Apple CEO Tim Cook surely charmed Twitter users -- and lots of others -- with that famous comment about Windows 8 and the merging desktop and mobile operating systems. It would be very much like trying to combine a refrigerator with a toaster, he said, using extreme examples to get his point across.

But maybe there's more to be said about that subject.

The feeling that OS X and the iOS would some day merge was fueled by the arrival of Lion, which represented a clear move in that direction. Not only were there more gestures in OS X, although I won't bother to list them, but certain features, such as full-screen apps and even that dreadful Launchpad, were reminiscent of the iOS. Well, you don't have to use either, nor accept the reversal in the direction of the scrollbars, or their part-time mouse-activated appearance.

Continue Reading...

My encounters with Apple's attempts to deliver a reliable online service have been decidedly mixed. Although most of you probably believe that it all began with iTools, a free set of online features, including email, which debuted in 2000, Apple's shaky online service history goes back further.

Indeed, the progenitor of MobileMe -- and now iCloud -- wasn't Apple's first attempt at taking their customers online. Back in the 1980s, Apple had an online service for dealers, AppleLink. A small startup company, Quantum Computer Services, made a deal with Apple to create a Personal Edition version of AppleLink, which would deliver a similar online service to consumers.

When the deal fell apart, Quantum decided to roll their own, and rebranded the service America Online -- later renamed AOL when it expanded beyond the boundaries of the U.S. But they continued to follow the Apple mantra, which was to make the service easy for regular people to master and get online, at the expense of making it too simple according to some skeptics, who also complained about AOL's infamous walled garden.

Continue Reading...

Apple's marketing people might have put themselves on a shaky footing when they downplayed the susceptibility of OS X to malware in those Mac versus PC ads. While pointing to over 120,000 viruses on the Windows platform, the ads used the phrase (to quote approximately), "but not on Macs." But that statement was strategically weasel-worded. It didn't necessarily mean there were no malware problems on a Mac, only that there were far fewer.

Over the years you heard about proofs of concept, meaning that antivirus software companies were able to build or recreate them in a laboratory, but it's not as if such infections actually occurred in the wild. Even though antivirus apps were regularly updated to protect you from theoretical infections, the malware outbreaks rarely impacted Mac users in the real world. But that doesn't mean Mac users were necessarily safe. Remember that there were occasional malware eruptions in the days of the "Classic" Mac OS. Sure, OS X's Unix core might be more resilient to malware, in theory, some of the earliest computer viruses were created years ago on the Unix platform.

Continue Reading...

Back in the early days, Mac users confronted a moderate level of malware infections. I remember one occasion when I visited a local software store -- back in Edison, New Jersey -- and bought a screen saver from a reputable publisher. The floppy was infected, however. I didn't have anti-virus software at hand, and had to reformat my Mac IIcx's drive and reinstall everything. Well, it was only weeks after I bought the computer. I didn't have much to reinstall, so the restore process wasn't as intimidating as it might have otherwise seemed.

In passing, I quickly discovered the value of security software, and download an shareware app, called Virus Detective, which I used until the author, Jeffrey Shulman (no relation to the famous poker player by the way), give it up. The computer store took back the infected floppy and refunded my money, with abject apologies.

Continue Reading...