Apple OS X

Apple OS X… any minute now!

Apple OS X Snow Leopard

iWould review Apple OS X Snow Leopard but it’s not out yet… but iWill…

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 faster on Mac OS X than Safari 3.1

Previous benchmark tests that I
’d carried out on my Mac mini had shown that Safari 3.1 was the fastest browser for the Mac OS X. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 changes that.

Using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test my testing shows that Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 holds a 7% lead over Safari 3.1.

read more | digg story

Macbook Air Parody Film

Ha ha. Funny. Such a nice song too. So what’s up with No 64-bit CS4 for Adobe’s next release of Photoshop? A bunch a hooey about carbon & Cocoa & OS X Support. I’m sure Adobe is just miffed about no flash on the iPhone, but who wins? Not us customers – say… maybe Dells don’t look so bad after all.

Windows is caught between Mac and Linux

For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it’s also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads into Windows’ once unchallenged market share.

read more | digg story

Finding a worm in the Apple? Secret APIs in Mac OS X

A Mozilla developer has discovered undocumented Mac OS X framework APIs that are being used in Safari. This discovery has led some to question if Apple is giving itself an unfair advantage, with some pointing out that if Microsoft was caught doing this it might find itself in front of a judge.

read more | digg story

The Economist: Ubuntu is the source of Linux’s rise

The Economist makes three technology predictions for 2008, two of which concern web surfing and the third of which concerns everyone, whether they surf the web or not. The Economist’s third prediction is that the technology world will open up: Click to download this Linux wallpaper that somebody thought very hard about.

read more | digg story

Leopard 10.5: One week out of the box… Top Five Lists.

As many reader know, iFirst decided to created this blog due to the unbridled buzz for the latest Apple, Inc. Operating System, 10.5, code named, Leopard. That first deadline, 4.20.2007 or so was missed. Perhaps it had to do with the due date they selected, i’m sure many people forgot to do a lot of things on that day, but the official claim was that it was the heralded iPhone that held up the big cat. At this point it’s dubious, but nevertheless the in”stall”ment gave me time to reflect and so my expectations have been rather high and the reality not always so. Let’s take a look at the big factors that I have noticed, and the big factors that are noticeably missing. (Star Wars-like Hologram in iChat people!)

Best Five Things.

1.Spaces. iJust love this thing. Zip around lining up squares or four across bars all the way up to 16 different desktops on one machine. It really clears things up when you are using iTunes, Garageband, Firefox, Camino, Pages, and whatever else you like to have in front of you. iOwn a 20″ machine and am using a 15.4 MBP for editing and feel the 15.4 MBP is a far better too, in that it’s faster, portable, but most of all, seems bigger, because of OS X ‘Spaces.”

2.Quicklook. It’s just cool. it speeds things up considerably, especially when editing… videos/fotos and the like, and makes the mac more pleasureable as well as faster to work on than anything else. two thumbs up for this one too.

3.Desktop. This includes stacks, the transparent menus, organization. Really its the organization that is key. The dock works better and it is really much easier to stay organized now. I would say this fits in with spaces & quicklook, because when you are looking for files or organizing files, its a breeze, it’s kind of like you hired someone to help you, but clearly you are doing this yourself, strange but true, major plus, easy push into the 30% faster work-flow due to cleanliness. The widgets are a little slicker and with Safari you can evem make your own.

4.Mail is cool. Letterpop pretty much beats the pants off of it now, but if you want to intergrate your Apple vCard, or namecard from the rolodex, apple mail/calandar/contact integration or higher-end solutions like filemaker pro, and sugarCRM are a much better bet than a simple organizational tool like letterpop, or even the 1 to 4 team solutions like Constant contact or ACT! The calendar and contact information has garnered some AI where the OS understands addresses, dates, and of course still rocks theautomatic form fill as found in Safari.5.

Installation. A breeze, this Intel Core Duo 2 Santa Rosa 2 RAMfresh from the refurb store did a nice lil’ job at taking Tiger, all of it’s files and places them together as i left them. I never really upgraded asisde from a fresh Tiger install and it was pretty much the same thing then. A breeze.

Best of Leopard Is Yet to Come…

by By Leander Kahney

There’s been a lot of brouhaha about Leopard, but the most exciting thing about Apple’s latest OS upgrade hasn’t even arrived yet — a wave of third-party applications that make use of new technologies under the operating system’s hood.

Core Animation could prove particularly revolutionary. A powerful programmers’ toolkit embedded in Leopard, Core Animation makes it easy to create flashy, animated 3-D interfaces. While some observers dismiss such things as pure eye candy — mere special effects to make the UI pretty — others have said they may herald the most significant advance in computer interfaces since the original Mac shipped 30 years ago.

“The revolution coming with Core Animation is akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984,” says Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library. “We’re going to see a whole new world of user-interface metaphors with Core Animation.” more…

Leopard is all hype.

 

Yup, iSaid it….and its true. Here it is Halloween weekend in 2007 and the best dressed costume of the year came from Cupertino. Leopard (OS X) is nothing special. At. All. iBlogged some digg crap calling it a “tipping point” dang, i’ve seen Malcolm Gladwell speak live, even met the man and i am willing to bet he IS NOT considering this marginal OS upgrade a “tipping point.” Or even gives a crap at all. iF Anything it gives MSFT time to kick the sh*t out of Apple again. Sure they got the momentum, SJ (Steve Jobs) will retire within this time frame. He came, he saw, he kicked f”ning ass. But Bill Gates did well too, they both did, and after Leopard, iPhone, iPod and the 45 nm paradigm shift has occured… iPredict Steve will retire. He should in my opinion, obviously he can do whatever he wants forever, he started Apple, he revived it, he made the keypad on my MBP glow, i owe him a foot massage and as awkward as that would be, more awkward still would for Steve to keep, “innovating.” Zaxxon high score reached. Time up. Not “game over…” Anything goes in bidness, but really, for this round, “time up.” Aside from a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, endorsed motor oil, or personal Hallmark division i don’t know what else the man can do, b/c he HAS DONE EVERYTHING.