/> This was a significant week in Apple’s history. In the past, Apple’s well tuned marketing engine worked just as well, but the Mac faithful just weren’t present in sufficient numbers to jar the Applesphere. However, the decisions Apple made regarding the secrecy of the iPhone 2.0 and iPhone 3G rollout may have come back…
News
MobileMe/.Mac Services Still Down
as swiftly as it appeared in the first place. Currently, Appleis .Mac home page redirects to a maintenance page with the message, “The MobileMe transition is underway but is taking longer than expected. While core services such as desktop mail, iDisk and sync are available, the new MobileMe web applications are not yet online. Thank…
Why user interface design matters
The difference between great vs. poor user interface design can be hard to quantify. Similar to the supposed difference between art and pornography — you know it when you see it. You certainly can’t tell which is a better designed product simply by looking at a list of their features. Two products may have similar…
Microsoft: We Have a Noisy Competitor
Brad Brooks, Microsoftis VP of Vista consumer marketing, in a keynote address to to the annual Partner conference, admitted that the Apple “Get a Mac” TV ads have had an impact, and Microsoft is going to start countering. In his discussion of the Vista launch, Mr. Brooks was frank and acknowledged that his company screwed…
Segway CTO Joining Apple
Doug Field, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Segway will be leaving to join Apple, according to a post on the Segway Chat Forum by the administrator, John Grohol. “Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will be sorely missed at the company. However, with every change…
Yahoo! Still Working on AOL Deal
If the parties could come to an agreement, Time Warner would finally be able to dump its Internet service division, and Yahoo! would potentially be in a stronger position to keep Microsoft at bay. Yahoo! shot down an unsolicited buyout offer from Microsoft at the beginning of the year. At the time, Yahoo! executives said…
YouTube Ordered to Turn Over All User Records to Viacom
Viacom alleged in its lawsuit that Google is responsible for allowing clips of copyright protected videos on the YouTube Web site. The company is asking for more than US$1 billion in damages. The broadcaster is hoping that by getting its hands on YouTubeis detailed records, it can show that copyright-infringing content is more popular than…
Jobs, Apple Execs Hit with Fraud Suit
Apple CEO Steve Jobs along with current and former board members have been slapped with a class action law suit over their alleged involvement in the company’s backdated stock options incidents. The suit was filed on June 28 and accuses the defendants of committing fraud by falsifying financial statements and concealing millions of dollars in…
Adobe Improving Flash Web Search Support
Adobeis move should ultimately make it easier for end users to find more content online, and Flash-based Web site and rich Internet application developers will potentially find their content in front of a wider audience. David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, commented “We are initially working with…
Intel: Developers Should Face up to Hundreds, Thousands of Cores
In his Intel blog on Monday, Anwar Ghuloum told developers he had some difficult news to deliver: developers should start to think about many, many more cores in the Intel CPUs — perhaps thousands in the long term. Apple may be anticipating this with the new Grand Central technology in Snow Leopard. Mr. Ghuloum commented…
Safari Hits New Market Share High in June
. Safari spent most of 2007 grabbing a bigger piece of the Web browser market, but spent the first four months of 2008 on a plateau around the 5.8 percent mark. In comparison, Microsoftis Internet Explorer Web browser has been gradually declining compared to its position last year while Firefox has been slowly gaining market…
Podcast - Mac Geek Gab #158: Bad RAM, iSights, Drive Speeds, and Startup Shortcuts
Listen Now: Download: or (AAC courtesy of Michael Johnston of iPhoneAlley) Show notes for Mac Geek Gab Podcast For June 30, 2008 Before heading off on vacation next week, Dave joins John for an all-out Geek fest, discussing what to do about bad RAM, bad hard drives, how to find speed bottlenecks, and more. Plus,…
Companies Form Alliance for Macs in the Enterprise
The Enterprise Desktop Alliance plans to offer a suite of tools that let IT departments maintain uniform client configuration, enforce the same security controls, make the same sharepoints and print queues available, deliver the same disaster recovery, and enforce the same compliance policies for both Mac OS X and Windows-based workstations. Atempo will be offering…
Podcast - Apple Weekly Report #128: Lawsuits, Diablo & iPhones
Direct Link: MP3 Version Listen Now: Blizzard announced Diablo III, Apple kind of updated Leopard again, Apple’s lawsuit express pulled into the station, and the Mac is showing up in eight out of 10 businesses surveyed. Apple’s ads are good enough to watch even on TiVo, an iPhone deal for China is getting closer, and…
Adobe Ships Creative Suite 3.3, Acrobat 9
Adobe began shipping Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 and Adobe Acrobat 9 on Wednesday, ahead of the company’s planned July release. The new Creative Suite bundles are still available as Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, and Master Collection, and now include Acrobat Professional 9. The new version of Acrobat Professional includes Flash support, enhanced collaboration…
Senate Hears Arguments on Search of Laptops at U.S. Border
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has the authority to search, copy contents or seize a notebook computer or mobile phone when travelers re-enter the U.S. Various groups have sought scrutiny of the practice in order to protect corporate private data and are also concerned about the economic impact. The Senate Judiciary Committee is…
Is there really a problem with bandwidth hogs?
Mobi le phone plans give you more monthly minutes than you will ever use, at a very reasonable cost. For a bit more, you can get practically unlimited text messaging as well. Many land-line phone plans come with unlimited calling within the United States. With each month, Web-based storage sites are offering more gigabytes of…
Crumpler Reginald Transfer
You can always count on Crumpler to design great bags and give them unconventional names. The companyis Reginald Transfer comes through on both counts, and looks good, too. The Reginald Transfer is a simple bag designed to fit a 15-inch laptop, a power supply, some documents, and a few odds and ends. It has a…
Podcast - Mac Geek Gab #157: Startup Secrets, Terminal Tricks, Battery Woes, and Services Menu
Listen Now: Download: or (AAC courtesy of Michael Johnston of iPhoneAlley) Show notes for Mac Geek Gab Podcast For June 23, 2008 John and Dave talk about bandwidth, Mac OS X’s services menu, directories in the Terminal, scheduling reboots and more. Sponsor: Audio Engine: Audioengine A5 and A2 — Real speakers designed for portable audio…
NVIDIA Unleashes GeForce GTX 200 Series GPUs
NVIDA has unveiled its most powerful graphics processing units (GPU), the GeForce GTX 280 and 260. The GTX 280 has 240 multi-threaded cores and can process video 18 times faster than the latest CPUs. It has 1.4 billion transistors and is capable of nearly a teraflop. Rendering 3D images in realtime is just about the…
Khronos Compute Working Group Evaluating Apple's OpenCL
The Khronos Group announced on Monday that they will form a Compute Working Group to create open standards for parallel computing across multiple GPUs and CPUs. Members include AMD, Apple, Freescale, NVIDIA and IBM. Apple has presented its OpenCL specification to the group. The Compute Working Group will “create royalty-free, open standards for programming heterogeneous…
AMD Announces OpenCL Compatible Teraflop Graphics Card
At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany on Monday, AMD announced its FireStream 9250 graphics card which breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision computations. The card occupies a single PCI slot and draws 150 watts. Developers have reported up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes compared to processing on…
Icahn's Yahoo Takeover Plan Going South
Mr. Icahn launched a proxy battle to take over the Yahoo board and offer the Internet search company to Microsoft after an unsolicited buyout offer from Microsoft fell through. Mr. Icahn insisted that buying Yahoo was in the best interests of both companies, but Yahoo contended that the offer was undervalued and a bad move…