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How to Avoid or Minimize Apple Update Woes

Written on May 18, 2009 by Charles Moore and 16 people have commented

Quite a few folks are reporting problems in getting the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update installed and working properly on their officially supported Macs, while “hackintosh” netbook users are finding they’re getting dramatically improved battery runtime with 10.5.7 — one of those ironies.
I’m still waiting to see how the dust settles, and also looking [...]

Apple Releases Mac OS X Update 10.5.7

Written on May 12, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 58 people have commented

There was a lot of buzz that it might come today, and it has. Apple just released Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.7 for download via Software Update. As one, let us install and restart our computers. Maybe the Internet will pause for a second in our absence.
Here are some highlights from the new release:

Includes additional [...]

Apple Updates iTunes to 8.1.1

Written on April 06, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 10 people have commented

Apple today released an update for iTunes, bringing the version number to 8.1.1.
The new version (currently available from Software Update) supposedly fixes syncing issues with the iPhone and iPod touch (which I’ve been lucky enough not to encounter) and with VoiceOver, the we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-display substitute for the iPod Shuffle.
It’s also supposed to bring HD movie rental [...]

Apple Releases 17″ MacBook Pro Graphics Fix

Written on March 26, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 4 people have commented

A while back we reported about issues 17-inch MacBook Pro owners were having with vertical lines and other distortion appearing on their displays. Almost three weeks later, Apple has released a fix for the issue. Officially dubbed “MacBook Pro Graphics Firmware Update 1.0,” it’s downloadable immediately via Software Update.
Apple doesn’t point any fingers regarding the [...]

QuickTime 7.6 Released

Written on January 21, 2009 by Matthew Bookspan and No one has commented

Get ready QuickTime junkies — Apple is taking care of you. If you check Software Update, you’ll notice a new flavor of QuickTime is available today.
From Apple’s support document, here is what we can expect in this update.
Video:

Improves single-pass H.264 encoding quality
Increases the playback reliability of Motion JPEG media

Audio:

Improves AAC encoding fidelity
Audio tracks from MPEG [...]

Apple Unleashes A “Perfect Storm” Of Updates

Written on November 21, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Apple TV 2.3 was not enough. They could not stop at iPhone OS 2.2. Apple had to introduce the perfect storm of updates to impact users of all their systems and devices by unleashing Quicktime H.264 Compatibility Update (now at version 7.5.5) and iTunes 8.0.2 (plus the required download of the new iPhone SDK to [...]

iPhone 2.2 Firmware Released, Google Maps and Podcasts Take Center Stage

Written on November 21, 2008 by carolyn and 17 people have commented

Today Apple released the iPhone 2.2 firmware update and it is available to download throught iTunes. Just click on “check for updates” to force iTunes to call home and start downloading the latest update.
While some iPhone pages have not been updated yet, you can download a new iPhone User Guide from Apple.com that outlines how [...]

Software Updates & New Releases For Week Ending 2008-11-01

Written on November 04, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

While the highlight of my week was seeing the release of some new security software (albeit, one that needs work), there was a great deal happening in the rest of the OS X application world that is worth a mention.

VLC media player – 0.9.5 – The de-facto, plays-anything, multi-platform media player get a small bump [...]

Microsoft Posts Patches on the Heels of Apple’s Security & Firmware Updates

Written on October 16, 2008 by Josh Pigford and 5 people have commented

Microsoft released three updates yesterday which fix bugs and address security concerns in their Office family of products and utilities.
The first is for the Open XML File Format Converter, which bumps the version to 1.0.1 and fixes a remote code execution (rated by Microsoft as “important”) associated with security bulleting MS08-057. The Open XML Converter [...]

Software Updates and New Releases for Week Ending 2008-10-04

Written on October 07, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 3 people have commented

My Apple TV woes managed to eat away at some of the time I would have dedicated to scouring for updates and new toys, but I managed to find some interesting applications and utilities. I didn’t have time to put Stainless (a Google Chrome-like browser for OS X based on WebKit) through enough paces [...]

Apple TV 2.2 Wish Lists = Fail

Written on October 03, 2008 by Matthew Bookspan and 4 people have commented

Yesterday, Apple released both an iTunes (8.0.1) and Apple TV (2.2) update. The Apple TV update has some great new features:

Support for the Genius
Support for HD Television Shows
Numerous bug fixes

One unmentioned feature change is how Apple TV now handles Wish Lists. In the previous release (2.1), you could click through to the movie you wanted [...]

Software Updates & New Releases For Week Ending 2008-09-27

Written on September 29, 2008 by Josh Pigford and No one has commented

Despite my MacBook Pro going into service yet again (getting a new one, btw), I managed to take a look at some of what the Internets had to offer before handing my venerable system to the Apple Store Geniuses. As always, only what I use makes it to the list so, drop a line to [...]

OS X 10.5.5 Released

Written on September 15, 2008 by Josh Pigford and 5 people have commented

Today, Apple released its 5th update to OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
The update is currently available via Software Update and should be available on the Apple website within a few hours.
The last update (10.5.4) was released on June 30. Apple has, on average, released an update to 10.5 every 65 days.
This update includes quite a few [...]

Microsoft Updates Office 2008 For Mac To 12.1.2, Office 2004 for Mac to 11.5.1

Written on August 12, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

The fine folks in Redmond have released Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 update which includes stability and performance enhancements for Office 2008, Office 2008 Home and Student Edition, Office 2008 Special Media Edition, Word 2008, Excel 2008, PowerPoint 2008, and Entourage 2008. In addition, this fixes several vulnerabilities, some of which may allow an [...]

iPhone OS 2.0.1 Available With a Truckload of “Bug Fixes”

Written on August 04, 2008 by Josh Pigford and 18 people have commented

This evening Apple made iPhone OS 2.0.1 available via iTunes.
Frequently Apple doesn’t include a lot of information on what software updates actually fix, but this could be on of the most cryptic of all.
This update simply says the update includes “Bug Fixes”…247MB of “bug fixes” to be exact.
Now that isn’t an additional 247MB of space [...]

Software Updates & New Release Highlights For Week Ending 2008-08-02

Written on August 04, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

Apple’s Security Update and iTunes minor update received the bulk of the attention this week, but there were a few other post-worthy items as well:

Sequence – 1.0.1 – The now $19.00USD innovative screen capture utility fixes a bug in video compression. I had not noticed the “é” in the name now (I believe that came [...]

Security Update 2008-05 : DNS Flaw Finally Fixed

Written on August 01, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 6 people have commented

Apple released Security Update 2008-05 which contains fixes for:

an Open Scripting Architecture (CVE-2008-2830) privilege elevation issue [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
a filename handling issue in CarbonCore (CVE-2008-2320) which may lead to an application Denial of Service (DoS) or arbitrary code execution [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
a web-exploitable CoreGraphics issue (CVE-2008-2321) that could lead to application DoS or [...]

Software Updates & New Release Highlights For Week Ending 2007-07-19

Written on July 21, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

JumpBox for Ruby on Rails Deployment – 0.9.1 – While the Mac is an awesome platform for web development, it is sometimes useful to use it for the creative & editing side and deploy in a more production-like environment or just deploy in a “sandbox”. By pre-configuring (in a virtual machine) Apache, MySQL and Ruby [...]

Most problematic launch in Apple history?

Written on July 11, 2008 by Josh Pigford and 32 people have commented

The past two days were supposed to be one of the biggest launches in Apple history in terms of the number of big products being released. Unfortunately the launch has been anything but smooth.
Four different products were scheduled to be launched in the past 2 days: MobileMe, App Store, 3G iPhone, and an update to [...]

OS X 10.5.4 Released To The Wild + Other Apple Updates

Written on July 01, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Apple has released OS X 10.5.4 (59 MB via Software Update) to the masses which includes the content of Security Update 2008-04. The update also includes improvements to AirPort reliability and speed, many iCal improvements, two secure surfing improvements to Safari and three Spaces & Exposé bugs.
The Security Update fixes 21 security issues in [...]