One of the features that I love most about iOS 5 is Automatic Downloads, which allows me to purchase an app, book, or song on my iPhone and have it installed on my iPad at almost exactly the same time. It’s great for users with multiple iOS devices, and it’s also coming to the Mac.
One developer has discovered the ability to turn on Automatic Downloads for Mac App Store purchases under the latest OS X Mountain Lion release.
Apple followed up yesterday’s Mountain Lion Developer Preview update with a new seed of Mountain Lion Server. Unlike some Mount Lion preview updates, which showed up in Software Update on Macs running the previous developer previews, Apple made this update visible in the Apple Developer Center website.
The problem with using OS X Messages, Twitter, Facebook, and other communication clients is that they operate in separate locations. I got like five different ones open on my desktop right now and it’s a confusing mess of switching windows and tabs and errant messages.
To make life easier one clever hacker figured out how to add a Twitter Timeline to OS X’s Messages app so that you can read your entire Twitter stream, in realtime, from the Messages app. It’s awesome, and I want it now!
Up until Mountain Lion, OS X’s “Cat” codenames kept on evolving from Cheetah to Puma to Jaguar to Panther to Tiger to Leopard. Once Lion hit, it seemed Apple had peaked, with no bigger lions to choose from, but then Cupertino surprised everyone with Mountain Lion.
Where to next, then? As the brilliant webcomic XKCD makes clear, there’s not a lot of good cat names yet, once you count out code names that have already been tech products, like Lynx or Ocelot. OS X Housecat? Please.
I’ll take OS X Saber-Toothed Jungle Cat though. Yes please.
You probably hate cable just as much as I hate cable, right? There’s like five shows on this planet that I want to watch, but I have to wait around for them to air or record them to my DVR, and I can’t take them with me unless I want to be naughty and download them illegally. Getting video wherever, whenever you want it should be a staple of the 21st century but cable companies aren’t making that easy because they refuse to embrace new technologies like Apple’s AirPlay service.
In a telling interview, Time Warner Cable’s CEO, Glenn Britt, admitted he doesn’t know what the heck AirPlay is, and thinks it’s too hard to get video from your computer to play on your TV.
Last week, Adobe created a firestorm of user unrest when it issued a series of security bulletins impacting three applications of its Creative Suite and said that users must pay to upgrade to the latest versions of the apps if they wanted patches that would close the vulnerabilities.
The company was quickly besieged by users, technology professionals, and security experts demanding that it reverse course and offer security patches to users who couldn’t afford the upgrades (or didn’t want to spend the money). Even though company quietly backpedaled and announced it would offer security updates without acknowledging the reason for its about face or offering an apology, the gaffe raises concerns that Apple’s yearly OS X release cycle might lead it down a similar path.
Apple could be preparing to kill off OS X Lion early in favor of its predecessor, Mountain Lion, according to the company’s AppleCare training schedule. One source claims that the Cupertino company is already recruiting and training staff for the new release, which could get its debut in June, weeks earlier than expected.
Many people I’ve talked to are anxious to try out the new features Apple has brought to OS X Mountain Lion. Unfortunately, Apple has only made the beta of Mountain Lion available to registered developers. In this video, I’ll show you how you can get the biggest features of Mountain Lion today, using only existing apps.
AirPlay and AirPlay Mirroring add a lot of value to the second and third generation Apple TVs. Paired with a recent iPad or the iPhone 4S, an Apple TV can instantly become a gaming solution and a theater for home movies – and will be amazing when combined with Mountain Lion when it ships this summer.
AirPlay also turns that Apple TV into powerful and extremely portable presentation system that’s a great fit for the classroom or the board room. The only challenge is that the Apple TV’s only output option is an HDMI port, which can be a big problem for connecting to older display technologies including many projectors and computer displays – a problem solved by cable and adapter maker Kanex.
WWDC may have sold out quickly, but as we reported there are alternative events for IT professionals and developers that want to network and hone their skills. One of those is the annual European Macintosh System Administrators Meeting, which began accepting registrations this week for this year’s event, which will be held in Sweden this September.
Unlike WWDC, MacSysAdmin isn’t intended for developers as much as it is IT professionals that need to deploy and manage Apple technologies in business and education.
As spotted by MacRumors, it looks like iCloud.com might soon get iOS 5 and Mountain Lion style notifications, with Apple currently testing a new notification service on the website.
What do you think? I’m not sure I need yet another place to get notifications, thank you.
Source: MacRumors
Apple has seeded an update to its third OS X Mountain Lion developer preview alongside Xcode 4.4. Preview 4. Registered developers can install the new software now in Software Update and the Mac Dev Center.
The update doesn’t seem to pack any major new features, but it looks like Apple is gearing up for the public release of Mountain Lion this summer.
When asked about Microsoft’s attempt to converge its mobile and desktop platforms into a single Windows 8 release, Tim Cook responded with an analogy of trying to converge a toaster and a refrigerator. If interest in Microsoft’s Consumer Preview release of Windows 8 is any guide, it seems that the public might agree with him.
According to Net Applications, a web analytics company, only a very small fraction of devices connecting to the Internet were running the preview – just 0.11% (or 11 out of every 10,000).
One of the main reasons many of us turned to Apple’s machines and its OS X operating system is the belief that the company’s software is more secure than Windows, its biggest rival. However, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky, one of the industry’s leading security specialists, believes that Apple is “10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” and that Apple need to invest more into security audits for its software.
Apple has a patent for a touchscreen iMac with an arm that swivels the display down to allow you to manipulate the display more like an iPad, without getting “gorilla arm.” It’s a cool patent, but what would that iMac look like in real life? Motion graphics and 3D animation student Joakim Ulseth put together an awesome video bringing an iMac Touch running OS X Mountain Lion to life. There’s a lot of problems with this sort of design, and Apple would never in a million years release it, but it sure does make a sexy video. [via iFans]
Apple has announced this morning that this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off on June 11 at San Francisco’s Moscone West (just as we expected). The five-day event will run until June 15 and will share the latest news about Apple’s iOS and OS X Mountain Lion operating systems.
Apple has released its third OS X Mountain Lion developer preview in the Dev Center. Build 12A178q of Mountain Lion is available for free to registered Mac developers, and it comes with a number of tweaks and changes. This release follows the second developer preview of Mountain Lion that was issued on March 16th.
Apple has issued a second update to Java in just two days this week as the company works to patch vulnerabilities that have led to the infection of over 600,000 Macs. The Java for OS 2012-002 update is now available to download via Software Update, and it’s recommended that you update.
When the App Store first launched on iOS, the need for an alternative marketplace quickly arose. Jailbreakers and power-users wanted a way to download and install apps that gave them more control over their devices than what Apple would allow.
That was how Cydia was born. Created by Jay ‘saurik‘ Freeman, the Cydia app store allows users with jailbroken devices to not only install apps that bypass a number of iOS’s built-in restrictions, but to more easily discover them.
On the Mac, there’s obviously no jailbreaking, but given the sandboxing restrictions placed upon App Store developers, there’s still a need for a Cydia-like alternative: an easy-to-use, curated catalog for apps that give power-users too much control over their systems for Apple’s comfort.
Enter the HackStore, which hopes one day to be as synonymous with user-empowered Macs as Cydia is with jailbroken iOS devices.
Engadget spotted that in OS X’s own Dictionary.app, the definition of Apple is woefully out of date, not even mentioning Cupertino’s biggest products: the iPhone and iPad.
Sadly, the dictionary is also out of date in other ways… namely, in how it lists Steve Jobs.
Back when OS X Lion first came out, amateur and pro astronomers alike noted with bemusement that Apple had used their new operating system as an excuse to alter the Universe according to their whim. Most notably, when picking a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy as OS X Lion’s default wallpaper, Apple photoshopped several stars and an entire separate galaxy out of the picture.
When Apple debuted the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion, with a brand new galactic image as the default wallpaper, we wondered if Apple had done it again. As it turns out, they have.
Apple uses digital certificates and code signing in various ways to help keep Macs secure. One common example is that apps sold through the Mac App Store are digitally signed, which allows an individual Mac to know that it’s getting the genuine article when a user launches the App Store app. It also allows a Mac to ensure that an application hasn’t been tampered with by a malicious user or a piece of malware each time that app is launched (Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper feature will be based on the same technology).
The same process is used with Apple’s Software Update servers. Each update from Apple is digitally signed using a certificate that let’s each Mac know that they’re getting genuine updates from Apple.
Digital certificates are designed to expire periodically and tomorrow, March 23, 2012, the certificate associated with Apple’s Software Update functionality will be expiring. Apple already has a new certificate ready that won’t expire for seven more years (2019). The transition to the certificate will be transparent for almost all Mac users, but it may create problems with some OS X Server installations.
Prepare yourself for a another look at OS X Mountain Lion and a peak at iOS 6, because Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference looks set to begin in early June. San Francisco’s Moscone Center — the company’s favorite venue for WWDC — has been booked up for a mysterious “corporate meeting” for one week starting June 11.
In addition to the new features we detailed earlier today, Apple’s second OS X Mountain Lion beta adds a nifty security feature that will prevent third-party applications from accessing your contacts without your permission.
Following the release of Apple’s second Mountain Lion beta late last week, registered developers have been stumbling across a number of new features that weren’t present in the first beta. These include Twitter notifications, “iCloud Tabs,” and location-based reminders.
