OS X Mountain Lion: How Apple Rescued Save As...

Everything was great (at least conventional) with saving documents up through OS X Snow Leopard. In Lion, inspired by iOS, Apple introduced what's called the Modern Document Model into its iCloud enabled apps. Apple eliminated Save As…, introduced Auto Save and Versioning, but most importantly, drove long-time users crazy. Also, the mods introduced a small…

My Travels with Lion & iCloud: The Claws Come Out

The first step was to upgrade to Parallels Desktop 7.0.15050.707095, which according to the company, “adds experimental support for OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview as both a host and guest.” That means that you can both 1) run this version of Parallels in Mountain Lion (host) or 2) run Mountain Lion as a guest…

Apple Deprecates CDSA & Smart Card Support in Lion

In a note to the Fed-Talk mailing list*, Apple Security Consulting Engineer Shawn Geddis explained: “With the release of OS X Lion, Smart Card Services are deprecated and will not ship as a customer functioning service. That does not mean that customers will be unable to continue to use their Smart Cards with OS X…

Pressing Apple’s Buttons

Why all the fuss? Two reasons.First, there are those who prefer keeping a Lock switch on the iPad and are upset about the change. Balancing this out, there are at least an equal number of users (me included, having never used the Position Lock) who welcome a Mute switch’s arrival on the iPad. The result? A controversy.…

Disk Utilities Fade Away

Today, NUM itself is long gone. The primary remaining third-party survivors are TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior and Drive Genius. I am not privy to the sales figures for these utilities, but my gut feeling is that they are in a decline. A decline that I expect will continue. In fact, I would not be surprised if…

Secrets of Internet Forensics, Part II, Snow Leopard

 Date & Time Preferences – Setup Note, however, that if you aren’t using AirPort/Wi-Fi, this service is unavailable. If Wi-Fi is in use, it works, and you’ll see a red pushpin that identifies your geographic location and sets the time zone. At first, that seems like a mystery because there are well known databases on…

All That Jazz: 32 and 64-bit Macs, EFIs, Kernels & Apps

For reference, here are the system requirements for Snow Leopard. The first thing to remember is that a Mac has to have a 64-bit CPU to run 64-bit apps. The Core 2 Duo, (Merom and Penryn) and the Xeons are 64-bit CPUs. However, the original MacBook Pro and Mac Minis with a Core Duo had…

Verbatim Store 'n' Go Flash Has a Secure Zone

 The Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go 8 GB Flash drive looks like all the rest, but it stands out in two ways. It has a retractable USB connector that avoids losing a cap, and it has a password protected private zone for personal data and a public zone to use in the normal fashion, even on…

How to View What's Hot and What's Not at Apple

Apple sells millions of Macs each quarter. It’s their bread and butter. Apple conducts the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) every summer. Apple hired Jordan (Mr. BSD) Hubbard to work on Mac OS X. Mac OS X has full UNIX certification. Snow Leopard looks to be a major step forward in UNIX-based OS technology. So what’s…

Just a Thought - Visualizing Apple Virtualization

You know, waaaaay back when computers ran MVS and UNIX, and computer makers had names like IBM, Honeywell, Univac, and Burroughs, virtual systems and thin clients were the normal way of doing business. Of course, we didn’t call them virtual systems and thin clients, mainframes had terminals (dumb terminals usually) and Unix systems ran X-Servers and…

Bluetooth Firmware Update for Tiger

Apple released a Bluetooth Firmware updater for Mac OS X 10.4.3 on Monday. The updater improves Bluetooth performance and reliability, but the Mac models it is intended for is a bit confusing. From Apple’s Web site: The Bluetooth Firmware Updater supports D-Link USB Adapters and Apple internal Bluetooth modules on the following CPUs: iMac G4…

The Slacker's Guide - Freeciv

Friendly Efforts Toward Global Domination It began innocently enough, like anything else. At the beginning of my junior year in college, I moved in with a new roommate, who pointed the game out to me, mentioned that he’d been playing for a while, then went on about his course work. Granted, this was the same…

The Devil's Advocate: Mac Punditry: Deranged and Dumb on any Processor

I wonder if the Atlantic ocean has as vast a collection of spineless jellyfish as seemingly comprises significant portions of the Macintosh user base and its ass-kissing punditry.  With far too few exceptions, this is a group that just days ago was smugly debunking, dismantling, and railing against the notion of Intel processors in their Macs, only…

Apple's iWrite Trademark Application Suggests PDA Device [TMO Scoop]

Following a tip from one of our guest’s comments in John Kheit’s column about new Apple trademark applications for iWork, ProBand, and Pod, we found that Apple filed a trademark application for the IWRITE mark on September 15, 2003. ThinkSecret broke the news, and MacRumors subsequently reported on the iWrite filing back in 2003, with…

Ihnatko - Boston, Macworld Expo, Show Bizness

   Show Bizness By now, many of you have made the altogether foolish decision to come here to Boston for Macworld Expo. And when I call this idea Foolish, I of course am saying nothing against the show itself. Macworld Expo promises to be a palace of delights as always — more on this Palace…

Apple Previews Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"

Apple today previewed the forthcoming release to its Mac OS X operating system, Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The update, slated to ship in the first half of 2005, incorporates 150 new features, including new ways to find files and other information, integrated RSS feeds in Safari,…

Just a Thought - Benchmarks: Not Just For Geeks Anymore

So, I was thinking about doing the OS X 10.3.4 update when it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that the update could make my already slow 450mhz G4 Cube run even slower. "But how do I test such things," I asked myself. "Dude, benchmarks," was my reply, and I slapped my forehead…

Installing Linux On A Dead Badger: Instructions Included

I f nothing else, Linux is versatile. You can find Linux on PCs and Macs; some cars use Linux as an embedded OS, and thereis version of Linux that runs on PDAs (as well as iPods, but weire still working on that story). Thereis even a version that someone got to boot on a wristwatch.…

The Open Group Turns The Unix Legal Gun On Apple

More importantly, the Cupertino, CA company has counter sued TOG to get the Unix trademark invalidated because, the company says, the term has come to be generic in nature. Lindows.com, a maker of Linux-based computers, successfully counter sued Microsoft to have that companyis trademark on “Windows” revoked for similar reasons. That case is still in…

TMO Reports - Apple's iChat Meets Mixed Reaction From Mac Users

During last week’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple introduced the next major revision of Mac OS X, code named Jaguar. One of the features of the new OS is an Instant Messaging application called iChat, which Apple said would be built into Jaguar. iChat is based on AOL’s AIM network, and allows iChat users to…

Big Blues

The markets were sent into a tail-spin this morning by a profit warning from IBM. It was the first profit warning from Big Blue in over a decade. The global computer giant announced that quarterly revenue would be down over $1 billion from previous forecasts to about $18.6 billion and net earnings would be off…