TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Apple’s Steve Jobs, during the annual share holder meeting, answered questions about the stock options scandal as well as the company’s direction. He also shed some light that Apple is “wrestling” with allowing 3rd party applications. In my opinion, it will be critical to allow 3rd party apps to help with the usefulness of the iPhone. I would like my Nokia N75 far less if I couldn’t load a bunch of 3rd party applications on it.

Anyway, check out AppleInsider for the details of the share holders meeting.

On Thursday Apple released updates to OS X to patch up over two dozen exploits in the OS. Simply open OS X’s software update utility and get the fixes to these holes. For more juicy details, check out AppleInsider’s write-up.

From tuaw.com (and confirmed on Apple’s Hot News) comes word that Apple is delaying the release of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to October because of moving developers from Leopard to the iPhone to keep the iPhone release date on track.

All I have to say is… WTF. Ok, seriously, the iPhone is causing Leopard to be delayed? The day Steve Jobs announced the iPhone I guarantee I would have bought one that very day. I would have left work early and bought it right then because I was taken hold by the Steve Job’s reality distortion field. $500? Sure… take my money! But after having plenty of time to think about it I really don’t want an iPhone anymore. $500? Hell no! Besides, we all know that the first generation Apple product always performs sub-par compared to later offerings. And no 3G! Sure barely any of Cingular’s customers have it, but that is sure to change very soon. Where I live (Washington D.C. / Baltimore area) is completely 3G and being a power user I would use the 3G-ness constantly.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple’s products. I love my iPod nano (thanks Nancy!), I love my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo (and before that my iBook), and I love Mac OS X. But I’m not gonna shell out $500 for a non-3G phone that is the first release.

Instead I am waiting for the constantly-delayed Nokia N75 to become available (yes, I use Cingular). I don’t need a touch-screen and this phone will have all the proven features that I want in my next generation phone. AND it has 3G.

I’m not convinced Apple will hit a home run with the iPhone… yet. It could happen. People underestimated the iPod’s success. And I could eventually get one. But it will not be my next phone. Nokia N75 please come out soon! Cingular and whoever is causing this phone to be delayed (since December!) need to stop this non-sense and get this phone out before it is obsolete. Otherwise I will not be spending my money on that either.

In any case, delaying Leopard for a cell phone seems lame to me. I can’t wait to upgrade to Leopard. But the iPhone can wait.

Read story here.

According to this article on slashdot, a company called Net Applications has provided data that Computerworld claims to show that there was a small decrease (0.3%) in Apple’s market share, but a rise in the number of PCs running Vista (just over 2% of PCs now run Vista). The number of PowerPC-based Macs fell but were not fully offset by new purchases of Intel-based Macs.

In my opinion this shows a significant number of people are waiting for OS X 10.5 before making their next Apple purchase, as well as waiting to see when the new iMacs are released. Meanwhile, the total number of PCs are continually increasing which are now being sold with Windows Vista only.

Now this is one sweet computer! Two 3.0Ghz Quad-core Xeons in a nice package with OS X. The base price with the 2 quad-core cpus is a few bucks under $4000. Of course with only 1GB of RAM which is pathetic not only by today’s standards but relative to the overall capabilities of an 8-core machine. You can easily upgrade the RAM and I would recommend most people do it themselves rather than pay for Apple’s overpriced memory. You can also probably find cheaper hard disks than Apple offers, but I haven’t checked the prices lately on either RAM or hard disks.

That being said I’d love to have one of these to replace my home-built Athlon 64 x2. I certainly won’t be spending $4k on a new computer any time soon, though. I’ve loved my Apple laptops through the last 5 or 6 years of owning one including my latest Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, but considering I can build my own desktop PC for far cheaper I’d have to have a lot of money with nothing better to do to buy one of those. But it’s still very tempting. If only Apple would release OS X for non-Apple hardware. Not that I need an 8-core computer or anything…

News.com.com.com is reporting that the release date for the Apple iPhone has been set for June 11. Replies to their story are contradicting this information, however. No official announcement has been made and until we hear something official I’m going to remain skeptical of the exact date.

In any case, I think I want to wait on the next version of the iPhone. I have a fully working iPod nano so I wouldn’t use the iPod functionality of the iPhone anyway. I just want a nice PDA phone. Since I’m already using Cingular it would be an easy switch, especially since my contract is already up and the whole reason I haven’t gotten a new phone yet is to wait for the iPhone. Unfortunately my 2 year old phone, a Motorola V551, just got a crack on the hinge of the flip ear piece. I think its days are numbered and certainly it will not last until a 3G version of the iPhone is released. If I want a phone discount I have to renew my contract and that pretty much means no iPhone for another 2 years. Decisions… decisions…

It looks like Office 2008 for Mac is coming along quite nicely. APC talks with some of Microsoft’s developers and gives us a few (albeit small) screen shots of what the new Office 2008 interface is going to look like. Also discussed are some new features that Office 2008 will have.

Some of the most impressive touches are Mac-only treats like Word’s Publishing Layout View with its DTP-style page layout capabilities. Images can be dragged out of iPhoto and placed directly onto the page with automatic text run-around, while excess copy on any page is automatically spilled into a linked text box that can be drawn elsewhere on that page or on the next page.

I’m looking forward to being able to try this application out. It looks like the changes are quite impressive. Check out the entire article at APC.

You download an archive to your Apple computer, maybe it’s a .zip file or a .tar.gz or .sit. You double-click on it to open it up and the built-in helper app opens up and extracts the files to a folder, usually your desktop. Or, in the case of a .sit file, if you have StuffIt installed that will open.

If you’re like me, you wish it handled .sit archives so you didn’t have to use the pretty lame StuffIt expander application. I call it lame because it’s not included by default, and why should anyone in 2007 have to sign up to download an unarchiving application?

Cue The Unarchiver, a free open source application for Mac OS X that is a much improved utility for unarchiving that replaces the built-in OS X helper application. I have installed it on my MacBook Pro and it is definitely an improvement over the included utility. Check it out.

Here’s Novell’s attempt at fitting Linux into Apple’s Mac vs. PC ad campaign that takes a different approach than the ones we’ve all seen on YouTube so far. It is pretty amusing, so check it out!

From lifehacker comes this comparison between FileVault and BitLocker, the two respective native file encryption systems for OS X and Vista.

The main differences boil down to BitLocker being used to lock down the entire operating system, while FileVault only locks down the user’s home directory. BitLocker requires much more setup in that you have to have a special encrypted partition that Vista is installed on, as well as have the unencryption keys stored on a USB stick. This USB ‘key’ is needed to allow Vista to boot. The author of the article feels that BitLocker is better because of the total lock-down of the hard disk. While that is overall more secure, FileVault I feel is more efficient since it only encrypts the user’s home directory which is where all the sensitive information is going to be stored anyhow. While I haven’t benchmarked either encryption method I’d imagine that FileVault probably has higher performance since BitLocker would have to do on the fly encryption and decryption of every single file the OS needs access to. Not only that I feel like backups would probably be more difficult to do on a BitLocker partition than simply backing up FileVault’s encrypted home directory.

In any case it is good to see that OS vendors are including such basic security mechanisms directly into the operating system. The more security the better.