Archive - Jan 2008

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted 10 key predictions of events and developments that will affect IT and business in 2008 and beyond.

The predictions highlight areas where executives and IT professionals need to take action in 2008, according to the report. The full impact of these trends may not appear this year, but executives need to act now so that they can exploit the trends for their competitive advantage.

Ithaca, NY USA (January 29, 2008) -- Despite Apple's whizzy demos, there's more to a disaster-proof Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard backup strategy than turning on Time Machine. In the new "Take Control of Easy Backups in Leopard," Joe Kissell, author of the best-selling "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups," covers the ins and outs of Time Machine and helps readers create a comprehensive backup strategy that includes offsite backups and a bootable duplicate.

Dirceu Veiga from FastIcon.com shows in this small video tutorial how to design an iPhone Webclip Icon using Photoshop.

The MacBookAir.com domain is now in the hands of Apple. MacRumors.com had registered it ahead of Macworld in anticipation of the MacBook Air release. As promised, they handed it over to Apple when asked. However, this does demonstrate that Apple does not necessarily register domains of upcoming products even when they are freely available. Curiously, the MacBookAir.com domain registration actually triggered a number of actual MacBookAir domain registrations by Apple.

Previous reports of shipments may have been premature, as the first customers who ordered the stock (1.6GHz/80GB) MacBook Airs immediately after the keynote are now getting shipment notifications for the latest Apple laptop. Calls to retail Apple Stores reveal that MacBook Airs have not yet arrived at retail locations.

Apple has released minor updates to Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. According to the release notes, Keynote 4.0.2 addresses "performance issues while playing or exporting presentations", while Pages 3.0.2 and 1.0.2 address "compatibility with Mac OS X". All of the updates are available via Software Update or from Apple's Download page.

The Fast Icon has released "Nature Icons", a collection of 14 freeware icons.

The "Nature Icons", inspired by nature things like trees and butterflies, is available for download as standard Mac or Windows icons as well as a handy PNG files for linux, web or blogs.

Deutsche Telekom announced (via MacNotes.de) on Saturday that they had sold 70,000 iPhones in the 11 weeks following its launch in November.

This represents a much smaller number of iPhones sold as compared to the 70,000 iPhone sales in 1 month in France. Despite this, the head of T-Mobile Germany states that "the iPhone is by far the most sold multimedia device in T-Mobile's portfolio."

Apple appears to be working hard on Mac OS X 10.5.2, and has seeded yet another build to developers. This build comes in at 9C23 and offers a number of fixes to CoreGraphics, DVD Playback, File Systems, BackupCore and Web Content Filter. Apple again lists "no known issues" with this seed of Mac OS X 10.5.2.

iPhone Atlas warns that the current 1.1.3 jailbreak may prevent official third party apps from working.

iPhone firmware 1.1.3 includes a mechanism for approving signed applications. Signed apps use private keys to authorize themselves for installation on the iPhone/iPod Touch. This gets damaged by the jailbreak, although it's reversable. It does mean that official and unofficial third party apps won't be able to co-exist.