Posts tagged Os x at Switched

Posts with tag os x

Apple Highlights the Best-Designed Mac and iPhone Apps

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jun 13th 2008 at 11:41AM

Despite what you may think , this week's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) didn't end with the announcement of the 3G iPhone. As part of the festivities, Apple handed out its Design Awards yesterday to what it considers best of breed applications and programs for the Mac and the iPhone. Most of the applications were beautiful, but some were of questionable usefulness to the average user, while others were simply too expensive for what they do.

Well, we're here to help you cut through the clutter, much of which you can either download online now or get from the iTunes App store when it opens for business on July 11. With out further ado, we present the Switched.com Apple Design Award highlights:

Squirrel - Winner of the best student developed software package. Squirrel is a financial tracking application similar to Quicken that aims to make watching your spending a little less mundane. Squirrel can output your spending and income into animated graphs and reports and will even connect to your online banking accounts to pull in updates. Price: €6.99 ($11) , or you can download the beta for free and cough up €25 ($40) when the final version goes live.

AP Mobile News Network - Runner-up for the best iPhone Web application. The Associated Press' iPhone news reader makes getting local news on your iPhone easy, and even lets you browse the services catalog of videos and photos. Price: Free!

AOL Radio - Winner for best iPhone entertainment app, AOL Radio for the iPhone puts 350 online radio stations, including 150 local station streams from CBS, at your fingertips. It's hard to argue with that. Price: Free!

'Guitar Hero III' - Winner for Best OS X game. There is a reason 'Guitar Hero' is so popular, and it's 'cause it's just so much damn fun. Probably didn't hurt that it simply didn't face much competition on the Mac. Price: $80 with guitar controler.

There were also a couple of gems that we would whole heartedly recommend, if there wasn't a price tag attached.

Remember the Milk - Winner for best iPhone Web applicaion. Remember the Milk is a great online to-do list with loads of great features. It now also has an iPhone-specific interface that makes managing your life's tasks a pleasure to do whlie on the go. Price: $25 per year for a Pro-Account that will give you access to the iPhone interface (alas, non-iPhone versions are free).

Twitterific - Winner for best iPhone social networking app, Twitterific is one of the most beautiful and pleasurable Twitter clients we've ever encountered. We're not sure what the revenue model on the iPhone version will be yet, but if it's anything like the OS X version, we're less than thrilled. (Shameless plug: Check out the official Switched twitter page for all our recent news). Price: Free with ads, $15 for an ad-free version on OS X.

OS X and the iPhone/iPod Touch are gaining ground as platforms to building beautiful applications for. Unfortunately, many developers seem to treat them as proof of concepts rather that truly making the applications useful ('Timeline 3D,' we're looking at you). We also would expect that as the Mac became more popular more quality free applications would start to surface. Unfortunately, so far, this has not been the case. [Source: MacWorld]

(Disclosure: AOL Radio is an online service owned and offered by AOL, which also owns and operates Switched.com)

Rumor Mill: What Apple Might Announce on Monday

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jun 8th 2008 at 2:04PM

On Monday Apple will host its World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, where rumors are circulating that Apple will announce anything from the new 3G iPhone to a Steve-Jobs-manned mission to Mars. But what can you actually expect to come out of those few days in San Francisco? Here are the four announcements we think Mr. Jobs is most likely to make during his keynote Monday morning.

3G iPhone
This one is sort of a no-brainer. We know the release of this faster, upgraded iPhone is right around the corner -- the only question left is how soon can we get our grubby mitts on it. Rumors have circulated that it will be available worldwide on day one, but we wouldn't count on that. The FCC and other regulatory bodies have yet to see the new phone (if they had, we would know about it), so we figure you probably won't be able to purchase one for about a month, but we do think they're coming sooner rather than later.

iTunes App Store
When Apple announced the iPhone SDK, it also announced it would provide a central market place for the purchase of applications for your iPhone (games, instant-messaging software, etc). The App Store icon is in place, developers have started creating products -- all that is missing is the actual store itself. Don't be surprised when it goes live Monday afternoon.

OS X 10.5.4
Didn't Apple just release an update to its OS X operating system? Sure, but the secretive company wouldn't want to let any potential details about its new 3G iPhone slip with something as innocuous as small operating system update. So expect yet another round of bug fixes and drivers for those shiny new iPhones.

.Mac relaunch
This one is a bit more of a long shot. The .Mac service has been floudering for years. Apple has added new funtionality and kept it useful, but for the features the price is simply too high, and the inteface a bit dated. The rumor mill is suggesting that the .Mac will get rebranded and relaunched with the help of the other tech company du jour - Google.

Is Windows 'Collapsing?'

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Apr 12th 2008 at 8:38AM

IT Firm Says Windows is Collapsing, We Agree Wholeheartedly

Gartner, a technology research and analysis firm, is warning that Windows is "collapsing." The analysts at Gartner said that Microsoft must make drastic changes to its flagship operating system (OS) or risk becoming outmoded.

The two analysts spearheading this charge, Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald , say that Microsoft is burdened by years of legacy code (old, inflexible programming) and bad decisions, and is facing competition on a number of fronts. Unless major changes are made to slim down the operating system soon, it will simply collapse under its own weight.

We've weighed the pros and cons of Windows versus the trendy OS X and scrappy Linux before, and we can think of a number of reasons to recommend either of those over the OS out of Redmond. And we've specifically discussed how Vista missed the mark by targeting high powered desktops that are increasingly being shunned for low powered and cheap laptops.

So is Windows done for? Not quite, but the increasing power and prevalence of Web-based applications make Linux and OS X perfectly viable and tempting solutions, especially as form factors on our devices shrink.

From Computer World

2038: The Year the Internet Will End?

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Mar 14th 2008 at 2:27PM

We're sure most of you remember the Y2K bug. Because most computers only stored the date with a two digit year, the clocks struck midnight on December 31, 1999 and all hell was supposed to break loose as computers around the world suddenly thought the year was 1900. The power goes out, records destroyed, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Alas, when the date became January 1, 2000, the world didn't end. In fact almost no computers were affected at all. This was partially because of expensive and hurried fixes to millions of computers, and partially because the threat was vastly overstated by the media.

Now another date looms on the horizon -- 3:14:07 AM on January 19, 2038. The "2038 bug" will affect any Unix or Posix based systems such as the Linux servers that power the web and Macs running the Unix-based OSX. Posix based operating systems store date and time as a four byte integer (technically only 31 bits) counting seconds from January 1 1970. When the number of seconds reaches 2,147,483,647 seconds, the clock will reset to -2,147,483,648, or 8:45:52 PM Dec 13 1901.

What could happen? Well we've actually already seen some of the effects of this bug. In May of 2006 the bug brought an AOL (our parent company) web server to its knees. The server was designed to never timeout, but rather than set a the timeout to simply never occur the timeout was set for a billion seconds in the future. When the one billion seconds, or just over 31 years 251 days and 12 hours, past the January 19, 2038 threshold the scheduled timeout was scheduled to happen in the past, 1901, and the server crashed. A similar problem took out the Mars Rover Spirit temporarily in 2004 when it started sending nonsense messages back to Houston from the year 2038. If our current systems were left as is we could expect them to start crumbling one by one, and on the morning of January 19, 2038 Switched.com would suddenly go offline as our server crashed.

Despite our sensationalist headline, neither the world nor the Internet will end in 2038. In fact with just under 30 years to spare we're pretty confident that any issues will be resolved before the doomsday scenario has a chance to play out. Besides, in 30 years shouldn't we have fancy new-voice controlled holographic computers like those promised to us by 'Minority Report?' We're pretty sure the pre-cogs weren't using Leopard.

From Newsvine and 2038bug.com

Related links:

Windows and OS X Vulnerable Via Firewire

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Mar 5th 2008 at 4:17PM

It seems like everyday computer users have a new reason to fear that their data is unsafe. And to be fair, it isn't. Unless you lock vital PC components up in separate bank quality vaults, encrypt all your data, and never go online, you're always in some danger, and at that point what use is a computer anyway? But every once in a while a hacker demonstrates a vulnerability in our computers that makes us second guess our ability to be even slightly secure.

First it was breaking encryption with a can of DustOff, then a flash drive hack that required a simple (if slow) reboot, and now an even more direct attack: connecting via Firewire to the target computer.

The new method requires only a Linux based laptop and a Firewire cable. An attacker can then get to the contents of your system's RAM and grab your password. This works on both Windows (Vista and XP) and OS X. So much for Macs being more secure.

From Engadget

Related links:

Apple's Leopard OS Has Bugs

by Tim Stevens, posted Oct 31st 2007 at 9:49AM

Apple's new version of Mac OS X, version 10.5, a.k.a. "Leopard," launched last week to a good bit of fanfare ... and a strong dose of piracy, too. It's already sold more than two million copies.

That said, things aren't entirely going well for the new cat. Many users are suffering from a wide range of problems when installing and configuring the new operating system (OS), ranging from random errors about Swedish language packs (oh ja?!?) all the way up to lost profiles.

According to reports, the problems are generally non-terminal, as in you probably won't wind up permanently losing any data, but some are complaining that their existing user profiles, along with all their preferences, are not being imported by Leopard. (So, starting up the new OS for the first time users are frighteningly asked to create a new account!) All the profile information is still there and data can be copied over to the new account, but that's a bit more work than you'd expect from an OS that prides itself on being extremely user-friendly.

Part of the problem apparently surrounds a program called the Usanity Application Launcher, or APE, which is somehow causing issues with the upgrade. If you use the program on your Mac (which apparently installs itself along with a number of Logitech devices), you're advised to uninstall it or upgrade that to a new, Leopard-friendly version before doing the full Leopard upgrade.

Or, you could maybe wait for the next update, which hopefully won't be quite so problematic.

From ars technica

Related Links:

Apple's New Leopard Hits Illegal Download Sites

by Tim Stevens, posted Oct 26th 2007 at 9:01AM

Apple's Leopard Hits Illegal Download Sites

After yesterday's (mostly) glowing reviews , it's no surprise that Mac fanatics want to get their hands on Leopard, the new Apple operating system (OS), as quickly as possible. It's also no surprise that anyone who wants a new OS this badly isn't necessarily inclined to pay for it. So, enter the Bit Torrents of the world, which are sites that enable peer-to-peer sharing of (not infrequently illegal) files. Wired's Threat Level blog found the torrent sites were humming last night with copies of Apple's latest Mac release.

Leopard hits Apple Stores today, but pre-release review copies went out weeks ago to the media and other places. Unlike its Microsoft Vista OS counterparts, Apple doesn't use any copy protection or lengthy serial numbers or anything to protect its pre-releases. It relies on trust, and, it's plain to see, perhaps this trust is unfounded, since thousands of copies of Leopard are being downloaded illegally even as you read this.

It's speculated that the majority of these downloaders are just looking to get their instant fix and will eventually go out and buy a legal copy of Leopard, but we wouldn't be surprised if, as the Mac OS becomes ever so slightly more mainstream, Apple doesn't start adopting Microsoft-like copy protection schemes.

From Threat Level

Related Links:

Apple to Unleash Leopard October 26

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Oct 16th 2007 at 3:50PM

The boys in Cupertino have finally given us a date: October 26th, next Friday, when the latest update to OSX, 10.5 (also known as Leopard) will ship. Leopard comes with a host of new features, including an overhauled dock with 3D effects and 'stacks' (pictured above) for easy organization. It also comes with the mesmerizing ability to browse your files in Coverflow (also pictured above).

Leopard is available for pre-order now for $129 for a single license and $199 for a family pack of 5 licenses. The server version is also available for pre-order at $499 for a 10-client license or $999 for an unlimited client license.

As usual, there is no such thing as an 'upgrade' available from Apple, so you're stuck paying full price regardless.

From Engadget

Related links:

What Will Apple Announce Tomorrow?

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Sep 4th 2007 at 11:37AM

In less than 24 hours -- tomorrow, September 5, to be exact -- Apple will be holding an event and making what will hopefully be some exciting announcements regarding new iPods and perhaps some new iTunes features. Apple is notoriously tight lipped about everything, so all we have to go on until tomorrow is hearsay and conjecture, which we thrive on.

Engadget has done a quick round up of all the information making its way through the rumor mill ahead of tomorrow's event. Wide, touchscreen Wi-Fi enabled iPods? Check. Newer, bigger, more-music-holding Nano "Phatty?" Why not. Beatles on iTunes? Sure!

Our money, like that of most Apple-watchers, is on the wide, touchscreen-enabled iPods and bigger-memory Nanos. After all, it's been almost two years since the last major iPod update, so it's just got to happen this time. We know it'll be music-related, since the artwork used on the invite (above) is an image of Apple's Cover Flow feature on iTunes and the iPhone.

Some other intriguing rumors, about a downloadable ringtones store for the iPhone, would be welcome, since the iPhone currently has about the worst selection of ringtones on earth (a measly couple dozen or so).

Even with less than a day to go, new stories are still popping up. Shiny Shiny is reporting a possibility that the iPods may incorporate an FM tuner, finally, with a click-to-buy feature that will allow you to wirelessly download a song you're listening to on the radio via iTunes.

Check out the link for a few more rumors, and we'll see tomorrow how much of it pans out.

From Engadget

Related Links:

The Touch Screen iPod in September?

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jul 13th 2007 at 8:42AM

Never one to rest on its laurels, the Apple rumor mill is hard at work resurrecting a piece of gossip sure to please those who love the iPhone interface, but hate the paltry amount of room for music. Yes sir, the touch screen iPod rumor is back with a vengeance. Of course, now the touchtastic iPhone lends more credence to the rumors, and even Steve Jobs himself has said that a new iPod was in the works that would run an embedded version of OS X, just like the iPhone does. Though he said nothing of a touch screen, we can only assume (with fingers crossed).

Apple insider, Digitimes, and Wall Street analysts are batting around the suggestion that the new iPods will land at the Macworld conference in January of '08, or perhaps even earlier. We at Switched honestly feel a little left out of the rumor mongering, so here's our two cents: We think sixth generation iPods will land in September.

Every year like clockwork, Apple refreshes the iPod line, even if for a minor update like last years increased capacity and brighter screen. And every year the announcement comes in either July or September (check Apple's press release library). Seeing as how July is halfway over and Apple hasn't started promoting a press event, we're betting all in on September.

From Apple Insider and Newsvine

Related Links:

Coverflow to Come to Mac OSX 10.5

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jun 11th 2007 at 1:59PM

We're sure you're familiar with that gorgeous feature of iTunes called Coverflow that allows you to flip through your albums in glossy 3D. At today's Apple keynote, Mr. Jobs has seen fit to extend that feature to the next version of the Finder, the file browser built into OS X 10.5, otherwise known as Leopard. In a nutshell, you will be able to flip through your files with live 3D previews of their contents -- all without opening their associated applications.

This works for files, devices, drives and applications -- even over your home network.

The new version of Finder makes browsing and sharing files between computers and over networks easier, and integrates with .mac (Apple's e-mail and remote storage service) to allow remote access to your files on your Mac through the Internet. This new feature is called 'My Mac' and may make remote access... well, accessible, to the masses. No more clunky services like 'Go To My PC' needed.

Your move, Mr. Gates.

From Engadget

Related links:

Joyswag: C&C 3: Kane's Wrath (Xbox 360) giveaway, Day Five Confront the SOCOM: Confrontation trailer Burnout Paradise 'Cagney' update for Xbox 360 delayed until July 14	FormatFactory Kicks Media Conversion Ass and Takes Names Download Squad Week in Review Evri.com: Zeitgeist for news
TUAW Best of the Week Apple posts Japanese iPhone guided tour Found Footage: Waiting in line for an iPhone 3G	Earnings highlights: BP, Discover, Corel, Citigroup, WD-40, MSCI and others Is Merrill shopping its Bloomberg stake? Florida coast shows promise for oil drilling
Airplanes in Burnout Paradise? Burnout's Cagney update delayed a few days MK VS DC new screens, plus "Brutalities"	Dissolution of Mercedes-McLaren partnership confirmed Forbes lists top 10 family cars Spy Shots: 2011 BMW 5 Series
Live outside in Sunny Day Sky Will Fallout 3 be banned in Australia? We'll trade you a Heavy for two Demomen . . .	Ana Ivanovic Appears on August FHM Cover Another Win Goes to Busch in Crazy Finish UFC 86 Classic Slugfest: Forrest Griffin Beats Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson

Apple Highlights the Best-Designed Mac and iPhone Apps

Rumor Mill: What Apple Might Announce on Monday

Is Windows 'Collapsing?'

2038: The Year the Internet Will End?

Windows and OS X Vulnerable Via Firewire

Apple's Leopard OS Has Bugs

Apple's New Leopard Hits Illegal Download Sites

Apple to Unleash Leopard October 26

What Will Apple Announce Tomorrow?

The Touch Screen iPod in September?

Coverflow to Come to Mac OSX 10.5

Breaking news Feed

Featured stories Feed

AOL Tech Network

Resources

Categories

cnet reviews

downloads

Features

Hot Topics

Latest Reviews from CNET.com

Top Product Reviews

Weblogs, Inc. Network