All Articles Tagged os x

Via CrackBerry.com:

RIM has officially announced that BlackBerry Desktop Manager software for MAC will be available this September. THANK YOU RIM. You can visit blackberry.com/mac to sign up for updates and learn more or visit the Inside BlackBerry blog to see a few screen captures of it in action.

Yeah. Good luck with that. Any guesses how long that lasts before Apple releases a patch to disable BlackBerry sync?

(Kidding! Joking! Don’t panic, Kev! We’re happy for you — now you’re at least half-way towards restoring your childlike sense of wonder…)

Good news for Mac OS X-based Jailbreakers! After having to resort to using powered USB hubs or patching in older versions of files to work around a bug in 10.5.6 that prevented DFU mode from being recognized, the iPhone Dev-Team dropped a note a Twitter to give 10.5.7 the all-clear:

The new 10.5.7 Leopard update is safe. In fact it’s more jailbreak-friendly than 10.5.6, since the DFU-mode bug is gone.

So no nasty cat-and-mouse-game shenanigans this time around, and even a slight improvement over the previous — unintentional — round.

Only one thing left — figure out what to do with all those now-redundant USB hubs…

(Via Jamesus)

We already knew that Apple’s next computer operating system, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (estimated for delivery mid-2009) was leveraging some of the amazing work done by the iPhone team, including the highly optimized QuickTime X. Now Apple Insider brings word that things like CoreLocation and more Multi-Touch might be making their way back to the big desktop brother as well:

CoreLocation will utilize a Mac’s existing networking hardware to triangulate the system’s location in a manner similar to the way the original iPhone was able to use the technology to emulate a true global positioning signal. [...] Snow Leopard will also gain access to a new set of Cocoa-based programing interfaces for leveraging the multi-touch features of the latest MacBooks and MacBook Pros within their applications.

The synergy between Apple’s desktop and mobile OS X development really seems to not only be benefitting both platforms, and optimizing R&D’s bottom-line, but bouncing off each other in iterative splendor. Hopefully iPhone OS 3.0 can take a little back as well — I’m looking at you universal spotlight search!

The iPhone runs mobile OS X, a stripped down and highly optimized subset of Mac OS X. Adobe has just released Flash 10, including a version for Apple’s platform. Does this new version finally address all the bugginess and bloat, that has long plagued the non-Windows version of Flash? What about the general privacy and security concerns around Flash cookies and exploits? Ars Technica put the new builds through their paces, and Daring Fireball sums it up thusly:

Performance still sucks on Mac OS X compared to Windows Vista. Using the exact same computer (four-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM), Hulu video playback consumes 56 percent CPU on Mac OS X 10.5 vs. just 7 percent on Vista.

John Gruber updates his post to say it’s not as bad as he first thought, but 2 times slower is still 2 (or more!) times too many. The iPhone is not as forgiving as a desktop or even laptop computer. If Adobe really wants Flash on the iPhone — as they keep harping to the media — why not make a highly optimized, super-fast build that would befit the OS X platform? You know, like Apple has done with Quicktime X?

Apple.com has put up a teaser page for their next-generation OS X, 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. And the features, to put it mildly, are mind blowing:

Exchange support built in, so that iPhone and OS X share common business email, calendar, and contact sync.

64-bit monster, supporting a theoretical 16TB (terabytes!!) of RAM.

Multi-core optimized, using “Grand Central” to chip away at one of the biggest problems in programming: how to really take advantage of multi-core processors.

Media from iPhone! building on the iPhone OS X, Quicktime X takes advantage of streamlined, next gen tech for modern codec support, and ultra-fast javascript for the web.

Open CL, to co-opt the GPU into doing some heavy crunching on the compute side.

How does this relate to the iPhone? Aside from using what they learned making iPhone OS X, from optimization to shrinking the OS footprint, rumor has it Snow Leopard will go a long way towards unifying the OS X branches, leveraging development efforts, and in the end, giving the best of both worlds to desktop, laptop, and handheld users.

Great, I just got through WWDC 2008 and now I’m already jonesing for 2009. Way to go Apple!

Last year Apple infamously delayed the release of their long anticipated OS X 10.5 Leopard in order to devote more resources to their soon-to-launch iPhone. When Leopard finally roared, it brought with it a host of new features, including CoreAnimation, Time Machine, Coverflow and Quicklook, and some 296 more according to Apple.

So would the next OS X release be similarly feature-packed… and delayed?

Turns out maybe just the opposite. Rumor is Apple may release OS X 10.6, claimed to be code-named “Snow Leopard” as early as Macworld in January 2008, and maybe even debut a beta this WWDC (?!).

Sounds crazy? Here’s what’s crazier: just as “Snow Leopard” comes off as a minor addition to “Leopard”, so too is OS X 10.6 supposedly a functionally similar product to 10.5! Focus this time may just be on stability, making what’s good better, and increasing the unification between the various “flavors” of the OS Apple now deploys across the Mac, iPhone, and Apple TV platforms.

Personally, this sounds great to me. OS X is mature enough at this point that more eye-candy or changes for changes sake can easily take a back seat for the final polish analogous to the 10.1 release of the early days. Nailing down the platform will let Apple take both the Mac and their mobile initiatives, headlined by the iPhone, fully and functionally into the future.

Gimme.

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