But you'll probably want to update your RSS feed, because this is the last post you'll see here, ever. This is the link you'll want for all the newest MacUser goodness. Catch you on the flipside.
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I guess you might say we’re being beamed up to the mothership. As of Monday, MacUser will be coming to you live from our new home on Macworld.com. While we’ve long been part of the Macworld family, we’re happy to be getting a bit of a facelift in order to fit in with the rest of our oh-so-respectable family, like our sister iPhone Central, kooky trivia-spouting uncle Mac OS X Hints, and long-lost second cousin thrice removed Gadgetbox.
Fear not, though, since we’ll still be bringing you the same great-tasting news, information, and opinion from our sweet new digs, including regular features like The Macalope Weekly. You shouldn’t notice too much disruption of service: if you’re a regular visitor to MacUser.com, you’ll find yourself redirected to our new location—RSS readers will have to update their feeds as well, but we’ll have that info for you on Monday.
We expect a pretty smooth transition, but as always, if you notice any bugs or blips, drop us a line at our email address (you can find it over there on the right side of the page, cleverly screened from all the spam-eating robots—well, except for the ones who keep telling us we’ve won a million Euros…because we want to believe).
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The big news for the week—and we’re talking monumental, stop-the-virtual-presses-type news—is that Snow Leopard is coming in the first quarter of 2009!
Totally! It’s 100% guaranteed in the bag! We’ll all be rollin’ with Snow Leopard in January! March at the latest! Word to your mother!
Well, OK, it was on this one guy from Apple’s slide (note to Dan, snow leopards don’t pounce—they are amongst the deadliest but also the laziest of cats and kill their victims from a reclined position on the couch). But, you know, it’s not like Apple’s ever said they’d deliver an operating system at a certain time and then, well, failed to deliver it at that time.
Except the last time. And probably some other times.
OK, look, can we all just agree to be happy when Snow Leopard eventually ships in June?
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The worst thing about DRM? The things it makes people do. Take the iPodhash project, a group of coders dedicated to reverse-engineering Apple’s database files on the iPod classic and iPod touch. Doing so allows for third-party utilities to access information on the iPod, which is particularly useful for those who want to use their iPods on Linux, since there’s no version of iTunes available for that platform.
Unfortunately, Apple didn’t take too kindly to a bunch of people picking apart its tech, and it’s called up its crack legal team to remove the offending information, which it claims violates the DMCA’s circumvention clauses. As the site administrator, Sam Odio, wrote:
A lawyer claiming to represent Apple, Inc has asked that we remove all content on this page (see email). We’re currently investigating the issue, and determining what our rights are. We’re not quite sure how the DMCA pertains to us, and where we fall within the law. We’re talking to a lawyer about whether we’re considered a “service provider” and what we’re legally obligated to do if that is the case.
The lawyer’s correspondence suggests that reverse-engineering the iPod database file violates Apple’s FairPlay DRM, which could conceivaably mean that said information could be used to figure out away to remove the DRM on files purchased from the iTunes Store (not that such methods don’t already exist).
Of course, you know how it goes: once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s sure to convince him to go back in.
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<p>Copyright Mac Publishing LLC. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. Do not re-post. Contact webmaster@macworld.com if you see this on a web page.</p> If you're an iPod touch user who eagerly downloaded the software update v2.2 as soon as you heard about it, I imagine you must be feeling sorely disappointed right now. It turns out that although it shares most of the features with the iPhone, the iPod touch was treated to none of the Google Maps updates by Apple.
So although you can now access the iTunes's podcast section and download podcasts, you can neither check out the Street View around 1 Infinite Loop nor get the walking directions or public transit information that will tell you how to sneak into Apple HQ. In other words, the Maps app on the iPod touch remains exactly as it used to be before the v2.2 update.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out any plausible reason for this omission. I have a few theories but both of them sound so lame to me that I imagine there must be a better reason.
It could either be because the iPod touch lacks GPS, or because Apple has a deal with Google that limits certain features from appearing on the iPod line, or maybe because Apple wanted to keep the update free for iPod touch users and would've had to charge for it if they'd added those extra Google Maps features.
Like I said, these reasons sound rather implausible, and it's pure conjecture on my part. We have no way to know what the real reason is right now and your guess is good as ours. Do let us know your theories in the comments below and feel free to vent as well; these new Maps features are awesome and iPod touch users are definitely missing out on them.
[Via Gizmodo]
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Another day, another Pro Applications update. Good news for fastidiously updating Shake, Color, Compressor, Qmaster, Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Server, and Logic Studio users. That’s a mouthful. If you guessed that this update “addresses general performance issues and improves overall stability”, then you read Apple update descriptions too much (and by too much, I mean more than once).
Final Cut Pro has been updated to version 6.0.5, improving still rendering and high resolution format handling, as well as a couple Panasonic camcorders.
Compressor 3.0.5 and Apple Qmaster 3.0.5 share a version number and fixed an issue with Back to My Mac and QuickClusters.
Color has been updated to 1.0.3, adding support for XDCAM 422 media and for the RED plug-ins for Final Cut Studio. Overall reliability has been improved when using trackers in the Geometry room, using the Reconform command, adjusting the Minimum and Maximum nodes in the Color FX room. And no, I have no idea what most of those mean.
Finally, Shake has reached 4.1.1 and addresses compatibility with Quicktime codecs greater than 8 bits.
Get to downloading. It should be in your Software Update now.
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<p>Copyright Mac Publishing LLC. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. Do not re-post. Contact webmaster@macworld.com if you see this on a web page.</p> For those not in the know, Apple released the iPhone and iPod touch Software Update v2.2 late night yesterday. The update, which is free for all iPhone users and iPod touch users with firmwares 2.0 and above, brings in a lot of enhancements to Google Maps, including the much hyped Street View, and the ability to download podcasts over-the-air.
But that wasn't the only software update to grace Apple's servers yesterday. As is usually the case, a minor iTunes update accompanied the firmware update. This update, which bumps the version number up to 8.0.2, contains the following fixes:
The 60.3MB update can either be downloaded via Software Update or through the Apple website. It ought to be noted though that this iTunes update is not a prerequisite for installing the firmware update on your iPhone or iPod touch.
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Just in case you didn't have anything else to do this fine Thursday afternoon, you may want to check out this x-ray image of a MacBook, which is exactly as cool as it sounds.
Jason de Villa (I'm assuming no relation to Joey de Villa) recently had his "brother the vet" borrow his x-ray machine to scan his MacBook, and this is the result. There's a hard drive, and various spinny things, and some ports over on the left side.
What else can you make out?
[via Gizmodo]
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According to some newly released court documents in the "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit, Microsoft was worried about comparisons between its newest OS and the Mac OS before Vista was even out, and before Apple starting joking about it ("Redmond, start your photocopiers.")
In fact, what really got Redmond going was the WSJ's Walt Mossberg, who told his readers on October 13 2005: "You also won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows. Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and much more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista."
Padmanand Warrier, a developer in the Windows group--and potential future super-soldier by the sound of it--emailed around a link to his colleagues, including to Richard Russell, a Microsoft development manager.
Russell, in turn, responded: "My takeaway from Walt's article is that we have failed to communicate Vista's value."
I'd say that Microsoft has still failed to do that.
[via Slashdot]
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The man behind Fake Steve Jobs has bid adieu…to himself. Newsweek’s Dan Lyons will cease posting to his “Real Dan Lyons” blog after he made some comments that were taken as less than favorable by their subjects. In a recent post on the departure of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang (archived at Valleywag), Lyons wrote of Yahoo’s PR team, who had told him that Yang wasn’t going anywhere:
I’d never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators—they’re really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of s* put one of Yahoo’s attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true “inside story” of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they’re fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah.
That deal, you may remember, fell apart like a wet newspaper in the mouth of a pitbull. Anyway, apparently Yahoo’s PR team objected to their characterization (we presume it was the word sacks that really got them riled), a complaint which made its way to Lyons’s employers at Newsweek, prompting him to pull the blog entry. Or, as Lyons himself described it to the AP:
“The bottom line is I don’t want to jeopardize a job I like (and which feeds my hungry 3-year-old twins) over some blog that’s just a funny little thing I’m doing in my spare time,” Lyons wrote. “Or, to translate this into Fake Steve speak: I’m a coward and a whore who has totally sold out to The Man.”
We understand Lyons’s reluctance to upset his corporate overlords, but we also kind of wish he stood by his remarks, if not for himself then for everybody who’s been forced to deal with…shall we say, circumlocutious PR reps.
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As the old saying goes, you learn something new everyday. But sometimes you learn something and forget something. Yesterday was one of those days. While writing up VoodooPad 4, I thought I’d open up some of my VoodooPad files to check out the new features.
I mostly use VP files to keep track of notes and ideas for fiction writing that I do in my spare time; it’s great for building connections between different concepts and characters. And as I used to maintain multiple computers, I’d gotten into the habit of using my iDisk for file storage so I could access said files no matter where I was. As an added benefit, I figured that would give me multiple synchronized copies of files in different locations to help safeguard against data loss.
I’d also assumed that Apple itself backed up the iDisk files, as most large server installations do. This wasn’t blind assumption either; back in 2005, Apple recovered files that had disappeared from my iDisk:
We isolated an issue with your iDisk, which is now fixed and we recovered the missing items for your iDisk Documents folder. To access the recovered data, please connect to your iDisk and navigate to the Recovered Items folder that is now present in your iDisk Documents folder. Please note there may be duplicate copies of some of the files.
Fast-forward to yesterday. I open up the VoodooPad files on my iDisk only to find they won’t open. And when I check them out in the Finder, I discover that’s because they register as 0KB in size.
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Sorry, Dual-Link DVI fans: we’re getting reports this morning that those of you who have been eagerly anticipating the adapter that makes your shiny new DisplayPort MacBook work with your Dual-Link DVI display has been—oh noes!—delayed. One user forwarded us his shipping notification, which cites an “unexpected delay” that means the adapter will now ship out on December 18th. That’s right, just in time for Christmas.
Likewise, the online Apple Store is now saying there’s a delivery time of 4-5 weeks for the Dual-Link adapter which, as you may recall, costs a hefty $99. Until then, you’ll have to hang out with the rest of us in the single-link proletariat. It’s okay: we have cookies, hot chocolate, and hugs for everybody.
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Fire up your Apple TV, kids, there be an update awaitin'! Apple released Apple TV Software Update 2.3 today, which includes four noteworthy features (discovered via this Knowledge Base article):
As our friends at TUAW point out, this update will most likely break any existing Apple TV hacks, so if your Apple TV is hacked six ways to Sunday you might want to hold off on the update.
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We’ve had our fair share of Apple customer service experiences—actually, I’m having one as I write this, chatting with a MobileMe rep. And we know that, like with any company’s customer service, Apple has its ups and its downs.
Fortunately, the word seems to be that even with its downs, Apple’s still has the most positively-regarded customer service in the computer industry. You know when you get that robotic voice at the end of a call that asks you how satisfied you are with your experience? Turns out that’s not just for the amusement of making you talk to a robot. The survey from VocaLabs, the company that tracks that data, shows that Apple topped the customer service charts with 60% proclaiming themselves “very satisfied,” in contrast to only 44% of Dell customers and 37% of Gateway customers.
In general, Apple walked away with a 52% customer satisfaction rating, as opposed to 45% of Dell and 39% of Gateway, making them king of the customer service world (with all attendant privileges and benefits).
Me, I’m still chatting with this MobileMe service rep to see if I can recover some files that have vanished from my iDisk. We’ll see if I nudge Apple’s customer satisfaction up or down by the end of this (so far looks like downnn).
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You probably don’t know Jordan Hubbard. Heck, before about an hour or two ago, we couldn’t have told you if he was a B-movie actor from the 1920s or the barista at our local coffee shop. Now, however, we can say with reasonable certainty that he’s the Director of the UNIX Technology Group at Apple.
Why, you’re wondering, is that so great?
Well, last Thursday, Hubbard spoke at LISA ‘08 (don’t get excited, it’s not a conference for aficionados of the Apple Lisa, but rather for Large Installation System Administration). Hubbard’s talk, Mac OS X: From the Server Room to Your Pocket (PDF link), discussed the evolution of Mac OS X technologies, such as security, over the lifetime of the OS, with special attention to—blah, blah, blah. That’s not why you’re here.
One table from Hubbard’s presentation slides grabbed some attention: a list of Mac OS X releases. Which, ordinarily would be pretty boring, except for the fact that he lists the release date for 10.6 Snow Leopard as Q1 2009. zOMG!!1!!! Somebody alert the media—wait, we are the media?
Ahem.
Okay, look. Apple’s press release for Snow Leopard was issued in June of last year, at which point they said 10.6 was “scheduled to ship in about a year.” Apple’s Q1 2009 runs from January to March 2009, which means a potential jump up of a couple months [I meant calendar Q1 2009, not Apple’s fiscal Q1 2009, so I’ve clarified -DM]. Good news, but nothing to get worked up about. And don’t come crying to us if it doesn’t surface until June. For all we know, this could be a clever disinformation plan by Steve Jobs to root out leaks, using a George Kaplanesque “Jordan Hubbard” who will mysteriously never be heard from again.
[via MacRumors]
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