This isn’t exactly shocking news, but here we go: The WWDC 2009 build of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) has been leaked onto the Internet. I would imagine Apple doesn’t want you, Average Guy, to download it, but don’t expect me to try and stop you. → Read More
Today there was no reality distortion field. Just a reality field. You want video. Here it is. You want devs to have video. Here it is. You want to edit video in place without loading Quicktime Pro or even knowing what it is. Here it is. You want the video menu and nav tools to disapper. They’re gone. You want them back. Here they are. You want a way to find your iPhone if you put it on silent to turn off all the noise and then your cat pushed it into the cracks of the sofa. Buy MobileMe, go to the page, look at the map, click ring and it overrides silent. Never had reason one to get MobileMe, but this Marriage Saver option is definitely almost worth a hundred bucks a year. If one developer bootstraps MobileMe for some value and I download that app, I’m almost in. And you can sell it to your wife as a way of checking where you are. Oh, you like the Pre. Here’s the 3G for 99 bucks. Thanks for the three days, Palm. And how about the G2 having no headphone jack. Apple doesn’t even have to win with this kind of competition. Seriously, who is the guy at Google who didn’t step up and flag that at the meeting? But guess what, Apple is winning anyway. The biggest laugh the whole morning was what wasn’t said, when Phil Schiller announced tethering on 22 carrier partners in 42 countries. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, didn’t even have to say no AT&T. Big laugh. Apple has the carriers on the run. You can see the vise tightening as AT&T gets closer to the reup time on the exclusive deal. With Pre and G2 already out there, it won’t take long for them to almost catch up on other carriers, and then… oh how about 99 bucks for a 3G with 1 billion Appstore downloads. Who’s kidding who here. Hell, Apple has the browsers on the run too. HTML 5, 2X to 3X the speed in Safari, HTTP audio and video streaming. I think I saw RSS on the screen in the upper row third from the left of 1000 features. Peer to peer auto-find no peering over bluetooth. The kids playing p2p backgammon in the back seat. TomTom GPS car kit with big speaker and look-ahead video → Read More
Apple’s Snow Leopard update for OS X is a major update, despite the fact that it doesn’t tout “300 new features” like the last one. For $29, there’s no reason to expect anything but bugfixes, but in fact this is probably the most important OS X update for years. While Leopard essentially completed the OS, which was in need of completing since it was introduced, Snow Leopard pushes it into the future. The technologies being introduced in Snow Leopard are for making your mac leaner, faster, and more capable of pretty much everything you already do. So let’s just recap what exactly these very abstract-sounding features are in case you need to explain it to a clueless friend or family member. → Read More
Goodness, that’s cheap. Apple is releasing OS X Snow Leopard this September for only $29. Yeah, $29, but only for Leopard users. → Read More
Poor MacDrive. The latest hot tamale of a rumor says that, starting with Snow Leopard (10.6), Windows users will be able to access Mac files without the use of any special software. You’d mount the Mac as you would any other Windows machine. → Read More
Yup, WWDC will run from June 9-12, more or less as that one guy predicted a few weeks ago. It’s at that Moscone West place, where Apple usually likes to hold its big rally-round-the-flag meetings → Read More
Apple may, just may, unveil Marble at this year’s WWDC, which may, just may, be in June. Marble is thought to be the code-name for a new user interface that may, just may, debut with Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X. → Read More
It’s been a matter of speculation for some time whether Quicktime Pro would be included with Snow Leopard, and now it appears to be a solid yes. This has been a long time coming, especially with the video editing push by Apple over the last couple years. Other UI changes are minor, but it’s always been said that Snow Leopard is an under-the-hood update.
I’m really pumped for this one. Leopard was a sham update compared with this. → Read More
Hey, party people, let’s go nuts OK? Der Snow Leopard is out and it’s sehr gut! Not many changes to be seen, but the techno music in the background makes this the best beta version OS X demo video I’ve seen all morning. → Read More
Ah, a clean install of Mac OS 10.4. Loverly. Think I’ll just download the latest nightly Minefield build and… MOTHER OF GOD! → Read More
How long does it take to create a standard in the tech industry? Let’s put it this way: we’re still waiting for the final word on videotapes (die, Betacam, die). So when you hear that a universal interface between applications and computing hardware has been hammered out in six months, you better be impressed. A team with members from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel among others has finished putting together the base for OpenCL, a language designed to allow programmers to take full advantage of the parallel processing units standard in almost every PC these days → Read More
If the last time you talked about how many bits something had was when you got a Super Nintendo, you’re probably as puzzled as I once was about the whole shift to 64-bit computing. Isn’t that the computing power of a Jaguar, not a Snow Leopard? No, silly goose. It’s very technical and I don’t pretend to understand it all the way, but essentially the 32-bit architecture that has been in place for years in x86es limits the maximum amount of RAM you can have, and its effectiveness. 64-bit architectures are available but not widely taken advantage of, and Apple aims to change that somewhat with Snow Leopard. Read more at Apple Insider, and keep an eye on it because there are two more installations of the extended article to come. → Read More
The first shots of Snow Leopard, Apple’s new operating system that should be here in about a year, are now starting to appear online. On a German site, of all crazy things! Anyhow, the biggest news from the released screen shots is the existence of a mysterious “Save as Web Application” menu item in Safari. What this does is save the Web site—let’s say Gmail, for example—and somehow saves a copy of it for use offline and on the desktop. In other words, it saves a Web site and turns it into a locally executable application. We’re officially going backwards, functionality-wise. All that, of course, is idle speculation. “Save as Web Applcation” could well mean something entirely different in Apple Speak. The rest of the screen shots, and there’s a lot of them, just show updated versions of apps like Quicktime. via Apple Insider → Read More
Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6, went out to developers at WWDC yesterday, and one glaring aspect that worries some is the fact that 10.6 is made specifically for Intel-based Macs, meaning that G5 won’t run it. In fact all PowerPC-based Macs are left out in the cold. This was bound to happen, though, as Apple’s switch to Intel processors has been complete for many months now, but this makes it official. And realistically, would any G4 or G5-based machine run 10.6 well enough to even warrant the effort? I’ve got a dual-proc 2GHz G5 that barely runs 10.5, so I wouldn’t even try Snow Leopard, but some of you are gluttons for punishment. → Read More
Somewhat lost in the iPhone 3G hype/madness yesterday was Apple’s announcement of the next version of Mac OS X, to be called Snow Leopard. The big news: rather than promise wiz-bang new features along the lines of Spotlight or Time Machine, Apple says it will focus on “enhanc[ing] the performance” of the operating system. Says an Apple senior vice president: We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more. In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system. Still, there are a few new things to look forward to. Grand Central will supposedly make it easier to take advantage of today’s multi-core processors. There’s also native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007! If I were the IT guy of a Fortune 100 company, that’d probably excite me; MobileMe should take care of all my syncing issues. Look for it in about a year. → Read More
