Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

The Apple Horizon

Written on February 19, 2008 by Arvin Dang and 8 people have commented

Can you foresee an Apple horizon, where one day the average Mac consumers out weigh a PC user? How long do you think that’ll take to happen?
The iPod began a new quest for Apple. A company set on innovation has taken our hearts with a simple, compact device for music. Well, it was music [...]

It’s All Greek To Me: 15 Lorem Ipsum Resources

Written on February 14, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 14 people have commented

Web designers, font purveyors, professional paginators and even application developers need sample data to test their layouts, creations and algorithms. “Lorem ipsum” has been the de-facto standard when placing non-distracting text into test areas and has been shown to exhibit characteristics of standard lettter, word and space distribution. While one could just keep a copy [...]

Apple TV ‘Take 2′ - Post Upgrade Melancholy

Written on February 12, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

For the past 24+ hours RSS readers around the globe have been awash with OS X 10.5.2 update news and notes on the ancillary side updates. The Cupertino software barrage continued today, including the Apple TV “Take 2″, which added access to iTunes rentals, Flickr/.Mac photos/movies and HD trailers.
I started the download before my evening [...]

While You’re Waiting For The iPhone SDK…

Written on February 12, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

As a previous post indicated, Apple has yet to publicly release the iPhone/iTouch non-web SDK and it is still unclear if casual developers will be able to get their applications onto these new devices. As we all wait like expectant parents, there are some great resources out there for the current, Apple-preferred method of iPhone [...]

iPhone Development Preview

Written on February 11, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Craig Hockenberry (of Icon Factory/Twitterific) give us a glimpse of what development will be like for the iPhone via his personal/development blog. What can we expect?

Tossing most of your current UI code
Being way more careful about object/memory use
Relying on your Objective-C & Cocoa skills for visual element design since NIBs are non-esistent
Learning a whole new [...]

Speed Up Documentation & Lesson Creation With ScreenSteps

Written on February 11, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Image is everything when preparing application documentation for manuals or creating a lesson for a training class or a self-paced module. An annotated series of screen, window or dialog boxes is much easier to understand than a simple list of actions and OS X users have many tools to choose from, including ScreenSteps 2
(from [...]

Twitterific 3.1 (Beta) Annoys Less, Fixes Bugs

Written on February 07, 2008 by Bob Rudis and No one has commented

The fine folks over at Icon Factory have release a beta (1.2MB zip file) update to their popular OS X Twitter client which fixes one really annoying problem in how new messages are displayed – no more autoscroll to the top – and adds a slew of enhancements, including NetNewsWire-like keyboard shortcuts (the spacebar moves [...]

TrueCrypt 5.0 Brings Plausible Deniability To OS X Users

Written on February 06, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

While I’m not trying to only focus on security topics, they just seem to pop up more often than not, including today’s serendipitous discovery that TrueCrypt is available for OS X. Security isn’t just about maintaining system integrity (loosely defined as keeping malicious code from getting onto/running on your system). A critical component is ensuring [...]

Crazy EDGE Outage

Written on February 01, 2008 by Matt Radel and 19 people have commented

As many folks have reported, AT&T’s EDGE network is struggling in the midwest. Outages have been patchy but seem to have affected entire cities, or at least large areas. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been any accounts of service dropping within inches…until now.
Here I sit, in downtown Cincinnati, and of the three iPhones in [...]

Fix for Office 2008 Security Issue

Written on January 26, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 7 people have commented

For those that have installed Office 2008, you may have seen some news floating on the internets about improper permissions — that were created by the installer — potentially allowing another local user to access your documents. It’s not a remote exploit issue and most folks are probably not vulnerable (you only need to [...]

A Look at Native KDE 4.0 for OS X

Written on January 25, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 11 people have commented

This week Slashdot (and many, many others) reported that KDE 4.0 has been released for Windows and OS X. KDE (K Desktop Environment) has been a popular GUI for *nix systems and there have been ways of getting it to run (mostly) on OS X prior to this native port if you were willing to [...]

Why Mac Security Matters: OS X Rootkit Hunter

Written on January 23, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 26 people have commented

After blogging about the need to use and maintain an anti-virus solution for your OS X systems, an anonymous reply questioning the need to use security tools at all on OS X systems gave me pause. You do not need me to link to the numerous articles flying around the internets that report on how [...]

Nothing But Air?

Written on January 22, 2008 by Arvin Dang and 21 people have commented

I think Apple made a few too many assumptions when creating the MacBook Air (MBA), but will that translate to a failed product? I highly doubt it.

The Developer Assumption
I think Apple made three assumptions when developing the MBA for the subnotebook demographic:

Subnotebook users regularly use WiFi hotspots
Subnotebook users will not use their notebooks at home
Subnotebook users [...]

Multi-touch on the MacBook Pro

Written on January 21, 2008 by Stephanie Guertin and 15 people have commented

A rumor surfaced on the internet this weekend hinting that the next revision of the MacBook Pro will have the same multi-touch abilities as the Air. That’d be logical, after all - the MacBook Pro’s haven’t been updated in a while, and that would be a nice feature, right?

The only problem with that is [...]

My Experience with Renting a Movie on iTunes

Written on January 19, 2008 by Michael Clark and 31 people have commented

We received three inches of snow last Thursday, but I wasn’t worried. We had plenty of white supplies (bread, milk, toilet paper) stocked up, so we didn’t have to venture to the grocery store. NetFlix said two DVDs would be delivered that afternoon. So before dinner, I ventured down to the mailbox to retrieve [...]

NetBoot and the Air

Written on January 18, 2008 by Stephanie Guertin and 4 people have commented

Since I heard that the MacBook Air didn’t come with an onboard optical drive, but did come, instead, with this magic virtual disk feature, I’ve been having a very interesting wonder - does this also mean that NetBoot now works - at least for the Air - over wireless?
And, fresh off the show floor today [...]

Reflections on another Tuesday at Macworld

Written on January 17, 2008 by Eddie Hargreaves and 11 people have commented

This is the fifth year I’ve attended Macworld Expo on the day of the keynote, and it definitely wasn’t as exciting as 2007. But after last year’s introduction of the long-rumored iPhone, how could it be?
Of course, another big difference is that I didn’t get into the keynote this year. There’s always a disconnect between [...]

Create Snazzy WebClip Icons

Written on January 16, 2008 by Matt Radel and 3 people have commented

The iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update added some great stuff, including Safari WebClips. I’ve literally added a dozen or more to my home screen in the last 12 hours or so. But the icons for the clips leave something to be desired. Even though I’ve done my best to zoom in as tightly as I can [...]

MacSweeper: Keep This Rogue Mac Application In The Broom Closet

Written on January 16, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 8 people have commented

F-Secure is reporting on the first, widespread rogue Mac application that comes in the guise of security software: MacSweeper. It is hosted at www.macsweeper.com, but I do not recommend visiting that site. I’m not convinced this is the first rogue Mac application ever to hit the internets, but the F-Secure folks are top-notch researchers who [...]

iPhone 1.1.3 Update First Impressions

Written on January 16, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 7 people have commented

Apple posted the 1.1.3 iPhone update shortly after the keynote (as promised) and I managed to slowly grab it via AT&T’s 3G ExpressCard (~161MB…full firmware load). The upgrade behaves like a standard iPhone firmware update and upon restart, you are greeted with a dialog explaining how to move icons around.
NOTE: This is the first time [...]

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