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Archive for January, 2009


Thursday, January 29th, 2009

You know that Apple clearly has no interest in honoring the 25th anniversary of the Mac. The event wasn’t mentioned during Philip Schiller’s keynote at Macworld Expo, nor in the recent quarterly financial conference with industry analysts.

The latest ads don’t harken back to the original 1984 commercial that attracted so much attention at the time, nor does the number 25 reflect anything especially meaningful for Apple.

I suppose that people who stuck with the platform through thick and thin might feel a little slighted by all of this. After all, we all endured some occasionally savage taunts from all those PC users who felt we were afraid to get our hands dirty and work on a real personal computer, rather than what they regarded as an overpriced plaything.

Certainly, Apple has done its best over the years to show the finger to Mac users, by producing bad products, unstable operating systems and all the rest. But now that things are on the upswing — despite the economic meltdown — you have to wonder whether Apple has become so full of itself on the way to the top that it has totally forgotten how it was allowed to stay in business all these years.

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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

So, without much fanfare, the 2.2.1 update for the iPhone and iPhone 3G quietly emerged from Apple’s update servers Tuesday afternoon. The advertised fixes were relatively minor: enhanced stability for the Safari browser, and a bug that involved images saved from Mail not displaying properly in the Camera Roll.

So far so good, and it doesn’t appear that there are many — if any — unannounced changes of note, as there have been with previous updates. But that could change as more and more iPhone power users examine every nook and cranny of the interface in search of more goodies and gotchas.

My experience was uneventful. Upon leaning of the update, I connected my iPhone 3G to my Mac Pro, and checked the option to download and update. The rest of the process was automatic, and I didn’t bother to babysit the process. When I returned to my desk after dinner, the phone was just recharging, fully functional with its firmware update.

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Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

As I’ve said on many occasions, most of what you and I do these days on our Macs harkens back to 1984, when the first all-in-one Apple Macintosh appeared. As a matter of fact, this reminds me of the time I wrote a book about Mac OS X, back in 2001, where I presented screen shots of that first Mac’s desktop, compared to the cool, liquid Aqua desktop.

Sure, the newer version was prettier, with a shaded dimensionality that has been softened over the years, but the fundamentals were the same. Point and click and drag and drop, and there you go. It was so familiar that Microsoft was able to crib the Mac’s interface and convince lots of people there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference.

But I’m not about to replay the operating system wars right now. I think Microsoft’s poor decisions in recent years have caused serious problems for the company that the state of the economy has only compounded. Let’s leave it at that.

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Monday, January 26th, 2009

In recent days, there have been reports of new Mac Trojan Horse threats, and you have to wonder whether Apple’s continued growth will come at the expense of making the platform a serious target for Internet criminals. Or at least that’s what the tech media has been saying for several years now, although it hasn’t quite come to pass.

The most recent outbreaks reportedly involve iLife ‘09 and Adobe Photoshop CS4. But wait! It has nothing to do with the legal versions you buy of these applications. Instead, the Trojan Horse strictly impacts pirated copies.

In the case of Photoshop CS4, Adobe uses a sophisticated license activation method, and the malware comes into play with a program used to crack the license.

Yes, that’s the real issue. We’re talking here about malware that only presents itself as a potential threat if you download and attempt to set up a bootleg copy on your Mac. According to Intego, the security software company, these aren’t proofs of concept, but have actually impacted thousands of people already.

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