Apple Day - everything about Apple, iPod, iPhone, iTouch, iMac, iBook

FSJ has been ordered to cease and desist by Apple lawyers just days before christmas! FSJ’s assets are at risk- Save FSJ!

Somewhere between 2006 and today, I stopped considering Apple an underdog. And I’m not just talking about their iPod numbers nor am I talking about their no-where-close to Windows marketshare. I mean, screw marketshare, really: Does Porsche outsell Honda?

Apples for the Army? Wow, the old guard has finally moved on.

It appears that the guy behind the “rixstep” blog has stolen material from Stepwise, a highly-respected news and technical site which has served NeXTSTEP and Cocoa developers for over a decade. On the main page at Stepwise right now, there’s a notice from Scott Anguish stating that Rixstep is violating his copyrights.

Apple Inc. will form a closer bond with once-rival Intel Corp. early next year when it begins building a new breed of ultra-mobile processors from the chipmaker into a fresh generation of handheld devices, AppleInsider has learned.

Just got a new iPod? Then visit iTunes Tutorials. It provides a fast and easy way to learn how to get the most out of iTunes. Short videos show you how to Sync Your iPod, Import Music from CDs, Create Playlists, Get Free Podcasts, Shop the iTunes Store, and more. Of course, if you’re giving a friend a new iPod this holiday season, be sure to send your lucky recipient to iTunes Tutorials website. It’s the perfect place to help them get started with iTunes.

Apple has sold 5 million iPhones, according to 9 to 5 Mac, an Apple rumor site. At the iPhone’s launch, Steve Jobs set a public goal of selling 10 million iPhones — next year. With the iPhone only on sale for six months, that means Apple’s already selling its sleek smartphones at 2008 speed.

For “Youth without Youth,” his first film in ten years, Francis Ford Coppola returned to self-funded, low-budget filmmaking and to longtime collaborator and Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch. It took six months for Murch and crew to edit the film, and they depended on Final Cut Studio throughout the six-month editing process. “In the final stages of editing the film, we were working with the ultimate resolution of the film,” says Murch. “So really, the final film, other than the color correction, came out of our editing rooms on Final Cut Pro—in this case Final Cut literally was the final cut.”

agent_blue writes “The Army is integrating Macs into their IT network to thwart hack attempts. The Mac platform, they argue, is more secure because there are fewer attacks against OS X than Windows-based systems. ‘Military procurement has long been driven by cost and availability of additional software–two measures where Macintosh computers have typically come up short against Windows-based PCs. Then there have been subtle but important barriers: For instance, Macintosh computers have long been incompatible with a security keycard-reading system known as Common Access Cards system, or CAC, which is heavily used by the military. The Army’s Apple program, created [in 2005], is working to change that.’”

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rdmreader writes “RDM has a point by point disassembly of the security vulnerability story phenomenon. We regularly see these, comparing various vulnerability lists for different operating systems. ZDNet’s George Ou, for example, condemns Linux and Mac OS X by tallying up reported flaws and comparing them against Microsoft’s. What he doesn’t note is that his source, Secunia, only lists what vendors and researchers report. Results selectively include or exclude component software seemingly at random, and backhandedly claims its data is evidence of what it now tells journalists they shouldn’t report. Is Secunia presenting slanted information with the expectation it will be misused?”

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Run completely on Macs, Charity Checks is a giving program that lets you make contributions to any charity while your gift recipient chooses the cause. With Charity Checks everyone comes out a winner.

Their clients have exciting new products we’ll want to use; cutting-edge stories we need to hear. Who better to spread the word than LaunchSquad. One of the world’s fastest growing PR firms, LaunchSquad wants to excite people about the new ideas and technologies offered by the companies they represent. And they depend on their Macs to get the story out, supplementing traditional PR tools with audio, video and other Web 2.0 techniques. We’re “building stories about our clients using new communications channels such as blogs and podcasts,” says founding member Jason Throckmorton. “And we couldn’t do it without our Macs.”

You get an email confirming your registration for a Final Cut Studio seminar. Next step: adding the event to your iCal schedule. Since you’re using Mac OS X Leopard, you don’t even have to leave Mail or open iCal. That’s because Leopard introduces a new technology called Data Detectors that lets your Mac recognize dates, email addresses, physical addresses, and other similar data. In this case, Mail can take advantage of Data Detectors to create a new iCal event for you. Find out how by reading the Pro Tip of the Week.

A number of readers are sending in the news that the Mac rumors site Think Secret will be shutting down, as part of the (secret) settlement of a lawsuit Apple filed in 2005. Apple had claimed that the blog, published since 1998 by college student Nick Ciarelli, had revealed Apple’s trade secrets. The only other detail of the settlement that has been revealed is that Think Secret was not forced to reveal any sources.

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“John McDermott’s workflow once consisted of handing off rolls of Kodachrome to a courier and waiting to see which images appeared in Newsweek,” writes Derrick Story (digitalmedia.oreilly). But now Aperture has transformed McDermott’s workflow. “It’s basically brought everything under one roof for me,” the assignment photographer tells Story in the latest Inside Aperture podcast. Aperture allows him to “download, edit, caption, and correct images” in the post-production tool McDermott describes as “a really elegant solution, and a simple one.”

“Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace,” writes Sara Rimer (New York Times). Due to MIT OpenCourseWare, the “global classroom” that delivers more than 1800 courses via the MIT website, Lewin receives fan mail from students all over the world. “Professor Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. ’Teaching is my life,‘ he said.” Like to sit in on a physics course taught by Professor Lewin? You can download free video podcasts of his lectures on iTunes.

DrJenny writes “C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple’s iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music — they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads. The article goes into details on how Apple’s home-grown ALAC lossless encoding relates to FLAC, DRM, and the iPod ecosystem.”

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eldavojohn writes “A ZDNet blog reports stats from Secunia showing OSX averaged 20.25 vulnerabilities per month while XP & Vista combined averaged 3.67/month. Is this report card’s implication accurate, or is this a symptom of one company turning a blind eye while the other concentrates on timely bugfixes? ‘While Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren’t present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it’s something I am glad I don’t use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.’”

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Surf private. To keep you safe when you visit sites on a borrowed or public computer, Safari offers an option called Private Browsing. When it’s activated, Safari stops adding the sites you visited to History, removes items you’ve downloaded from the Downloads window, eliminates personal data from AutoFill, and doesn’t add your search terms to the pop-up menu in the Google search box. How can you take advantage of Private Browsing? Find out by watching our Quick Tip of the Week.

Seth Weintraub (computerworld) reports that a survey conducted by Canalys for Symbian “shows that iPhone sales are second only to Blackberry in North America. That means that iPhone has passed Windows Mobile, Palm and Linux in sales in North America.”

The editors at tech.com.uk report that Google Zeitgeist 2007, the “list of the most popular search terms it processed in” 2007 “has just been made public and, as expected, is topped by everybody’s favourite gadget, Apple’s iPhone. The iconic device was the fastest-rising search term both globally and in the US, which is where most of Google’s stats are drawn from.”

According to Jonny Evans (Macworld), “iPhones are the most popular mobiles on the Christmas wish lists of 13 to 25-year-olds in the US.” As he explains, “the statistics drawn from the survey of 1,175 Gen-Y consumers are a ’bellwether for up-and-coming consumer trends,’ said Murtaza Hussain, chief executive officer at Peanut Labs.”

Bryan Gardiner (wired.com) reports that Google has optimized its popular Picasa photo service for the iPhone. He quotes Google software engineer Joe Walnes as saying: “Today, I’m happy to tell you that we’ve just released this new iPhone interface for Picasa. After you go to Picasa on your iPhone and log in, you can quickly see all your albums that you’ve uploaded to Picasa web. If you click on any of the albums, you can get a full view of your picture with comments from your friends.”

After thoroughly testing the new iPod nano, Dan Frakes (Macworld) concludes that “it’s been improved in almost every way.” It offers “very good sound quality, excellent battery life,” and an “improved user interface.” And one great screen for watching video. “Even though this is the smallest video-playing screen we’ve used, after watching a 90-minute movie on the nano we were pleasantly surprised by the experience. Picture quality is comparable to that of the iPhone, just smaller.”

deleuth writes “The de facto online connectivity software sold along with many Apple computers, .Mac, has a Web interface through which users can check their ‘iDisk’ while away from their own computer. However, there is no Log-Out button in this Web interface, so most users just close the browser and walk away… not realizing that their iDisk has been cached by the browser and that anyone who wants to can open up the browser, go back to the link in History, and get into their iDisk completely logged in. From here, files can be downloaded and/or deleted. This seems like a minor security flaw via bad interface design, and podcaster Klaatu (of thebadapples.info) posted this on the discussion.apple.com site, only to have his post removed by Apple. Furthermore, feedback at apple.com/feedback has gone unanswered. The problem remains: there is no way for the average computer user to log-out of their iDisk on public computers. A quick review of any public terminal’s browser history could bring up all kinds of interesting things.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Monsters and Friends has just released the beta of Drunknbass, a new iPhone hack that allows the unit’s camera to capture video. ‘While the iPhone’s 2.0 megapixel camera resolution may be mediocre for a still camera, it is excellent resolution for a consumer video camera.’ A standard definition Canon digital camcorder uses a 680K pixel sensor chip (because a standard definition TV’s resolution is only 520 x 360), while one of Canon’s HD camcorders uses a 2.9 megapixel sensor. The beta presently allows 5 second clips at 10 frames per second, but the finished version will soon allow infinite recording at 45 frames per second. Video of Drunknbass in action can be found on YouTube.”

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