, memory-card slots and the return of firewire, MacBooks will sell like hotcakes. Netbooks be damned. The real computing market — and most of the money — is in laptops, and Apple’s got the best available.

* Snow Leopard looks like a great upgrade, despite the lack of whizbang new features. Instead, it will offer upgrades in all the right areas: Web browsing, better multimedia, easy of use and speed. Snow Leopard has tons of little touches that will add up to an extremely polished, consumer-oriented operating system that focuses on the things consumers do — browse the Web, watch videos, and communicate with friends. That’s why things that seem small and minor — like today’s WWDC demonstration of easy video editing and uploading in QuickTime — really counts. Apple is focused, as usual, on improving the user experience. And unlike Vista, Snow Leopard delivers.

* Green. The new MacBooks are rated EPEAT Gold — the highest standard of energy efficiency, green production and recyclability.The importance of being green can’t be understated. There’s a huge shift in consumer attitudes, especially among Apple’s educated, upscale demographic, who are demanding environmentally-friendly products. Being green is a huge selling point, and Apple now offers some of the greenest hardware.

Opinion: Apple Makes Its Best Enterprise Play Yet

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Image credit: MacRumors

If there’s any reason for a business to shun Macs and the iPhone after Monday’s upgrade announcements at WWDC, it’s got to be because the IT department is on the take or it simply doesn’t want its employees to use the best computers and smartphone on the market.

Perhaps flying under the radar among major announcements of upgrades to the company’s notebook computer line, Apple offers with OS X Snow Leopard — and the new iPhone OS 3.0 — significant improvements to a few areas of special interest to business customers that should enable Apple’s devices to make greater inroads to acceptance in the enterprise market.

Chief among them, of course is new seamless integration with Exchange, the Microsoft mail/contacts/calendar service used by the vast preponderance of enterprise customers today.

The WWDC demo by Craig Federighi, VP of Mac OS Engineering Monday showed how easy it is to add an Exchange account using Snow Leopard, with the OS supporting auto-discovery of Exchange servers, with all email/folders/to-do lists being automatically populated and Spotlight immediately able to search all data. Quicklook even lets users preview MS Office documents through Mail, even when Office isn’t installed on the Mac.

Event invitations can be accepted or denied right through Mail. iCal and Address Book automatically have all appropriate data once Mail is setup. One or more contacts can be dragged & dropped into iCal to automatically create a meeting and Calendar events support resource allocation, including people’s schedules and room availability.

What more does the IT department want?

How about data encryption for the iPhone, the ability to locate a user’s mobile device on a Google map using the new Find My iPhone service on MobileMe and remote secure data wipe for phones that are truly lost?

Apple has always been looked upon by enterprise interests as a maker of things for creatives and other ‘unserious’ users, but Monday’s announcements surely throw down a gauntlet in the matter of those who are serious about their computing and communications going forward.

WWDC: Rumored iPhone 3.0 App Demoed: Find My iPhone

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Photo: Gizmodo

Apple’s Scott Forstall just showed off the previously-rumored Find My iPhone feature in the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Find My iPhone is a MobileMe service that helps you find your lost iPhone, or wipe it remotely.

The service allows you to send the iPhone an alert sound that will play even if the phone is in silent mode — good for finding it in the back of the couch. It will also display a message on the home screen, such as another phone number, in case a stranger found it and the screen is locked. Clever.

If you think the phone has been permanently lost or stolen, you can also wipe all the data remotely. And if it shows up again, you can restore from a backup.

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Photo: Gizmodo
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Photo: Gizmodo

iPhone’s OS 3.0 Debuts, Big Features Missing for AT&T Customers

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No company does product release hype and tease like Apple.

First Scott Forstall, Apple’s iPhone VP ran through the numbers: 1,000,000 SDK downloads, 50,000 Apps on the App Store, 40M iPhones/iPod Touches sold, 1B+ apps downloaded.

Cue to the inspirational video of iPhone developers telling their stories. Not a dry eye in the house. Finish with quick cuts of customers naming their favorite apps…

All of setting the stage for announcement of the update to iPhone’s operating system, 3.0. It’s got 100 new features including the long-awaited cut, copy and paste functionality, which works across applications, landscape mode for Mail, Notes and Messages, and shake to undo.

Another much anticipated feature, MMS, will be supported in 76 countries by 29 cellular service providers at launch, though iPhone’s US carrier, AT&T won’t be quite ready for it until ‘the end of summer.’ It’s a really sad thing how US technology behemoths can’t seem to get in step, isn’t it?

Further adding to AT&T’s impression as an albatross around Apple’s neck, Forstall had to admit the US carrier is not among the 22 worldwide that will support tethering in iPhone 3.0, which will allow users to share a network connection with Macs and PCs, wired over USB, or wireless with Bluetooth. It’s a seamless experience, with no need to run any software once it’s turned on. And it won’t be available to customers in Apple’s largest market.

WWDC: Snow Leopard to Cost Just $29

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Snow Leopard — Apple’s next major operating system update, which looks friggin’ awesome — will cost just $29 for current Leopard users.

Apple usually charges $130 for major operating system upgrades, but Apple says it wants to encourage everyone to upgrade. Snow Leopard will be available in Septmeber (developers at WWDC get a near-finished version today.)

Snow Leopeard will run on all Intel hardware, even the older stuff, and includes a ton of under-the-hood tweaks and improvements. At WWDC, Apple’s top software honcho, Bertrand Serlet, demonstrated a ton of cool speed enhancements and nice interface tweaks, including a sleek update of QuickTime. Serlet showed how Snow Leopard will double the speed of some tasks while trimming about 6GBytes of disk space.

A family pack will cost $49.

Spatial View Looks to Bring 3D Content to Mobile Apps

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Spatial View, the company that launched the Wazabee 3Dee shell, a cool protective case with removable lens for viewing 3D content on Apple’s iPhone, has announced the release of an SDK and interlacing software to enable third party developers to create and view applications for Apple’s mobile devices in vivid 3D.

The Wazabee 3DeeInterlacing SDK contains tools for developers to create 3D content for the iPhone, including a runtime component that allows games and applications to run in 3D when using the 3DeeShell. The 3DeeInterlacer enables content creators, licensees and production houses to interlace existing content and distribute it for display on 3DeeShell-enabled iPhones. Both run on Mac OS X and are available to download for free at the Wazabee site.

Many are predicting that 3D, long a source of curiosity but plagued by the need for special glasses to view it, will be the next big thing in multimedia. With more and more applications and hardware being developed to support 3D viewing, it should be interesting to see the mobile games and content developers will produce with the Spatial View SDK.

[IntoMobile]

Truphone Improves WiFi Calling on iPod Touch

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Truphone, arguably the most persistent VoIP developer for Apple’s mobile products iPhone and iPod Touch, released the 3.0 iteration of its app for the iPod Touch Monday, making a very strong case for the portable gadget as an effective communication device.

Among the improvements in Truphone 3.0 are a faster, slicker UI, improved voice quality, and native support for IM communications using Skype, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk.

Users with a stable WiFi connection will assuredly enjoy being able to IM using any of those clients from within a single app, as well as make free phone calls to other Truphone users, Skype and Google Talk users. Truphone also offers excellent rates on calls to landlines and worldwide mobile phones.

The upgrade offers improvements to in-app account management that now allow users to:

  • See rates before initiating a call
  • Display recent call history, showing the exact cost of a just-ended call, how long it lasted, with the ability to see a summary of calls made month by month
  • Top up an account balance without the need to access a browser window separately
  • Top up an account balance in variety of ways, including credit card or PayPal
  • Change calling tariffs within the application.

When Apple introduced the iPod Touch few considered the possibility it might become a communication device, but with the addition of a microphone adapter and the evolution of 3rd party applications developed for the iTunes App Store over the past year, Truphone has done a great job of employing its WiFi connectivity to give iPod Touch owners the added value that comes with being able to make VoIP calls.

Receiving calls through the Truphone app still requires a user to have it open and running, but when Apple introduces a new version of the device’s operating software next week at WWDC, the push notification it will support could change even that limitation.

CrossLoop Brings Remote Support to Macs

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CrossLoop, the Monterey, CA-based developer of a popular screen-sharing application for PCs announced this month a version compatible with Intel Macs, extending the company’s innovative on-line technical support model to the Apple community.

Having racked up over 100 million minutes of tech-support served by nearly 5 million downloads of its PC client since 2006, CrossLoop is now seriously targeting the universe of Mac users and even pitching the product as a perfect vehicle for helping PC users switch to Mac.

While a great percentage of the peer-to-peer help sessions done with CrossLoop are free (downloading the software is free and there is no charge for users to share their computer screen with other CrossLoop members), the company’s platform supports a community of nearly 15,000 registered “helpers” whose freelance technical support can be had using the service for between $50 – $60 per hour.

CrossLoop competes in a field with larger (Citrix) and better known (Geek Squad) names, but is currently logging a quarter million screen-sharing minutes a day and looks to be in the game for the long haul. If you are looking to help a friend remotely with a software install or considering freelancing your tech support skills on the side, CrossLoop could be well worth a look.

Will iPhone be the Death of Mobile Search?

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iPhone applications and the increasing popularity of smartphones, driven especially by growth in the developing world, pose the greatest threats to the long-term relevance of mobile search engines such as Google and Yahoo, according to a report Monday at TechRepublic.

Jason Hiner, Editor in Chief of the widely read technology web portal, argues that a personal experiment he’s undertaken using his Apple iPhone leads to the inescapable conclusion that “trends [in mobile computing] add up to bad news for Google in mobile search because it translates into fewer people needing its search engine,” offering several pertinent examples of his own behavior in addition to statistics about the growth in smartphone use over the past year that bolster his thesis.

There’s little argument that iPhone changed the mobile phone game entirely with its arrival on the scene two years ago, as all the major mobile handset makers have since come to market with their versions of touchscreen smartphones to compete with Apple.

In addition, Apple revolutionized the environment for mobile software development by creating the App Store, which both provided a brand-new arena for software developers to work in and suggested a model for distribution that had previously been limited to the distribution of entertainment titles through the iTunes music store. Apple’s competitors Blackberry, Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows Mobile) launched App Store-like marketplaces in response.

But does all of this development, do all of these trends in mobile computing spell the eventual end for search as a relevant tool on mobile platforms?

Certainly Google’s voice search functionality adds to its relevance and appeal on a mobile device, but as Hiner argues convincingly, limitations of mobile device screen sizes and challenges related to typing on small handsets do make traditional desktop search functionality far less appealing in the mobile environment.

What do you think? Do you use Google less on your iPhone? Should Google be worried about the trends in mobile computing as a great threat to its core search product? Let us know in comments below.

Safari Is Fat Hog That Spies on You — Porn Mode Doesn’t Work

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Apple’s Safari 4 browser is a pig. It’s a resource hog that doesn’t clean up after itself — and it remembers every site you visit, even in “porn mode.”

Safari records every site you visit, even if you turn on the “Private Browsing” feature or clear the browser history. And the files it generates can consume gigabytes of disk space.

“This is a huge privacy concern,” writes designer and musician C. Harwick, from Chapel Hill, NC, who did some snooping in Safari’s hidden system folders. “With no good way of getting rid of them except manually (clearing the history doesn’t do it, and I don’t think resetting Safari does either), these hidden files are strewn all over the user’s hard drive unbeknownst to him waiting for snooping relatives (or more pertinently, law enforcement) to dig them up. I really like Safari, but I’m going to have to seriously consider using Firefox now (ack).”

Gallery: NYC Painted Impressionist Style On The iPhone

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David Leibowitz is a veteran fine art photographer who’s lately been making some pretty amazing art using his iPhone.

Based in NYC, Leibowitz’s pictures of the city look like a French Impressionist painted the scenes (hit the jump for more pictures). There’s nothing to indicate they were made using his iPhone and about $40 worth of apps from the App Store.

Leibowitz has a long history of using digital tools to make art. He started in the ’80s with a Polaroid camera. He’d hand manipulate the emulsion to create photographs that look also look like Imrpessionist paintings. But now he’s discovered the iPhone, and the results are not your typical iPhone art.

Hit the jump for some of Leibowitz’s latest pictures and an interview explaining how he makes iPhone art.

Cult of Mac Favorite: TuneUp (iTunes Add-On)

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What it is: An iTunes add-on for cleaning mislabeled tracks, downloading art and finding music videos, concert info and artist bios.

Why it’s good: After years of downloading weird crap off the internet, my iTunes library is a swamp of mislabeled and unidentified tracks, and I’m sick of it. So I downloaded TuneUp — and I’m in love. TuneUp handily cleaned up a bunch of mislabeled tracks using the Gracenote database (which uses the track’s “audio fingerprint” to identify it). Cleaning takes a few seconds per track and was about 70-80 percent effective on my odd library (British punk, post-punk and lots of electronica). Previous track cleaners I’ve tried have been useless. But it’s the extra artist info via the Net that I’m really digging. TuneUp sits to the side of the iTunes window and displays all kinds of artist info: Wikipedia bios, Google News stories, music recommendations, upcoming concerts and YouTube videos, which I’ve wasted hours watching. The information is truly useful, fascinating, appropriate and timely. Apple thinks so too. TuneUp was added to the shelves of Apple’s retail stores this week — a rare honor granted only to tip top software.

Where to get it: TuneUp is available as a free download with 100 cleans and 50 album covers. Full version costs $29.95 (or $19.95 for an annual subscription),

NOTE: Use CULTOFMAC activation code to get a 15% discount.

MacBook and iMac Busted in Canadian Counterfeiting Raid

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The Mounties in British Columbia just busted their biggest counterfeiting operation ever — and the brains of the operation were a very sinister and criminal-looking iMac and MacBook.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia raided a counterfeit “currency lab” in Surrey, B.C. last week, seizing more than $220,000 in American and Canadian notes and arresting four people.

They also seized a new iMac, a MacBook, and what look like a pair of inket printers and a laser printer. HP is the ink of choice for funny money, looks like.

(I’ve always suspect Macs were the machine of choice for counterfeiters, given their graphics history. I’ll look into it).

RCMP news release.

Vancouver Sun story.

Via TUAW.

Glimpse Of Future: Unbelievaby Cool 3D Map of NYC For iPhone

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UpNext 3D NYC iPhone App from Danny Moon on Vimeo.

The 3D NYC iPhone App from UpNext is unbelievably cool. It renders Manhattan in 3D, allowing you to zoom up and down the city streets, in-between buildings, finding places to eat and things to do. The rendering is amazing — see the video above.

It overlays the subway map and crowdsources popular destinations. All this for only $2.99 from the iTunes App Store. Worth buying even if you don’t live in NYC.

Apple Offers Free Summer Camp Workshops for Kids

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Parents with children aged 8 – 12 and relatively easy access to an Apple Retail Store might consider enrolling in Apple’s free summer camp workshops during July.

Beginning the week of July 13, Apple stores will offer a series of 3 hour workshops where kids will be introduced to Macs and Apple software and learn how to make a movie, create a photo slideshow, write and record a song or craft a presentation.

Space in each workshop is limited and kids are limited to no more than two workshop sessions each for the summer, but it is a free opportunity to kill six hours out of what can be a long, boring summer break for some – and a chance to get hands-on instruction with some of the hardware and software many kids are likely to encounter in school during the coming years.

The workshops break down into two weekly sessions in movie making, music, photography and presentation arts, where Apple instructional staff will teach kids the ins and outs of iMovie, GarageBand, iPhoto and Keynote.

A quick check of some of the session availability shows all sessions in New York City’s Apple stores are already full, though the rest of the country – even in populous California cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco – have spots still open.

Apple also offers similar youth programs year-round to help cultivate the next generation of evangelists.

Report: Blackberry LBS Apps Cost 4X More than iPhone’s

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Location based software applications in Blackberry’s new App World store are four times more expensive than similar titles in Apple’s App Store, according to a Skyhook Wireless report released Wednesday.

The company’s Location Aware App Report (PDF), a monthly survey of titles available in the online stores of mobile handset manufacturers Apple, Blackberry and Android, found the App Store offers a greater percentage of paid to free apps across a wider variety of title categories than either Blackberry or Android.

With over 35,000 apps in the App Store at the time of the survey (around 10,000 having been added since), and 2,300 of them location aware, Apple’s average price for a paid location aware app was $3.60. In contrast, the average price for a location aware app from Blackberry’s App World store was $13.60, while bargain-basment titles could be had from Android’s Market at an average price of just 84¢

The survey results are skewed in that Apple’s App Store has been open nearly a year, while Blackberry’s App World is only in its second month of operation. On the other hand, in its first six months of operation, the App Store saw more than 800 location aware apps released, while Android’s Marketplace produced fewer than 200 in its first two quarters.

For now, location aware software developers have shown a clear preference for Apple’s iPhone platform, even if some seem to believe the Blackberry platform might support quite a bit more revenue per title.

Developers Sneaking Porn, Profanity Onto iPhone Via Easter Eggs

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CC-licensed iPhone homescreen screenshot by Blake Patterson.

Developers are sneaking Easter Eggs into their iPhone apps to get around onerous App Store restrictions, Brian Chen at Wired.com reports.

Programmer Jelle Prins’ song lyrics app Lyrics, for example, was initially rejected by the App store because it included songs with naughty words. Apple bans profanity, pornography and basically anything adult and fun.

But the Lyrics app will include swear words if you go to the About page and swipe downward three times. Up pops an option to turn off a swear word filter.

“Lyrics has slipped in a quiet ‘Screw you’ to Apple’s App Store gatekeepers albeit one mumbled behind their backs,” Chen writes.

Has anyone else discovered undocumented features in iPhone apps? If so, leave them in the comments. A prize for the best one.

Cult of Mac favorite: Web Snapper (Mac OS X utility)

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What it is: A wee utility for downloading web-page grabs.

Why it’s good: Web Snapper enables you to save unbroken grabs of a website in a variety of formats, exactly as they appear in your browser. This beats direct printing to PDF from the likes of Safari, which rarely retains styling, and Web Snapper also betters its rivals, due to its excellent interface. (That said, if you’re counting the pennies, take a look at donationware effort Paparazzi!, which offers broadly similar functionality.)

Where to get it: Web Snapper is available from the Tasty Apps website, and is priced $14.99.

Email ‘N Go Is Perfect For Emailing ‘N Driving

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When I’m barrelling down the freeway in my four-ton Land Rover, I like to check Google Maps on my iPhone and email my friends. Trouble is, I can’t see where I’m going.

Email ‘N Walk, a new super-clever iPhone app, offers the perfect solution.

It uses the iPhone’s camera to display on screen what’s up ahead. It’s designed for pedestrians  — to stop them walking into lampposts as they read or send email — but it’d work in automotive settings too.

Shame it doesn’t work for text , Web browsing, maps, or video, but it’s a start.

Available for free — for a limited time — from Phase2 Media.

iTunes link for Email ‘N Walk.

Sneak Peek of OS X Snow Leopard Features

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YouTube user LeopardOctober has posted videos, screenshots and information about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on YouTube since mid-March or so, and in the last few days has put up some interesting clips of a few things we can expect to see when the new OS debuts June 8 at WWDC.

The first video above shows that users will be able to set the default behavior of Spotlight so that performing a search can ‘search this Mac’, search the current folder or use the previous search scope.

In the video below, we see users can assign an application to a space or all spaces, quickly from within the Dock.

LeopardOctober has several additional clips on the YouTube channel with embedding disabled, so you’ll need to head over there to check ’em out.

The videos posted are from fairly late builds of the Beta (10A261 and 10A286), which has reportedly been ‘frozen’ at 10A354 for the final release software.

[Thanks Rafael!]

Security Expert: Microsoft Puts Mac Users at Risk

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Image credit: Mike Seigafuse. Used with permission.

Microsoft was slammed this week by PC industry security experts for releasing security patches to fix vulnerabilities in Windows versions of PowerPoint, while announcing that Mac users would remain at risk until patches for OS X are completed in June.

“Microsoft is the one big company screaming loudest over ‘responsible disclosure,'” said Swa Frantzen, a security analyst at SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center (ISC) in a post to the ISC blog late Tuesday, adding, “[But the] policy cuts both ways: You need to obey the rules yourself just as well as demand it from all others involved.”

The Windows manufacturer, claimed Frantzen, ignored its well-known best practices for responsible disclosure Wednesday by revealing that Office for Mac 2004 and Office for Mac 2008 contain three unpatched vulnerabilities, and by releasing information about the same bugs in Windows. The combination, he said, could be used by hackers to craft exploits targeting Macs.

Analysts from Gartner and nCircle took varying poistions on the debate, according to an article in Computerworld, and Microsoft itself had no comment further than the statement the company released along with the Windows patch.

The larger question in some minds would be why any Mac user would use PowerPoint over Keynote, but that’s a different debate.

Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update Is A Whopper, But No Big New Features

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The Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update is one of the biggest Apple has ever released — but there appears to be no major new features, just a bunch of bug and security fixes.

It looks like Apple is putting the finishing touches to OS 10.5 before releasing Snow Leopard in the fall, which will have major code changes under the hood.

The Mac OS X 10.5.7 delta update, which updates 10.5.6 to 10.5.7, weighs in at 442MB; while the combo update, which transforms any version of 10.5 into 10.5.7, is a whopping 729MB.

According to an Apple support document, the update fixes bugs and security issues in the core OS, iCal, Mail and printer controls. Possibly the biggest change is adding RAW support for several new cameras, and improved video playback on recent Macs with Nvidia graphics cards.

But according to Macworld Rob Griffiths, who examined installer log files, the update tweaks a long list of applications, from Address Book to Terminal.

“What’s most surprising about the number of modified applications is that very few of those are mentioned on Apple’s 10.5.7 notes page–only Dashboard, Time Machine, iCal and Mail are directly called out, but none of the rest,” writes Griffiths. “(The log) reveals a total of 16,915 changed files on my MacBook Pro. Despite that, things seem to be running very smoothly here after the update.”

More App Store Approval Madness – Religious Imagery is ‘Objectionable’

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An App Store gatekeeper, whose name may or may not be Peter, officially positioned Apple as a ‘Holier Than Thou’ company recently, by rejecting the whimsical photobooth application Me So Holy.

The app would have allowed users to place photographs of themselves or others inside pre-set figure avatars that could let cousin Jim appear to be the face of Jesus, or Joe Bob to be Mohammed, or Mary Jane to be a bodhisattva, or, you get the picture.

Apple rejected the app, saying it “contains objectionable material,” according to Me So Holy developer Benjamin Kahle.

Someone at Apple must have not gotten the Jesus phone memo.

Chicago Pair Shows iPhone Development is Child’s Play

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If you haven’t make it yet as an iPhone developer, Sam Kaplan and Louie Harboe, a couple of seventh graders from Chicago, may make you rethink your career choice.

The pair’s iPhone development company, Tapware, recently released its first iPhone application called “The Mathmaster” and has a second app in the hopper. Based in Hyde Park and supported by seed funding from a business school professor at the University of Chicago, Kaplan and Harboe have been plotting their success trajectory for years.

“Since the fifth grade, we’ve had this idea of working together and becoming successful,” said Harboe, a professional designer with a portfolio of images and icons at www.graphicpeel.com.

The Mathmaster is a simple tool designed to interest kids in things like square roots and multiplication tables. The pair developed the app in about a month and it was approved by Apple’s App Store within a week.

They hope to launch a second, quirkier advertising-based application around their site sipthatdrink.com in the coming months.

“Our goal was to get approved by the app store, sell a bunch of copies and make more apps,” said Kaplan, who has already completed an advanced placement computer science course and served as a keynote speaker at the National American Council for Online Learning.

Makes paper routes and lemonade stands look very 20th century, doesn’t it?

[EdibleApple, Chicago Suntimes]