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Mac Market Share Hits All-Time High Following Windows 7 Launch

Written on November 02, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 2 people have commented

Microsoft’s advertising strategy with the latest installment of Windows is basically to none-too-subtly deride its predecessors, and it does appear to be helping Windows 7 gain traction among consumers. Unfortunately, it also might be contributing to the success of Mac OS X, or at least, it isn’t doing anything to slow down the steady progress [...]

Snow Leopard Bug Deletes All Data, Apple Enters Data Loss Competition With Microsoft

Written on October 13, 2009 by Liam Cassidy and 13 people have commented

The intertubes are ablaze today with reports of a serious bug in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that, under certain conditions, can destroy all of a user’s personal data.
The problem lies with Mac OS X’s Guest Account functionality, and was first reported at the beginning of September on Apple’s Support Discussions forum. Specifically, some [...]

VMware Fusion 3 to Debut by End of October

Written on October 12, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 7 people have commented

In the ever leap-frogging world of desktop virtualization for the Mac, VMware has announced that it will make its next hop (I won’t venture to say who’s ahead at this juncture) by the end of October…or the 27th, if you go by its blog. So in just a few weeks, version 3 of Fusion will [...]

Snow Leopard Leaps in Market Share

Written on October 01, 2009 by Charles Jade and 36 people have commented

Eighteen percent of Mac users are running Snow Leopard just one month after its release, according to Web metrics firm Net Applications. That’s a remarkable upgrade rate for the latest iteration of OS X, especially considering Snow Leopard is Intel only.

Overall, OS X now represents 5.12 percent of the worldwide OS market, up from 4.87 [...]

Life With Snow Leopard: One Month Later

Written on September 25, 2009 by Mark Crump and 37 people have commented

Installing a new operating system on Day One is often a foolish undertaking. Yet, there I was, installing Snow Leopard the night of the 28th.
I took the plunge day one for two reasons: as a tech journalist specializing in the Mac, I felt I owed it to our readers to offer timely insight on Snow [...]

Windows 7 Takes Pricing Cue From Snow Leopard

Written on September 18, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 12 people have commented

Snow Leopard is selling like hotcakes. It’s selling  much better than Tiger, and a lot better than Leopard, too. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say those strong sales numbers had something to do with price. Microsoft appears to think so, too.
For a limited time, Microsoft is offering students the opportunity to grab one [...]

Snow Leopard Sales Seen Doubling Leopard

Written on September 17, 2009 by Charles Jade and 8 people have commented

Just two weeks after being released, Snow Leopard is already setting records. According to NPD, sales are more than twice that of plain-old Leopard in its first two weeks, and nearly four times that of Tiger.
“Even though some considered Snow Leopard to be less feature-focused than the releases of Leopard or Tiger, the ease of [...]

How-to: Get Google Gears Working in Snow Leopard

Written on September 15, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 7 people have commented

Snow Leopard was a remarkably painless upgrade for me, but one particularly important piece of software was broken: Google Gears.
For those who don’t know, Gears is Google’s framework for storing browser data offline. It works with many Google services as well as some third-party products. I use Gears primarily with Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) like [...]

Sorry Redmond: Too Little, Too Late

Written on September 10, 2009 by Liam Cassidy and 23 people have commented

I was recently asked in a tweet, “Have you completely abandoned Windows now?” I realized, with some genuine surprise, that not only had I stopped using Windows in any meaningful way, but actually stopped using it the moment I got my hands on my first (modern) Mac in 2008. So, in the aftermath of last [...]

How-To: Resurrect Your AppleTalk Printer in Snow Leopard

Written on September 04, 2009 by Dave Greenbaum and 27 people have commented

Did Snow Leopard leave your old AppleTalk printer out in the cold? Grab a hot cup of cocoa and warm your printer up with some of these handy tips to continue to use your classic AppleTalk printer with your state of the art operating system.
Print Via USB
Of course! Get a longer USB cable if possible, [...]

Mangled Mail? That’ll Be the New Cat

Written on September 04, 2009 by Liam Cassidy and 23 people have commented

Ooops. Seems I spoke too soon. TidBITS reports that some users who upgraded to Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest incarnation of its Mac OS X operating system, have been experiencing problems sending email using the native email client, Mail.app.
When trying to send mail, hapless users have been getting an error message that reads “Error 54: Connection [...]

Apple Testing Snow Leopard 10.6.1 Update

Written on September 04, 2009 by Liam Cassidy and 41 people have commented

It has been one week since Snow Leopard’s worldwide launch and, predictably, it appears Apple is already testing its first OS software update. According to a report by AppleInsider, the update has not yet made its way to Apple’s large community of paying developers — the Apple Developer Connection member base — but instead is [...]

iStat Menus Now Purrs Like a Snow Leopard

Written on September 03, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 14 people have commented

Has it been a long almost-week for anyone else who upgraded on day one of Snow Leopard? My upgrade experience went swimmingly, with the glaring exception of iStat Menus not working. Since then, iSlayer.com (home of iStat Menus) has been set as my homepage so I can check it obsessively for news of a 10.6 [...]

Quick Tip: Automator and Services in Snow Leopard

Written on September 02, 2009 by Mark Crump and 14 people have commented

Originally introduced in OS X Tiger, Automator is a drag-and-drop form of scripting. You can create workflows to easily speed up many tasks. With each version of OS X, Automator has seen some improvements, but with Snow Leopard, it finally realizes its full potential.
It realizes it by allowing you to create your own Services. Unless [...]

Debunking the “Snow Leopard is a Service Pack” Myth

Written on September 01, 2009 by Mark Crump and 35 people have commented

For a while the blogosphere has been running its mouth off about how “Snow Leopard is just a service pack Apple has the gall to charge for.”
TechRadar.com reports, “Despite all of the necessary ‘under the hood’ improvements in Snow Leopard, this release has the inescapable air of a service pack about it.”
Gina Trapani says, “Even [...]

Snow Leopard Features Suggest It’s a Touchscreen OS

Written on September 01, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 8 people have commented

If you’ve got one of Axiotron’s awesome Modbooks, and you’re running Snow Leopard, you may have already stumbled across a few features that make your Mac so much easier to use. It’s unlikely Apple had Axiotron in mind when it included these features, though, so what’s the real story here?
Cult of Mac believes the features [...]

Snow Leopard Malware Targets Apple Users

Written on September 01, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 33 people have commented

Not that any TheAppleBlog readers would ever try to acquire software in a less-than-legal manner, but just in case you know someone who would, tell them to watch out for web sites claiming to bear Snow Leopard gifts.
Like the Adobe Photoshop CS4 and iWork ‘09 before it, Snow Leopard now has a super-special malware edition [...]

Your Favorite Snow Leopard UI Changes

Written on August 31, 2009 by David Klein and 35 people have commented

Now that many of us have upgraded to Snow Leopard, I would like to start a forum where you can share your favorite UI changes. Use Command + Shift + 3, Command + Shift + 4, a third party screenshot capture tool, or links to your favorite photo sharing site. I’ll start it off with [...]

Does Mom Need Snow Leopard?

Written on August 31, 2009 by David Klein and 32 people have commented

Naturally, as a contributor to this blog, I purchased a Snow Leopard family pack the first possible day. Some people may have pre-ordered on Amazon, but they missed out on the in-store experience. My mother lives close to an Apple store, so I decided to stop by and upgrade my Macbook Pro while catching up [...]

Snow Leopard: A Brief Introduction to the New Big Cat

Written on August 28, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 35 people have commented

I’m now running OS X 10.5.6 on two of my three eligible Macs (the fourth is a 12-inch PowerBook G4), and so far, I couldn’t be happier. I haven’t run into any nasty compatibility issues or really disastrous bugs (although Finder once auto-quit and restarted when I was fiddling with the menu bar), and general [...]