If you know me, then you know that I’m a huge Mac fan at heart and wouldn’t trade one for anything. Well, there’s some good news for myself and many of the other Mac users out there. Apple has announced that the newest version of their operating system will be released on the 26th of October, 2007. The new OS will go by the name of “Leopard” and will come with scores of new features that will more than likely blow your mind. I’ve seen some of the new features in the keynote that Steve Jobs gave and have to say that I’m thoroughly impressed by some of them. Be sure to check out the Apple website for information on all the awesome features Leopard’s going to be packed with.
For any of the hardcore Mac junkies out there, you might like to know that MacScoop.com is featuring a roadmap of the Leopard release that we should expect to see. If you’ve been following Apple or using Mac for a few years then you know the new releases generally come out in October each year. Based on what MacScoop is showing, we should expect to see this same release time frame. Visit the MacScoop.com site to check out the roadmap.
I saw this article on Slashdot and about laughed myself to death. Symantec, the company known for it’s anti-virus and firewall software, has reported in a study that Microsoft has the most secure OS of its competitors. The article about this hilarious report went on to mention that Red Hat Linux and Mac OS X have ranked BELOW Microsoft. Seriously? Come on now.
“According to a Symantec study reported by Information Week, Microsoft has the most secure operating system amongst its commercial competitors. The report only covered the last 6 months of vulnerabilities and patch releases, but the results place Microsoft operating systems above Mac OS X and Red Hat. According to the article, ‘The report found that Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.’ The article continues to mention the metrics used in the study (quantity and severity of vulnerabilities as well as the amount of time one must wait for the patch to be released).”
It’s not generally my thing to load up my computer with plugins but the Ars Technica site had an article featuring a pretty neat plugin. It works with the iTunes application and the dock. When a song is playing in iTunes that has cover art, instead of seeing the default iTunes icon, you will see the album’s cover art as the dock icon.
Installation is easy as pie. You just drag the .bundle file into the ~/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins. If iTunes is open during the installation you simply restart it and the plugin is then active. That’s all there is to it.
You can download the plugin on the DockArt website. The current version as of March 16, 2007 is 1.0.8.
A Slashdot article from today asks the question of whether or not Microsoft will be able to match or even surpass Apple on the desktop front. In my opinion, no. I’ve used a beta version of Vista and I use a Mac always. Vista, like the Apple commercial implies, constantly asks for verification of nearly every task that you want to perform.
From the article:
“RDM asks Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop?, a comparison of recent sales and profits and the future outlook for Macs and PCs. It’s the opinion of the article’s author that Apple doesn’t have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win. The key is to take the most valuable segments of the market. They show via a few quick financial numbers that even though Apple is selling fewer machines, they’re making more money per machine than your Dells or your Gateways. Not being beholden to Microsoft gives them a big advantage when competing with traditional PC sellers. Once Apple is positioned, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales. If it doesn’t make a choice, the company will face difficult battles on two fronts.”
How many things are people going to blend and smash and then upload to YouTube? This is getting out of hand guys! It’s funny for the most part but still just a little out of hand. Quite wasteful too.
Even though I’m a week late on realizing that MAMP had a new version released, the 1.4.1 update came out November 10, 2006. For anyone that’s not familiar with MAMP, it’s a Mac OS X application generally used for PHP and MySQL development; MAMP standing for Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Best of all it’s just an application you drop in to your Applications folder and sets you up for an instant development environment. Compared to the version I had there were some minor updates to the software that’s included in the program and - from 1.4 to 1.4.1 - there was a bug fix for Mac OS X (version 10.3.x) users that were having trouble with Apache starting in MAMP. For complete information on the releases and their associated fixes / updates you can go to their releases section. The new program icon is nice too.
Ryan Raaum has developed an application called Locomotive for Mac OS X that keeps developers from having to go through the hassle of setting up a bunch of servers and libraries. The application is ready for PowerPC or Intel architectures so it’s good to go on all Mac systems. You can use multiple versions of Rails that can be set up to use different libraries, gems, or web servers.
For me, this application is quite ideal as I am trying to learn Ruby and get in to Ruby on Rails development. So far the reading is going well and Ruby seems really simple but no projects have come to mind to try and develop to help me learn Ruby. If anyone has any suggestions at all please let me know. Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll come up with something eventually.
You can check out Locomotive by clicking here. For more information on Ruby you can click here.