Mac userTom Klaver says, “Command-Tab in this case brings me command-slap, because when I invoke the command-tab keystroke to switch to another app, almost every time this weird unidentifiable
thing happens.”
Anyone else experiencing this problem?
On a day when HP beat Apple to the punch with the idea of a multi-touch notebook, Apple fan and Flickr user nthnschrdr‘s design for a multi-touch Mac Pad is something worth dreaming about…
Be sure to go to the Flickr page and check out the photo’s embedded notes.
Possibly in a fit of friendly rivalry with its competitor Fortune magazine, atop whose list of the 50 Most Admired Companies in the world Apple sits for 2008 at #1, Forbes magazine featured its list of the 10 biggest Apple failures this week, a gallery of which we reproduce for you below.
There are at least a couple of items here that grabbed a few hearts, but what do you think? Are these all Apple strikeouts? Let us know in comments.
Artist Ben Fino-Radin clicked the needles together for this faithful repro in yarn of a 1980s Macintosh 128k computer.
You can catch his “fibrous reinterpretation” of this and a few others at the Current Gallery, in Baltimore or see more Mac-inspired work at his site.
Via Make
Boxee announced product upgrades today giving users of its Mac-Ubuntu-AppleTV media center application seamless integration with Hulu and CBS.com offerings through the Boxee interface.
Making a bid for wider recognition of its product at CEA i-Stage in Las Vegas, Boxee is preparing to move from the invitation-only Alpha stage into beta release of a service that aims “to bring all your entertainment into one place.” The company plans to send out 10,000 invitations to its final Alpha release today.
Be sure to watch the video embedded above for a good overview of what Boxee is all about, and check out the Techzilla Boxee Review we posted a few weeks ago.
I walked into the Apple Store in San Francisco tonight fully expecting to walk out with a brand-new MacBook Pro — the 2.53 GHz model, if at all possible. After 30 minutes playing with all of Apple’s latest laptops, I was stunned to find myself instead walking out the door with a 2.4 GHz MacBook and a smile on my face.
The Top Line: The Aluminum MacBook is the perfect heir to the 12″ PowerBook G4. It’s light, rugged, and meant to be used as a true laptop — it actually runs cooler than my 12″ PowerBook from 2003. Apple hit it out of the park with this thing, and I couldn’t be more delighted. To learn why, click through.
Apple promised that it would finally pull its attention off the cash cow iPhone and iPod product lines to spotlight notebooks at an event this morning, and they weren’t kidding. New MacBook, new Air, new Pro, and a new matching Cinema Display for good measure. The design team absolutely hit it out of the park on these machines, which are all glass, shiny black accents, and subtly tapered corners. Like the iMac whose design they refine and make significantly more appealing, these machines look like they were just made to sync with an iPhone or iPod touch (and, if anything, they make the continued use of white plastic docks for those devices look increasingly incongruous). This is Apple’s best design work, and it’s for a Mac — something we haven’t seen since the 12″ PowerBook G4 that I’m typing on was introduced. Read on for the Pros and the Cons…
Erroneous MacBook Pro Mock-Up Courtesy Ars Technica
This has been a gangbuster summer for Apple. First came the iPhone 3G announcement in June, alongside OS X iPhone 2.0 with the AppStore, Mobile Me, and HD video in iTunes, then came a new round of incremental but strong new iPods, and amazing news about a major uptick in Mac sales during a down economy. In spite of some software issues, Apple is coming out with huge new gains in multiple markets and is healthier than just about any other tech company.
And yet, unless Apple rolls out rumored new Macs next Tuesday, all of that will start to look suspect. To find out why, click through!
Apple released the OS X 10.5.5 update in the US on Monday afternoon to immediate acclaim as an all-out assault on bugs. Despite initial skepticism, even TUAW, which was first to the tape, acknowledged the release notes are “quite detailed.”
Gizmodo provided a laundry list of items addresed in the update, with MacWorld shortly touting 30 bugs fixed in the new software. Not six hours later, ComputerWorld upped the ante to 70 bugs fixed.
Security experts are finally satisfied the “Dan Kaminski exploit,” referring to the researcher who disclosed a critical flaw in DNS that made it much easier than originally thought to “poison” the cache of DNS servers, or insert bogus information into the Internet’s routing infrastructure, has been fixed.
Apple also updated Mac OS X’s implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the open-source DNS software maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), to keep it current with an early-August version that ISC released to solve performance issues that had shipped in the original fix for Kaminsky’s vulnerability.
The update also fixes a number of non-security flaws, according to the release notes. iCal and Mail both received more than half a dozen fixes, Time Machine got slapped around a bit, and MobileMe even came in for some love.
See the complete list of adjustments after the jump.
A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.
This is the first time the film, a documentary called, ‘Welcome to Machintosh’, has been screened in the US since new interview footage with original Apple co-founder Ron Wayne was added to the movie. Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube.
That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.
The cult of Mac is growing as Apple emerges as the key computer for US consumers, amongst which it is now the fourth-ranked computer manufacturer, according to new research from MetaFacts.
Brand loyalty, the report claims, is at an all-time high with Apple’s chain of retail stores pulling customers through the doors – and selling Macs, MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros in particular, the researchers claim in their latest Apple Profile Report 2008.
It gets better, “Like the camel slipping its nose under the tent, Apple is reaching into American households as the second or third Home PC,” said Dan Ness, Principal Analyst at MetaFacts. “Where Apple shines is
as the third PC, ranking fifth with 8 per cent of third Home PCs, and ranking fourth in notebook PCs, also at 8 per cent of the installed base.”
And whether that Mac is a first, second or third home computer, what households do with their machine is very different. They’re used to make websites, create graphics and “personal activities”, the report explains – probably while the Windows box gets used for checking email, playing games, and cranking up peoples scores in MMORPG games online. Or something.
Mac users are public, too, this report explains. Seems 21 per cent of Macs are used in public – double the public usage of your WIndows machine – and potentially marking Apple’s ascendancy as a laptop maker.
“If you look around at a Starbucks or cybercafé, you might think the whole world’s gone to Apple,” said Ness, “Mac users are very active and use their notebooks in more locations than Windows notebook users.”
Wait, there’s more – brand loyalty, “More than four in five (81%) of households with Apple as their primary Home PC plan to buy the same brand – Apple – for their next Home PC,” said Ness.
All this action in the consumer market, is it any surprise that the long tail effect Apple executives hoped for four or five years ago when they began visualising it has now begun taking place?
The company gets put down a lot for not focusing sufficient attention on the enterprise markets. Perhaps it didn’t – once – but for the last few years of Apple market expansion, the company’s executives have known that consumer demand would eventually become an enterprise market driver.
Think about it – do you recall when you moved jobs and were once excited about the technology you got to use because it would be better than what you could afford at home? Nowadays when you start a new job its not uncommon to live in abject fear (OK, slight trepidation) of the dated system you’ll end up working with…it’s not at all uncommon for workplace technology to be less advanced than the tech company workers have at home.
And as Apple’s consumer market share grows, so too does the demand made on enterprises to offer workers the equipment they are already familiar with.
And that’s the long tail Apple execs set in motion with the iMac in 1998.
Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.
It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.
It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.
Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.
It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.
Check out our gallery of original artwork from Swedish painter Erik Saxen, who painted the work in 1987 for a huge poster campaign and newspaper run promoting the launch of the Macintosh SE in Sweden.
Saxen is seeking a serious collector for the set of oil paintings (some with mixed media), which are currently in climate-controlled storage in Florida. For additional information and contact links see My Old Mac.
Photographer Pat St. Clair has a couple more panoramic images from Thursday’s big night for the Democratic Party at Invesco field in Denver.
Above is a still shot from his vantage point near the Jumbotron behind the media pavillions. St. Clair made it from three fisheye images stitched and interpreted usung PTGui Pro 7.8 on a McBook Pro. The original size image is here.
Go here for a dynamic four-image shot that captures the enormity of that historic evening.
Unlike St. Clair, I was in Denver without the benefit of a Press Pass or professional photographic equipment and struggled to capture my own memories with the rudimentary camera in my iPhone.
Judge for yourself the quality of the iPhone’s camera by clicking on the gallery thumbnails. Large pics and descriptions after the jump.
The Hills screensaver is about the coolest screensaver I’ve seen for Mac OS X, but it’s not easy to get.
The screensaver shows beautifully rendered rolling green hills covered in perfectly-manicured grass. You fly over them as though gliding in a silent helicopter. It’s utterly hypnotic — and very relaxing, especially on a big display.
The developer, Chris Kent, was hosting it on a .mac account, but he exceeded bandwidth limits and it’s now gone.
Searching for it in Google brings up a bunch of old links — it’s very frustrating.
So we’re hosting the file here. Download The Hills version 1.1: hills-1-1.dmg.
Photographer Pat St. Clair shot a super-cool QuickTime panoramic photo from last night’s historic session of the Democratic Party’s convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, CO.
Working on assignment for LightSpeed Media, St. Clair shot the DNC image using a new Canon XSi with a Sigma 8mm f3.5 circular fisheye lens. It was four shots around on a custom rig, with the camera set to ISO 1600 and aperture priority metering.
He shot RAW files, used Photoshop Camera Raw to render them to tiffs, stitched the panorama in PTGui Pro 7.8. and authored the final pan in Cubic Converter, all on a MacBook Pro.
Next time you’re running out for some organic produce or fresh-grilled unagi, if you’re in Texas, you might want to swing by H-E-B, where you can pick up a MacBook while you’re at it.
Who said Apple’s distribution model is restrictive?
Via AppleGazette
August is back-to-school month and in the era of increasing glasnost between Apple and its prime competitor up in Redmond, WA, students can save 30% on Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac until September 8th with the purchase of any Mac at Apple resellers and Apple retail stores across the US.
A full list of participating Apple resellers is available at Microsoft’s website. Click on the “Save Now” link.
Ten years is one of those nice round numbers that always sparks nostalgia and reminiscing and (hopefully) waves of warm and fuzzy feelings, whether its focus is a sports career, a marriage or a business enterprise. Today, in the world where Cupertino, CA is the center of the universe, all thoughts are on iMac, Apple’s user-friendly, all-in-one desktop computer that said hello to the world on August 15, 1998.
The iMac has grown and changed in many ways throughout its ten years of existence, but remains possibly Apple’s best-known and most accessible calling card for a growing market of consumers curious about the complete user experience at the root of Steve Job’s business philosophy.
We present here a gallery of iMacs, from then to now and our anniversary greetings. We’re looking forward to the next ten years.
In many ways, we’re living in a golden age for Apple. The entire product line is rock-solid, and the only complaint any of us can muster is that Apple hasn’t released whatever top-secret products it has in the wings yet. Market share is way up in Macs, dominant in iPods, and rapidly growing for iPhones. The current crop of software for the Mac is better than at any time in the history of Apple (sorry, Framemaker-lovers), and the iPhone development community shows tremendous promise (a few apps are already the best to ever appear on a phone).
So why are so many long-time Apple fanatics, myself included, feel a bit bummed out by the current state of affairs? Is it because we hate the thought of outsiders getting in on our little secret or that we really miss CyberDog and QuickDraw GX? It’s worse — we’ve all become de facto Apple spokespeople. I don’t draw a salary from Apple, but I am a full-time Mac genius in my social circle. If you share my pain, click through.
Adding to recent criticism charging Apple with inadequate attention to security concerns, Consumer Reports takes the company to task for the lack of phishing protection in Safari. Among seven common online blunders that can “ruin your computer or invite identity theft,” thinking your Mac shields you from all risks comes in at #5, according to the report.
Citing a State of the Net survey that says Mac users fall prey to phishing scams at about the same rate as Windows users, CR recommends Mac users ditch Safari for Firefox or Opera until Apple builds phishing protection into its flagship browser.
AppleOwner.com, a Taiwanese Apple-oriented website, has leaked what are purported to be pictures of the new MacBook, a highly anticipated revision to Apple’s line of increasingly popular notebook computers expected to be available within the next six weeks.
The photographs are long on suggestion, but short on detail, and may well be noting more than placeholders on the AppleOwner website. Make of them what you will.
Via Gizmodo.
Amid growing criticism of a lassiez-faire approach to security issues, Apple has canceled participation in a public discussion of its security practices at the Black Hat security conference scheduled this week in Las Vegas. Black Hat Director Jeff Moss told reporters in an interview Friday that unnamed members of Apple’s engineering team had agreed in early July to participate in a panel discussion on computer security issues, which would have been a first for the notoriously secretive company. “It was [going to be] them talking about security engineering and how they take security seriously,” Moss said, but “marketing got wind of it, and nobody at Apple is ever allowed to speak publicly about anything without marketing approval.”
In a separate security-related development, reports indicate the DNS security patch released by Apple on Friday may fail to fix the exploit flaw it was intended to repair.
Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. and Swa Frantzen of the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center both detailed research indicating systems running the client version of Mac OS X were still incrementing ports, not randomizing them, as should have been the case if the fix had addressed the flaw. “Apple might have fixed some of the more important parts for servers, but is far from done yet, as all the clients linked against a DNS client library still need to get the work-around for the protocol weakness,” Frantzen said.
While Dan Kaminsky, the researcher who uncovered the DNS flaw in February and helped coordinate a multivendor patch effort indicated “if there was a huge population of people behind DNS servers running OS X, I’d be more worried,” Rich Mogull, an independent security consultant and former Gartner Inc. analyst said, “It may be a low priority in the scheme of the DNS vulnerability, but if all my servers are OS X, it matters. Within the Mac audience, it matters.”
Via Computerworld
Apple released Security Update 2008-005 yesterday, fixing a DNS exploit others began work on nearly a month ago. With an increase in reported instances of malware and trojan horses targeting OS X systems, Apple has lately been widely criticized for being slow to move on security vulnerabilities, especially with respect to the iPhone.
The DNS fix is among 13 items updated in yesterday’s security release, which is available through Software Update and at Apple’s web site.
Via MacWorld.
Click the image to view VMware’s Fusion demo on YouTube.
The good folks at VMware have IT Pros all over excited about the new Beta 2 release for its Fusion 2.0 virtualization software. According to our very own Leigh McMullen, this release is important “because it is the dominant virtualization technology in IT Shops, allowing us to create VM’s on our Macs as a “Lab” machine, that we can later run in production, (or take a production image, and run it on our Macs for experimentation).”
Additional goodies in the new release (which is a free upgrade for users of Fusion 1.x) include Leopard Server Virtualization – Yes, Parallels could already do that, but they charge over a thousand bucks for the version that can – and support for Ubuntu Unity mode – which is a FIRST as far as we know.
Check out our gallery of screenshots below:
