Apple today posted two updates for its early 2009 Mac Pros and XServe.
Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.4 (1.96MB)
XServe EFI Firmware Update 1.2 (1.81MB)
Macrumors is knee-deep in filings for secret Delaware companies made by Apple’s Senior Trademark Specialist Regina Porter. This morning, they’ve found another name that could at some point be used in a future Apple product/service.
‘iGuide’.
According to Macrumors, the trademark classification includes the following passage:
Computer hardware and computer software for accessing, browsing, searching, recording, organizing, storing, transmitting, receiving, manipulating, streaming, reproducing, playing, and reviewing audio, video, games, music, television, movies, photographs, and other multimedia content.
Even more revealing was a later passage which describes downloadable electronic content of a wide variety:
Downloadable electronic publications in the nature of books, magazines, newsletters, journals, and blogs in the fields of entertainment, sports, science, history, culture, celebrities, news, current events, politics, technology, and education;
As TechCrunch points out, the registration for this name tends toward it being a service rather than being a physical product.
From the description above, it seems that iGuide would replace much of the functionality of iTunes if it were to be released on the Mac platform as well (and Apple likes to maintain continuity among all of its platforms). As we’ve pointed out in the past, iTunes functionality has grown far beyond its original purpose of organizing music.
Could the ‘iGuide’ name replace ‘iTunes’ in the future? It also looks like it would encroach on ‘Front Row’ as well.
As Apple tablet rumours drove company stock to new highs across the Christmas period, another small slice of information has emerged, suggesting the company does indeed hold plans to extend its application provision into the Cloud.
(As if they were done with the critically acclaimed current online version that is years behind Google Apps)
An Apple job posting this week reveals the company to be looking for an engineer to
Proving that sometimes the law does have teeth, even when dealing with the biggest corporations, a US Judge yesterday denied a Microsoft appeal, offering a judgment which could see Word and Office removed from sale starting January 11.
Canadian developer i4i first sued Microsoft in 2007, accusing the US company of illegally using its XML editing technology in the popular Word software line. In May, a Texas jury said Microsoft violated i4i’s patent, and ordered it to pay i4i nearly $300 million in damages.
Microsoft filed various appeals and won a six-month delay in execution of the order to remove Word and Office in their current forms from sale. Now the Court of Appeals has upheld that injunction.
The case is likely to head two ways at this point – an appeal to the US Supreme Court or a settlement (financial deal) between Microsoft and i4i – otherwise Word and Office will be withdrawn from sale while various XML features are removed.
Microsoft will comply with the decision, a company spokesman said today. “We are moving quickly to comply with the injunction, which takes effect on 11 January, 2010,” said Kevin Kutz, the director of public affairs for Microsoft, in an email.
Hopefully this fixes some of those issues we’ve been hearing about on 27-inch iMacs. The firmware update, or specifically the issue it fixes, might have been resposible for Apple’s delaying the the delivery for the larger iMacs to after Christmas. According to Apple, the 683K file “updates the graphics firmware on ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards to address issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering.” What do you think?
It is a bit early to be calling this one, but it looks pretty likely that this year’s WWDC will be held on from Monday, June 28 to Friday, July 2, 2010. What makes us think so? Moscone Center’s summer schedule (below) has a “Corporate Event” scheduled for those dates. Apple has used this un-named moniker in the past to reserve their dates at the convention center.
If you are planning on attending, it might make sense to avoid making appointments for that week (and why not be the first to book fully refundable travel reservations?). If scheduled as such, the event would also overlap with the 3rd anniversary of the release fo the iPhone and also AT&T’s contract.
WWDC is traditionally when Apple rolls out its new iPhone hardware and software along with other product announcements. This year’s event could see such far fetched items as a tablet and/or new iPhone mobile carriers. Thanks to BBTRINET
Vevo, a joint venture between Sony and Universal Music, claims to be the “Hulu for music videos”. That remains to be seen. However, the site did get a big boost today by announcing that a third (of the big four) music label, EMI, would be adding their content to the site.
The site launches tomorrow and is powered by Youtube. Coincidentally, Warner, the only major label not in Vevo, has a partnership with Google to do videos on their own. Vevo has put out their sloppy version of Video Killed the Radio Star below, with 50 Cent.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p03Z1qmxJ5g&w=600&h=385]
VEVO ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT WITH EMI MUSIC
New Premium Music Service to Launch on December 8
with Content from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment
and EMI Music
NEW YORK December 7, 2009 — VEVO, the new premium music video and entertainment service, today announced an agreement in which EMI Music will join Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment in providing music fans with professionally-created video content when the service debuts on December 8 in the United States and Canada.
As part of this agreement, music fans will be able to view professionally-created video content from artists on EMI’s labels including Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol and Virgin, as well as the independent artists and labels represented by EMI Label Services and EMI
The Server Admin Tools update is recommended for remote administration of Snow Leopard Server. This update includes the latest releases of:
iCal Server Utility
Podcast Composer
Server Admin
Server Monitor
Server Preferences
System Image Utility
Workgroup Manager
Xgrid Admin
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3931
Munir Kotadia is a journalist who specialises in internet security – and he
Look, everyone knows this thing is the best desktop computer money can buy. But that doens’t mean we get sick of hearing about it. Ken Mingis at Computerworld got his review in today and had some very interesting observations:
Great question. Maybe it is best to get two.
Seriously, pretty fast Engadget.
Some quick observations on the new Magic Mouse: It looks thinner than any mouse I’ve used before. Will it feel like one of those mice that fits into your laptop’s PC card slot? And I wonder how the right and left clicking action will be. Remember, Apple isn’t 100% awesome when it comes to mice. Anyone remember Jobs unveiling the "Puck Mouse" as the next greatest thing? Even the Mighty Mouse ball never worked perfectly for me – I reverted to a Logitech when the ball died.
Anyway, I’ll judge it when we get to play with it – which I am excited about.
CNET went to town running Windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition of a MacBook Pro (to get exact hardware parity) and found that Snow Leopard was usually faster than Windows 7 and, at the same time, used less power.
To be fair, Snow Leopard is optimized for Apple’s hardware. There is no way Microsoft can optimize Windows for all of its hardware partners’ products. Get the full scoup at CNET.
VMWare Fusion 3 is now avaialble for pre-order from Amazon. We’re hoping to have a review up in the next few weeks, but until then we only have the company specs to go by
What’s New in VMware Fusion 3
Packed with 50+ new features including:
When in doubt, there’s always a security story somewhere and this one’s got something rather, erm, ‘special’ about it – it hits us right in our wallet…
See, internet banking is becoming de rigeur. It’s the nicest way to visit your overdraft or to watch the numbers growing on your credit card statement as those punitive borrowing rates slowly enhance your debt. (So, how is it again banks lost all that money), anyway – I digress – the story is that now Australian police are warning citizens ‘down under’ to belay use of Windows for internet banking, advising they use a Mac or Linux machine instead.
"Detective Inspector Bruce van der Graaf from the Computer Crime Investigation Unit told the hearing that he uses two rules to protect himself from cybercriminals when banking online," Kotadia reports. "The first rule, he said, was to never click on hyperlinks to the banking site and the second was to avoid Microsoft Windows,” reports a local Ozzie tech title.
The Detective is anxious that any future laws passed by the Australian government to help make online banking more secure may demand ISP’s check for things like firewalls and the like, as the MUCH SAFER Mac and Linux systems don’t tend to use them (he reckons – don’t shoot the messenger, people)..
In his own words, then, rather than this tedious translation: “Van der Graaf said he mentioned the two alternatives to Windows because he was concerned about any future law that could require internet service providers or banks to check their users had protection before allowing them to connect. ‘If you had a rule where ISPs would have to check for firewalls or that sort of thing, people using this safer system would not be able to do their internet banking. People using an iPhone, which is quite safe, would then not be able to do their internet banking,’ he added."
‘Course, Windows 7 will solve ALL these things, won’t it, as it’s already winning pretty wide praise for being the closest OS to a Mac that Microsoft’s ever shipped – well, kind of – take a look...
Via: MacDailyNews
We’re seen the pictures from their patent applictions (below) for a number of years. We’ve even seen some pretty awesome mockups. Is Apple about to release a new mouse with its new consumer products?
That’s AI’s latest theory. They think that upcoming consumer Macs will be outfitted with a new "Mightier" mouse which could gain things like haptic feedback and multi-touch on the top. Us? We’d take a Multi-touch trackpad that could sit below our keyboards and be happy. But we’re not the "Crazy Ones"
This one is geared toward the PC world at the moment but the implications to Macs (and iPhones) are pretty clear. It appears that Adobe will be releasing a version of Flash in the coming weeks that makes use of a computer’s GPU to accelerate Flash. In this case, they are NVIDIA ION chips that . Any Apple user not living in a cave will think two things upon hearing this information:
1. "Hey, that sounds familiar. Isn’t that what Snow Leopard’s OpenCL is doing? Why not just program Flash to use now Leopard’s GPU optimizations?"
2. "Flash really needs some optimizations so it stops killing my machine when I hit a complex Flash-based banner ad. "
There’s some obvious advantages to GPU optimizations
The numbers keep piling up for the App Store. Today, Apple announced that the iPhone App Store downloads surpassed two billion and the number of apps available for download surpassed 85,000. The App store hit a billion downloads in late April and turned a year old in July with 1.5 billion tallied.
App Store by the Numbers:
2 Billion: Apps downloaded
85,000: Apps available
125,000: developers
50,000,000: iPhone and iPod touch customers
500,000,000: Apps this quarter alone
>10,000,000 Average apps per day average currently
Apple’s Press release follows:
CUPERTINO, California—September 28, 2009—Apple® today announced that more than two billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. There are now more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone™ and iPod touch® customers worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program.
“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”
Today, iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries worldwide can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. With the recently introduced iTunes® 9, it’s now easier than ever to organize and sync your apps right in iTunes and they will automatically appear on your iPhone or iPod touch with the same layout.
As we warned before 3.1 came out, the latest iPhone update disables the tethering hack that so many of you enjoy using. That in itself is reason enough hold off on updating.
However, today TUAW publishes some more discouraging news. After the 3.1 update, non-iPhone 3GS users (touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G) won’t be able to access Exchange servers for their Email, Contacts and Calendar if the Exchange connection has been set by their administrators with a forced device encryption connection. Only iPhone 3GS devices now work in this mode. Apple has said it improperly set up encryption on iPhone OS 3.0 which wasn’t really encrypting the Exchange information.
Luckily, the Gmail Calendar and Contacts sync that uses Microsoft’s ActiveSync API (to act like an Exchange Server) is not affected.
We’re hanging back on this update a bit.
From the Toys section:
Best Buy offers the Western Digital 1TB My Book USB 2.0 External Hard Drive, model no. WDH1U10000A, for $64.99. Shipping adds $5.50, or opt for in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that’s $0.07/GB and the lowest total price we could find by $35. Sales tax is added where applicable.
You have to admit, these guys don’t lollygag. Also, we enjoyed the newscaster who obviously had some sports play-by-play work in his past. Strangely, it doesn’t look like the Apple Store in question used Kensington locks like all the ones we’ve ever visited.
Popular Yelp has updated it’s iPhone app to include a pretty cool easter egg. Shake your iPhone (3GS only) three times and, viola!, a hidden monocle feature appears. Click the top left tab and boom the iPhone camera activates within the app and it will show the nearest restaurants, bars, and anything with a Yelp rating.
To date, this is one of the first iPhone apps to use this feature, which reportedly was not supposed to come out until iPhone 3.1. What could be better? How about a similar augmented reality feature for social networks such as Twitter or Facebook or where my cat likes to hide
While most of us will be taking the wraps off of Snow Leopard client this weekend, Mac System Administrators will be taking a look at Snow Leopard Server. Charles Edge of 318.com has posted a number of videos on using Mac OS X Server 10.6. These include configuring Wide Area Bonjour and the Mobile Access Server amongst other topics.
http://www.youtube.com/p/EFFC3A3FF65CC37D&hl=en&fs=1
While most of us will be taking the wraps off of Snow Leopard client this weekend, Mac System Administrators will be taking a look at Snow Leopard Server. Charles Edge of 318.com has posted a number of videos on using Mac OS X Server 10.6. These include configuring Wide Area Bonjour and the Mobile Access Server amongst other topics.
http://www.youtube.com/p/EFFC3A3FF65CC37D&hl=en&fs=1
Update: Nack has now said that Photoshop CS3 is compatible – at the very least.
Adobe has confirmed that its applications are for the most part compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, while also warning it has not tested the new OS with previous generations of its professionally-priced Creative Suite products.
John Nack’s blog reveals, “Apple and Adobe have worked closely together (as always with new OS releases) to test compatibility.
"As for Adobe Creative Suite 4 , everything is good with the exception of auto-updates to Flash panels (which I guarantee you’re not using) and Adobe Drive/Version Cue (which doesn’t work at the moment on 10.6). CS3 & earlier haven’t been tested.”
Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium is a relatively recent release which caused some of Nack’s readers to question the company’s testing methods. Answering these complaints, Nack states: “I’d frankly be shocked if people at Adobe & Apple really hadn’t tested CS3 on 10.6. I *think* it’s just some corporate conservatism at work here, and Adobe doesn’t want to over-promise anything. As I say, though, I’ll try to find out more.”
However, Adobe’s tech support briefing warns: “You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).”
The company does however promise available trial versions of its software will be compatible with Snow Leopard.
Adobe recently confirmed future versions of the Creative Suite will run only on Intel-based Macs.
UPDATE: John Nack has now updated his original blog, saying "No one said anything about CS3 being ‘not supported’ on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation."
We do note the problem when allocating resources at one of the world’s biggest software developers, but we also note the commitment in Adobe’s tech support briefing which said when we looked, "Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6)." This suggests if Snow Leopard causes any unexpected problems, Adobe at this time doesn’t plan to address them. We’ve a feeling a lot of creative shops running older Macs and older installations of Adobe’s creative apps will be somewhat frustrated at this, as they have been each time Adobe has been recalcitrant in similar matters in the past.
