GP Mac News: January 2009

Could Apple be coming to CES as iLounge Pavilion quadruples in size?

18,000 square feet has been reserved for the iLounge Pavilion at this years Consumer Electronics Association show adding to the rumours that Apple may be attending CES 2010 in place of its usual presence at Macworld Expo.

CES organisers have announced that the iLounge Pavilion, a unified iPod, Phone and Mac exhibition area at the 2010 International CES, has "quadrupled in size since its official launch last week".

The iLounge Pavilion, co-sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association and iLounge.com, will feature manufacturers and retailers of iPod and iPhone accessories, related products and services, and based on requests from vendors, will now grow to include leading Mac developers and retailers as well.

Mobis Technology, Pro Clip USA, Incipio Technologies, iSkin and GelaSkins are among the Mac-related companies that usually exhibit at Macworld rather than CES, who have signed up for the iLounge Pavilion.

Other firms, like Griffin Technology and Scosche, that have maintained a presence at both shows, are expected to book larger spots for next year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The 2010 International CES is scheduled for January 7-10 in Las Vegas. Macworld Expo 2010 is set for January 4-8.

Macworld Expo

In December Apple announced that it would no longer exhibit at Macworld Expo after the 2009 event.

Speaking of the much-increased Mac presence at CES Karen Chupka, senior vice president, events and conferences, CEA, said: "We have received an incredible response from companies interested in exhibiting in the iLounge Pavilion at the 2010 International CES."

"In fact, the original space allocated for the pavilion sold out in less than one week - a CES show record - and we've quadrupled the space to accommodate the overwhelming demand," she added.

"This exciting new CES Pavilion brings momentum to the consumer technology industry and reinforces the International CES as the global hub for the latest innovative technologies.

"Leading Apple developers and retailers are excited to have such an outstanding stage at the 2010 International CES," said Jeremy Horwitz, editor-in-chief, iLounge.

"Whether they're showing off iPod accessories, iPhone applications, or the latest and coolest new Mac products, they know that they'll find the world's largest audience at this great new pavilion."

The iLounge Pavilion, originally floored with 4,000 net square feet of exhibit space which sold out in the first week following the launch, has increased to 18,000 net square feet.

Exhibiting companies in the 2010 CES iLounge Pavilion, which will be housed in the Las Vegas Convention Center, South Hall 2, include Griffin Technology, Mobis Technology, Pro Clip, Scosche, Incase Designs, Incipio Technologies, iSkin and GelaSkins.

At present this line up still covers more of the iPod and iPhone market than traditional Macworld Expo Mac-related companies.

Could Apple be coming to CES as iLounge Pavilion quadruples in size?

Macworld Expo is run by IDG World Expo, a subsidiary of IDG, publisher of Macworld

Macworld February on sale now! Get the lowdown on the NEW 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro! PLUS there's a FREE copy of Carrara 5 Pro worth 350 for every reader! For February Magazine">more information click here.

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O2 & Be networks down to 1.5Mb due to over-subscription

O2 and Be Broadband networks are suffering extreme congestion, with users reporting download speeds of just 1.5Mb. Far less than the "up to 20 meg" advertised on the O2 web site"

User's of O2's service have noticed the drop, leading to calls from users on O2's forum for the company to fix the problem.

O2 bought Be Internet in 2006 to step up to the high-performance area of the market. According to The Register O2/Be gained 62,000 new customers in the last quarter, at a time when other ISPs were shrinking.

Confounding matters is that O2's customer support is not always informing users of the problem. Macworld's speed test of O2's 16-meg line returned a speed of just 1.51Mb, leading Macworld to contact O2's Customer Support and discover if there was a problem with the network. O2's Customer Service department offered help such as "clearing the cache in Internet Explorer" and "trying different router setups".

One user, paulvwells, said on the O2 forum: "O2 customer services won't do anything about it as they told me it is because my router has to be plugged into the master socket", the user let his feelings on this be known with a smiley icon of rolling eyes. Another user called Howard Hopkinson replied: "I suspect that's another #### excuse".

One user called gazza1690 wrote that O2's customer services has told him: "its main fibre optic cable was broken".

O2 & Be networks down to 1.5Mb due to over-subscription

An O2 SpeedTest captured on an iPhone. The line is advertised at 16Mb, but is only delivering 1.51Mb

O2 Broadband's customer services initially told us that they: "weren't aware of any issues at the local telephone exchange". However, O2 clarified today that: "parts of the network are experiencing congestion at peak times. This is why you're experiencing a drop in your line speeds. O2 is looking into the issue at the moment and is investing heavily to increase the capacity for people this is happening to."

O2 was unable to confirm when any capacity increase is likely to take place. However, Broadband tech site Sam Knows reported on 16 Jan that the upgrade should start to ease congestion in four to six weeks. If so, congestion problems should be solved by late February, early March.

Janet Jackson postpones shows in Japan
(Reuters)
UK govt. plans nationwide 2Mb broadband service

UK govt. plans nationwide 2Mb broadband service

The UK government has unveiled a bold plan to help the country move out of recession as part of a wide ranging ‘Digital Britain’ report (PDF).

The full report compiled by Lord Carter for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is due in the summer but interim findings were released today.

UK govt. plans nationwide 2Mb broadband service

The 22 recommendations in the interim report examined both broadcasting and the UK's digital infrastructure.

The package of measures would include everyone having access to 2Mb per second broadband by 2012.

Secretary of state Andy Burnham told the Commons that broadband would become a necessary public service, similar using the telephone or postal service.

The report suggests working in partnership with Internet service providers to achieve this goal, ensuring services will be affordable to all.

The BBC, due in part to the popularity of its BBC iPlayer service may also be asked to help foot the bill to ensure broadband for all.

The report states that over nine in ten households can already get first generation broadband. Six in ten households have already adopted it, a higher percentage than most other major economies.

The benefits of universal 2Mb broadband are obvious says Lord Carter, with people enjoying access to information, education, e-commerce, including special tariff deals, BBC licence fee funded services, public services, including health and schools.

The UK digital economy is thought to be worth around 50bn, and universal broadband should help stimulate commerce at a time when many companies are struggling financially due to the recession.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said broadband was: "As essential to our future prosperity in the 21st Century as roads, bridges, trains and electricity were in the 20th".

"Even at this difficult time for the economy, we will not turn our backs on the future, we will build bridges to the future," he said.

NEXT: Tackling online piracy

Continued... 1 | 2 | NEXT >

Fujitsu to end hard-disk head production
Spector retrial enters key act as defense begins
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Janet Jackson postpones shows in Japan
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With acquisition Websense to silence blog comment spam

Archiware releases Backup2Go from PresSTORE

JPY the UK distributor for Archiware PresSTORE data backup products, has announced the release of PresSTORE 3.1, and a new module Backup2Go designed for secure backups on the move.

Backup2Go is designed to backup data from laptops and desktop computers, whether in the office or on the road, regardless of interruptions or location.

Archiware releases Backup2Go from PresSTORE

PresSTORE Backup2Go can be installed and configured within a couple of minutes and is ready to save your data automatically says the manufacturers.

Workstation 'templates' allow administrators to define and customise backup for any given workstation or groups of workstations. Scalability is reportedly effortless and because the backup process is started by the workstation, data from 10s, 100s or even 1000s of clients can be added as required.

Administrators can allow users to configure their own backup or they can override a user's parameters by using a workstation template defined on the server. The administrator has total control over individual backup plans and, as required, can enforce a consistent backup policy.

Backup2Go lets the laptop initiate its own backup as soon as a connection can be established to the server. This relieves both the server and the network from unnecessary load and traffic explains PresSTORE.

Automatic resume

If a workstation or laptop is shut down or loses the network connection, the backup process is interrupted but resumes automatically as soon as it is on-line again so incomplete backups are fully functional.

When a laptop or workstation is unable to establish a connection to the server, even after a long period of time, it will be started as soon as access to the server is available.

This provides complete flexibility and protection of data, irrespective of if a user is away on business, at home or even on holiday says PresSTORE.

Files can be encrypted while being transferred over a network and/or at point of storage. In addition, PresSTORE also backs up access rights and ACLs of a file.

This protects files against unauthorised access after restore. Access to view a workstation's index of saved files is managed via group-based access rights.

PresSTORE Backup2Go module supports data backup from 20 workstations or laptops to a central server and supports all platforms.

The Mac OSX version costs 625.00, a free trial version is available. More details can be found at the JPY website.

25 Years of the Mac: The Mac timeline in pictures

With acquisition Websense to silence blog comment spam

Web security vendor Websense has acquired Defensio, a provider of Web services used to delete comment spam off of blogs and Web sites.

Websense bought the tiny Montreal-based company to bolster its ThreatSeeker Network, which keeps tracks of Web attacks for corporate users, but the Defensio technology is also being extended into a new line of Web services that will help Web site operators lock down their sites, according to Dan Hubbard, Websense's chief technology officer.

Using its current Websense analysis software, the company could create new services to, for example, alert customers when material that shouldn't be posted to the Web appears on their Web sites, Hubbard said.

Websense hopes to be able to talk more about its move into selling security services for Web site operators around the time of the RSA Conference this April, Hubbard said. For the next six months, however, Defensio will be available to anyone who wants to use it, free of charge.

Defensio plug-ins can be used on a dozen blogging platforms to get rid of machine-generated comment spam, which is designed to fill up the comment sections of Web sites with commercial messages or, worse, links to malicious Web sites.

On Monday, Websense reported that comment spammers were adding links to Trojan horse programs on Barack Obama's Web site and then linking to those malicious links using comment spam.

That information came from Defensio's network of about 10,000 blogs, Hubbard said.

Defensio is owned by a parent company, Karabunga, which was quietly bought by Websense late last month. The company employs just a handful of people, but it is one of a very small number of businesses working on the products that stop the comment spam problem.

“Idol” David Cook to hit colleges on U.S. tour
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Markzware updates InDesign to QuarkXPress conversion tool

Markzware updates InDesign to QuarkXPress conversion tool

Markzware has released an upgrade to its highly recommended conversion tool ID2Q (InDesign to QuarkXPress).

ID2Q v4 is created to provide a method for migrating Adobe InDesign content into a new QuarkXPress document. This new version will convert Adobe InDesign documents up to Adobe CS4 to QuarkXPress 7 or 8.

The company says that intricate details of the content within an InDesign document are instantly recreated in QuarkXPress.

This product converts and transforms files created with InDesign on either the Apple Macintosh OS or Microsoft Windows, into a new QuarkXPress file, which can then be opened on either platform which achieves a goal of allowing interoperability between the formats.

ID2Q v4 costs 165 or €199. Upgrades are €99 (around 92) from Markzware's Web site.

New Variant of Mac Trojan Horse iServices found in Adobe Photoshop CS4
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Fujitsu to end hard-disk head production

Fujitsu plans to end production of read/write heads for hard-disk drives as part of a wider review of its HDD business, it said on Tuesday.

The company will exit the head business at the end of March. The move will affect about 360 employees at its factory in Nagano, Japan, who will be reassigned to other operations within the Fujitsu group, it said in a statement.

The head is the component that reads and writes data on to and from the spinning magnetic disc at the heart of a hard-disk drive.

The discontinuation of HDD head operations will mean a one-time facilities-related loss of 5 billion ($56 million [m]) will be recorded in its results for the last three months of 2008.

Fujitsu's review of its hard-disk drive business has seen it in talks with Western Digital and, most recently, Toshiba, according to local press reports.

Toshiba, which is tipped to buy the business, confirmed last week that it's in talks with Fujitsu but said nothing had been decided.

25 Years of the Mac: The Mac timeline in pictures
“Idol” David Cook to hit colleges on U.S. tour
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Papermaster to start at Apple in April - IBM lawsuit resolved

It appears that the saga of Mark Papermaster has finally come to an end, as Apple announced on Tuesday that the former IBM vice president would officially be taking his post as Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering beginning on 24 April.

Furthermore, Apple said that the court case between IBM and Apple over Papermaster’s employment has been resolved.

Papermaster was tapped last October to succeed outgoing Apple executive Tony Fadell, who had previously headed up the iPod hardware division.

Unfortunately, IBM took issue with the new job, arguing that Papermaster was forbidden from taking the position under a non-compete agreement that he had signed.

Papermaster found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from his former employer, which said that he had access to trade secrets and other information that could harm IBM.

Last Novemeber, US District Judge Kenneth Karas issued an injunction requiring Papermaster to immediately stop working at Apple.

Papermaster subsequently countersued his former employer on the grounds, arguing that IBM and Apple were not significant competitors.

An IBM veteran of 26 years, Papermaster had served in a number of different capacities at the company, most recently as vice president of IBM’s blade server development unit.

At Apple, Papermaster’s new position will put him in charge of the hardware engineering for the iPod and iPhone.

“Idol” David Cook to hit colleges on U.S. tour
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25 Years of the Mac: What will come next for the Apple Mac?

New Variant of Mac Trojan Horse iServices found in Adobe Photoshop CS4

Security software firm Intego reports that pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4 may contain a variant of the “trojan horse” malware first reported in copies of Apple iWork ‘09 last week.

OSX.Trojan.iServices.B is what the malware is being called. It affects some copies of Adobe Photoshop that are being distributed through pirate software sites.

According to Intego, “The actual Photoshop installer is clean, but the Trojan horse is found in a crack application that serializes the program.”

The crack application installs a backdoor in the /var/tmp directory, copies an executable to /usr/bin/DivX and saves the root hash password in the file /var/root/.DivX, according to Intego.

It then listens on a random TCP port and attemps to make repeated connections to two IP addresses.

Intego concludes that the creator of the malware intends to be alerted through this method and may have the ability to connect to affected Macs and perform various actions remotely.

“The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac,” reads Intego’s security alert.

Mac users concerned about this issue are advised to install and run security software to protect themselves. Obviously, the best practice remains to only acquire your software legitimately and through trusted sources.

25 Years of the Mac: The Mac timeline in pictures
25 years of the Mac: The birth of desktop publishing

RouteBuddy 2.3 released, improves performance reduces memory usage

RouteBuddy have released RouteBuddy 2.3, a free update to their GPS mapping program for Mac OS X.

RouteBuddy provides native Mac OS X support for Garmin, TomTom, and NMEA GPS devices - allowing users to manage and display their GPS data using high-precision vector-based road maps.

RouteBuddy 2.3 improves performance and reduces memory usage, and fixes several crashing bugs.

The RouteBuddy store can now be searched from within the application, and several cosmetic issues relating to map rendering have also been addressed.

The device also allows geo-data to be translated between a wide range of formats, and can import and export data as .loc, .gpx, .csv, .ov2, and .kml.

RouteBuddy costs $99.50, around 71, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Maps are available for several different territories, and are priced from $39.50, around 28.

The United Kingdom and Ireland map costs $49.50, around 35, while a range of European maps are also available.

A free demo is available for download.

25 Years of the Mac: How Apple created new type of user-interface
Janet Jackson postpones shows in Japan
(Reuters)
New Variant of Mac Trojan Horse iServices found in Adobe Photoshop CS4

25 years of the Mac: The birth of desktop publishing

Jonathan Seybold, founder of the influential Seybold Seminars, says that when Steve Jobs showed him the Macintosh he was convinced it was the future of not only computing but also publishing. “It was very clear to me that the distinction between computing and information science and graphic arts would just go away,” he says. In the summer of 1984, Jobs called Jonathan Seybold. “Steve wanted to see me urgently,” Seybold recalls. “He said they had a deal with Adobe, they were signing a deal with Linotype, they had real fonts. I went to Cupertino and walked into this tiny room, and there stood Jobs and [Adobe co-founder John] Warnock with a Mac and a LaserWriter. He showed me what they were up to. I turned to Steve and said, ‘You’ve just turned publishing on its head. This is the watershed event.’ When I turned to John, he has this look on his face. He was just so happy. I could tell he was thinking, ‘This made the company. This is my validation.’ It was a magic moment.”

25 years of the Mac: The birth of desktop publishing

It was the end of 1984, and the stage was set for the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter. The LaserWriter debuted to great fanfare at Apple’s annual stockholder meeting on January 23, 1985, where Steve Jobs’s legendary showmanship was on display. Onstage the Pointer Sisters belted out “I’m So Excited.” In the audience were all 27 Adobe employees who had made the trip to Cupertino’s Flint Center after toasting the culmination of their two-year effort at Adobe’s office the evening before. The jubilant engineers who had toiled in obscurity were seeing their product in a place where they could gauge public’s reaction to it.

“You couldn’t walk out of there not feeling you were doing something great,” says Dan Puttman, Adobe employee #2 and former senior vice president of the North American systems division.

The LaserWriter cost $6,995 – steep by today’s standard, yet astoundingly cheap compared with the IBM and Xerox laser printers of the day, which were priced three to ten times that. Plus, the LaserWriter had Adobe’s special ingredient: PostScript. Almost immediately, analysts commented on the LaserWriter’s output, praising its “near-typeset quality.”

With the release of the LaserWriter, Adobe Systems was on the corporate map. The two soft-spoken scientists [co-founders Warnock and Chuck Geschke] were thrust into the media spotlight, fielding interview requests to explain why the world’s second-largest computer company had bet its future on an unknown startup. When three upstart companies – Adobe Systems, Aldus Corporation, and Apple Computer – joined forces to create desktop publishing in 1985, shockwaves rumbled through the publishing world. Thanks to the combination of the Apple Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker, and the Adobe PostScript-equipped LaserWriter, publishing was liberated from the confines of proprietary typesetting and printing systems.

This article first appeared in Macworld in January 2004. It is excerpted from Pamela Pfiffner’s Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story (Adobe Press/Peachpit Press, 2003). Pfiffner is editor-in-chief of CreativePro

25 Years of the Mac: The Mac timeline in pictures
25 Years of the Mac: How Apple created new type of user-interface

25 Years of the Mac: What will come next for the Apple Mac?

It seems like only yesterday that Macworld released its first issue, with a youthful, besuited Steve Jobs peering over a trio of original Macs on the cover.

OK, maybe not yesterday. But those 25 years seem to have come and gone as quickly as so many Apple CEOs. And that quarter of a century has given us the countless advances and changes – in software, hardware design, operating systems, and more – that make the Mac what it is today.

But that’s the old news. What’s more important is what your Mac will be like next year, or the year after that, or five years from now. How will Apple’s ongoing endeavours and other technological developments affect the devices you use in the near future?

In this article, we take a look at how some of today’s trends are driving the technology of tomorrow, as well as how some of the past 25 years’ significant events brought us to where we are today. We’ve also asked some longtime members of the Mac community to share their thoughts on various aspects of the last two and a half decades.

What next for the Mac interface

25 Years of the Mac: What will come next for the Apple Mac?

Ever since Apple introduced the world to the mouse and the window-based graphical user interface in 1984, the company has worked tirelessly to develop a more efficient, yet more powerful, user experience. Witness Apple’s many patents.

However, not all – not even most – of those patents will see the light of day. We doubt, for example, that Apple is likely to replace the Mighty Mouse with a new input device based on filing patent #20070152966, titled “Mouse with Optical Sensing Surface,” which spends 35 pages detailing a mouse whose entire shapely body is a Multi-Touch display.

Still, although patent spelunking may not be an infallible way to divine exactly what products will emerge from One Infinite Loop, it is an excellent way to gain insight into what’s going on in the minds of Apple’s development team. A quick look at Apple’s most recent filings shows that interface design is clearly a front-and-centre concern.

Take, for example, filings for hardware devices. The frequently rumoured Multi-Touch tablet Mac has its own 52-page filing, complete with interface details that include a full-size virtual keyboard and resizable interface elements. If you don’t want to actually touch your display, Apple also has you covered – with a filing for a proximity-sensing display that can tell not only where and how close your fingers are, but also how fast they’re moving toward or away from the display’s surface.

For people who prefer devices with a physical interface, Apple has filed a patent for a keyboard with OLED-display keys that change appearance depending on what you’re up to, another for a 3-D remote control that’s intriguingly Nintendo Wii–like, and yet another for a holographic display that provides a 3-D experience without geeky glasses.

Some filings seem designed to work together. Take, for example, the intriguingly conceptual “Multi-Touch Data Fusion” filing, which melds a Multi-Touch display with other interface technologies such as an accelerometer, force sensors, facial-expression detection, eye-tracking, and pupil-dilation and voice-command recognition. Pair that filing with an earlier one for a “Multi-Touch Gesture Dictionary,” which assigns different meanings to different hand gestures, and you’re headed into a brave new world of computer control – one first hinted at by the four-fingered touchpads on Apple’s current laptops.

Most filings are less groundbreaking but still worth noting – for instance, the not-so-euphoniously named “Cursor for Presenting Information Regarding Target,” which enables QuickLook-like previews when you move your mouse over file icons and hyperlinks, and the equally wonderfully named “Enhancing Online Shopping Atmosphere,” which describes a Second Life–like avatar-based shopping experience, complete with helpful virtual experts (not referred to in the filing, however, as geniuses).

One recent filing that we hope comes to fruition describes giving iTunes the ability to use your Mac to broadcast all of its stored tunes to your iPod or iPhone wirelessly. If this dream becomes reality, you’ll no longer be limited by the storage capacity of your iPod, but only by its ability to connect to the Net.

There are a few holes in Apple’s patent-protected future, however, even in areas where other engineers are hard at work. For example, we couldn’t find any filings for brainwave-controlled input devices or for acoustically activated virtual keyboards.

NEXT: What next for the Mac processor

Continued... 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | NEXT >

25 Years of the Mac: How Apple created new type of user-interface

In 1970, eager to be on the cutting edge of information technology, Xerox gathered many of the best minds in the computer industry and ensconced them in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. Its mission was to create the future without worrying about the practicality of actually marketing their creations as commercial products.

By 1973, it had succeeded in giving birth to the Xerox Alto, the embodiment of many computing firsts. It was the first personal computer in the sense that it was designed to be used by a single person. Rather than putting fully formed characters on screen one at a time, the Alto created both text and graphics out of individually controlled pixels using a process called bit-mapping. Using Ethernet, another PARC creation, the Alto could network with other Altos and laser printers, yet another PARC invention. It had a funny pointing device, a three-button mouse, invented in the 1960s by Douglas Carl Engelbart.

Recommended by Jef Raskin and software engineer Bill Atkinson, Jobs approached the Xerox Development Corporation, the copier giant’s venture capital branch, and proposed, “I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will sort of open the kimono at Xerox PARC.” At the time, Apple was enjoying meteoric growth. Xerox was anxious to get a piece of the action and was more than willing to allow an Apple contingent to take a peek at PARC.

When Jobs first visited in November 1979, he saw with his own eyes what all the fuss was about. He was so excited that he returned in December with Apple engineers and executives. Jobs began jumping around, shouting, “Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing! This is revolutionary!” If Xerox didn’t recognize the value of its own work, Jobs certainly did. When he saw the Smalltalk development environment running with its movable overlapping windows and pop-up menus, he knew that’s what he wanted, and he instructed the Lisa crew to begin working in that direction.

Apple didn’t get blueprints from Xerox, but rather inspiration. “Just like the Russians and the A-bomb,” observed PARC’s director, George Pake, “they developed it very quickly once they knew it was doable.” Eventually more than 15 Xerox employees would defect to Apple, including Steve Capps, Bruce Horn, Alan Kay, and Barbara Koalkin.

25 Years of the Mac: How Apple created new type of user-interface

This prototype Macintosh screen (courtesy of Steve Capps) shows the basic but still-recognizable Mac graphical user interface that lives on in Mac OS X 10

This article first appeared in Macworld January 2004 and has been updated. Owen W Linzmayer is the San Francisco-based author of Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, recently published by No Starch Press. Visit his website for more information about his works and where to purchase his books.

25 Years of the Mac: The Mac timeline in pictures

24 January 1984: Introducing Macintosh The revolutionary 128K, 8MHz Macintosh sets the agenda for Apple’s next two decades