Upgrading If you had been using AU 5.5.3 on Lion, the update will replace it with version 6. Because version 6 isn’t as full-featured as the previous version, Apple has made an upgrade to the original app available, AU 5.6.If you’re still using Snow Leopard, you should continue to use Airport Utility 5.5.3, It requires…
John Martellaro
John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. With degrees in astrophysics (B.S.) and physics (M.S.), he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include chess, science fiction and astronomy. John is the host of the TMO podcast Background Mode.
Articles by John Martellaro
A Layman’s Guide to the IPv6 Transition
Editor’s note: This is not intended to be a detailed, technical article. Instead, it’ll be restricted to the essentials, general simplifications, and some links for more details. Also, this first article on the subject focuses on Comcast and its IPv6 efforts. I asked Century Link about their plans, but they weren’t forthcoming about their IPv6…
History Won’t be Kind to Apple & Textbooks
I have been thinking about Apple’s foray into textbooks, announced last week. I note that some authors are outraged that Apple is trying to take 30 percent of textbook revenues and lock authors into their system. Others are suggesting that the market needed some leadership, and this is the price to pay for Apple bring…
Alice for the iPad: A Charming Must Have
Alice for the iPad is an iPad app that provides a both abridged and full text version of Lewis Carroll’s beloved book, Alice in Wonderland, for children. It’s solid, well done and has sold over 500,000 copies. What’s interesting here is that this is an app, not an eBook file. What that allows is a…
How Steve Jobs May Have Snookered the TV Industry
Mr. Jobs’s comment (Isaacson, p 830) is taking on the stature of Fermat’s Last Theorem. That is, everyone believes Mr. Jobs (and Fermat) had the solution, but no one could figure out what it was. The TV industry, without vision, research or a demonstrated understanding of first principles seems to be jumping to the conclusion…
John Sculley: Steve Jobs Was Never Fired From Apple
Editor’s note: The following interview took place during the last week of 2011. The complete, 80-minute audio interview is available in two audio files — Part 1 (43.1 MB) and Part 2 (37.3 MB) — but Mr. Greelish asked The Mac Observer if we would transcribe it for the record, with his full permission. What follows are…
Verizon Says 4G LTE Requirement a “Long Way Off”
First of all, the idea makes no sense because it would tie Verizon’s hands. But never mind that. TMO spoke to several Verizon wireless representatives at CES and asked them the question. The response was, first, they haven’t seen any corporate information to that effect. Or any imposed deadlines. Secondly, they said that while the…
Piper Jaffray: 30M iPhones Sold During Holiday Qtr
Mr. Munster went on to tell investors about the larger implications. “If Apple sells 30 million plus iPhones in Dec, with no new form factor, up from 17.1 million in [quarter ending] Sep, it would be evidence supporting our survey work indicating that 94 percent of iPhone users plan to upgrade to a new iPhone.…
Amazon Launches a New Kindle Store for iPad [UPDATED]
As we know, Amazon has been reluctant to sell ebooks inside the Kindle app because Apple will then take 30 percent of the purchase price. That’s no good for Amazon’s business. As a result, Amazon has offered customers the ability to purchase ebooks at Amazon.com, the Kindle edition, and then the purchased item is placed…
iPhone 4S & Siri Double Carrier Network Load
In the smartphone era, wireless operators have always been just a littler shorter on bandwidth than they would like. New network services and especially Siri, which uploads the voice query to Apple servers and handles the response, continue to press the networks to the limits and have forced carriers to imposes extra charges or limitations.…
iOS Steals Major Smartphone Share from Android in U.S.
“Apple and Android distanced themselves from the competition in 2011, turning the OS battle into a 2-horse race,” NPD reported. The results were disclosed in an NPD report obtained by The Mac Observer. The gains were made thanks to Apple’s iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, and, incredibly, the iPhone 3GS finishing in the top three of…
Jet-Propelled Tidbits & the White Stallion
We saw that Netflix screwed up pretty badly in 2011. TV Predictions’ Phillip Swann thinks that Reed Hastings will be forced out soon. Meanwhile, here’s the first, so-called “scientific quantification of customers’ experience with Netflix. It’s from Forsee Research: “Amazon Soars; Netflix Plummets…” Apple is suing Samsung and HTC. Everyone is suing Apple. Apple’s iOS…
Twice Annual iPad Launch: Good for Apple
A rumor is just a rumor and should be taken with a grain of salt. But if the rumor leads to some considered analysis, then it’s the analysis that’s interesting, not the rumor. So while I don’t claim to have any inside information, I’d like to analyze the above rumor. Apple got caught with its…
Mastersoft Chess for iOS: Passable
Mastersoft Mobile Solutions has a fairly new program for iOS, simply called Chess. It’s a good chess app bolstered by a low price. However, even at version 1.43, it feels a little rough around the edges. I have been reviewing computer chess apps for a long time. The modern standard against which I compare other…
Camera Boost for iPad 2 Fine-Tunes Photos & Videos
Camera Boost for the iPad 2 is a replacement camera app that allows realtime enhancements to photos or videos. It adds HDR to videos, dynamic noise reduction, and improves on the default app in low light conditions. The very first thing you should know about this app is that it allows more photographic control over…
Apple Things of Christmas Past and Future
Here’s another Apple venture that’s doing really well, the Apple TV. Don Reisinger reports that of the nearly 12 million “set-top” boxes sold in 2011, Apple’s take was 4 million Apple TVs. We don’t often think about market share in that category, and Apple has about 32 percent. Here’s the story: “Apple TV the king…
iPhone 4S: Trident Kraken Case is a Fortress
The Trident Kraken is the kind of case you buy if you have an active, outdoor lifestyle and need ultimate iPhone protection. It’s literally built like a fortress and includes a built-in display protector. In terms of the iPhone cases we’ve already reviewed, this case is most similar to the OtterBox Defender. It has an…
The Future of Unsigned Apps on the Mac
The Prospect Apple has a lot on its hands with curating iOS apps and apps in the Mac App Store (MAS). However, could things ever get to the point where Apple might want to, as a minimum, digitally sign all Mac apps? Why would Apple want to do that? A digital signature doesn’t add any…
Finding the Good Stuff: Behind the Scenes Analysis
It seems that OSes are always on a roller coaster. First, we get something really good, but then the developers mess with it or load up too much agenda. It sucks. There’s customer push back, and the developers relent. Then the OS gets good again. One TMO reader commented that he thought Lion was Apple’s…
iNet for OS X & iOS Reveals Devices on Your Network
With Christmas just around the corner, you may be adding some new Ethernet devices to your home network. These days, keeping track of them, their IP addresses, their services, and even how close you may be to exceeding the DHCP license limit on your router is essential. iNet from BananaGlue will help you do that…
Check Your Comcast Data Usage
As a result, one of the new blights of our Internet life is the process of keeping track of our monthly data usage. Here’s how to do it with Comcast. (Note, Comcast has a complex site and there are lots of different ways to do things. I’ve picked a simple approach for beginners.) 1. First,…
The Motion of Nature As Your Mac Desktop
My Living Desktop for OS X intelligently displays full screen videos, with sound, as your desktop, but does so without consuming vasts amounts of memory or hogging the CPU. The app comes with twenty-six different videos, mostly gorgeous nature scenes, that bring life and perhaps serenity to your Mac’s display. Most of us who are…
iPhone 4S: OtterBox Defender Case is Ultimate Protection
If you’re looking for an iPhone 4/4S case that can handle fairly extreme conditions, the OtterBox Defender may just fit the bill. It encapsulates the iPhone with a dual layer system and even includes a built-in, clear plastic display protector. Many of the less often used ports have flaps or silicone buttons to protect them.…
Displays for iPad 3 In Production
Mr. Shim also relayed the fact that Apple has chosen three different companies to make the IPS (In-plane switching) display: Samsung, Sharp and LGD. Particularly interesting is the selection of Samsung, a company Apple has seen a lot of in court lately. By selecting Samsung, Apple seems to be saying that they’ll do business with…