Corporate War

• Depending on your view of this week's keynote address by Steve Jobs at the WWDC (see previous post on some of the Leopard tidbits), The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has a T-shirt for you:
   
• Speaking of Leopard, Amazon is now offering the single license as well as the family pack (which covers up to five users) for pre-order. It will be shipping in October, though no firm date has been given yet.

• The most surprising announcement of the week was the Safari 3 Beta version for Windows, and it seems that the curious have been busy downloading: 1 million to be exact in the first 48 hours. The proof, though, will be in how many of those folks stick with it.

• TUAW has a pretty good roundup of Safari 3's new features in two posts (here and here), which include draggable tabs within a window (and out to a new separate window), adding more than one new bookmark at a time, and reopening the most recently closed window.

• However, the launch of Safari 3 Beta has not been a smooth sail, with the reviews definitely on the mixed side. Check out Ars Technica, Macworld, and Wired's Cult of Mac for some first-hand accounts. And it's already been given an update to fix three serious security flaws.

• One of the claims that Apple makes about its Mac operating system is that it's much safer from hackers (as well as being more free from being hijacked by applications starting out of nowhere--something that's convinced my two mother-in-laws to switch from Windows recently). In the UK, there were some complaints about Apple's security claims in its Get a Mac ads (here are the Anglicized ads), but the British Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) "rejected these complaints, essentially stating that Apple's claims are legitimate, and Macs actually are less virus-prone that counterpart Windows systems" (via MacNN).

• If you buy an iPhone (which will be available on June 29 at your local time of 6pm!), you'll also have to sign up for an iTunes account if you don't already have one.

• Rumor watch: The Financial Times reported this week that Apple is quietly working away on a new online film rental service. Loop Rumors has its sources saying that titles will rent for $2.99 and expiring after a set amount of time (30 days being bandied about).

• Dashboard widget of the week: As someone who's a frequent shopper of the Amazon UK and France music stores, I find that I use CurrencyConverter from Paolo Grifantini quite often. Paolo also offers a handy widget that calculates proportions on his web site (something I wish I had back in middle school).

• Bouncing off that French tangent, if I forget any of my Apple gear next time I head to Paris (which got a lot easier thanks to this new Air France non-stop from Seattle), I'll have an Apple store watching my back. Well, not a full-on Apple store, but an "Apple Shop" that has the same design ethos and Genius Bar, placed within the FNAC Digitale electronics store on St. Germaine.

• Since we're on the subject of far-flung locales, Apple formed a partnership with Wipro Infotech to sell Apple's entire range of products in India, from MacBooks to iPods.

• And finally, one of my favorite features of iChat in the new Mac OS X Leopard: the R2D2 Hologram Effect (shown at right).

1. Web developers have an exciting new platform to create apps for, and the iPhone's touch screen is a fun interface to think about when creating new applications.

2. This may kick-start Web 2.0's evolution into Web 3.0: sites and services redefined, redesigned, and refined for a handheld platform and fully mobile user base.

3. As competing devices follow suit and shift to a more-immersive mobile browsing experience, Web-based software and Web 2.0 sites may have great days ahead of them.

But Leopard was the star attraction of this circus, and it's been loaded up with over 300 new features. The Finder, the engine of the Mac operating system, has been given a redesign that resembles the iTunes UI--including the ability to browse through files using the coverflow feature (pictured at right, via Lifehacker). And the desktop has been further squeezed into the dock, enabling you to keep your background image pristine. Macworld offers some details:

The redesigned Desktop does away with the blue background familiar to OS X 10.4 users. The background shown during Monday's keynote featured blades of dew-covered grass, but Apple fully expects users to upload their own iPhoto images to the background of the Desktop. To that end, Jobs said, the Desktop has been redesigned to better accommodate those images; the Menu Bar is now semi-transparent while the Dock will be reflective. Drag a window toward the Dock and you'll see its reflection on the platform where application icons now sit.

More significantly, the redesigned Desktop in Leopard introduces Stacks--a collection of folders that reside in the desktop. Apple sees Stacks as a way to clean up Desktop clutter. Files are collected in the Stacks for rapid access; click on the Stacks icon and the Dock and the files and folders fan out or appear in a grid. Clicking on one of those icons instantly launches the relevant app. You create Stacks by dragging any item or group of items to the Dock.

As part of Stacks, the redesigned Desktop will also feature a dedicated Downloads folder. Files downloaded via Web browsers and e-mail clients will automatically get routed to that destination--the Downloads icon in the Dock bounces when a new item arrives with the most recent download appearing on top.

• In an article speculating about how big the iPhone will be, Business Week has two sources who say that Apple plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29.

• The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) does a Zaprudering of the new iPhone commercials, while CNet goes even further with descriptions of the UI gleaned from usage on the commercials. But all this attention has caused Apple to edit one of the commercials to downplay rumors of a super-secret 12th program (via MacNN).

• Still not ready to give up your Newton? Well, here's something for you: the third annual World Wide Newton Conference taking place in Tokyo on July 7 (via TUAW).

• With two major releases out of the way (in the MacBook and MacBook Pro), Think Secret sees a newly aluminum-ized iMac tracking for announcement at the WWDC next week. They'll supposedly come with 20-inch and 24-inch displays only.

• A couple last notes on the MacBook Pros: BareFeats did some gaming-centric benchmark tests on the new models and found they came up quite speedy, while Gizmodo notes that the new Pros have between 30 and 60 minutes of added battery life thanks to the LED screen.

• The original Apple II turned 30 this week, and Ars Technica has some fond memories:

  It had color graphics, expandable memory, BASIC, and most importantly, Oregon Trail. Sure, there were some useful applications, but we all know that anyone who bought one did so in order to shoot more buffalo than they could carry (or at least spent recess doing that, then begging their parents to buy one). The Apple II became one of the first mainstream computers and was a major influence on how the computing industry grew. You can even find Apple IIs in use today, despite the last one being made in 1993.

  
• The Economist puts Apple on its cover this week with an article on what lessons other companies can glean from its zest for innovation (the article seems to be available even to non-subscribers).

• Dashboard widget of the week: Symbol Caddy from Brian Haslanger is an invaluable widget for anyone who works with HTML-izing text. It presents the full range of special characters and odd symbols at your mouse tip--like  and €. Just click on a character, and it gets copied to the clipboard for easy inclusion into your code.

• Weekend project: Charge up your Mac's speed and productivity with these tips from ImAFish and Lifehacker.

• And finally, here's something lighter for the weekend: a fanboy mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the iPhone via Gizmodo:

--Agen G.N. Schmitz

The new version adds longer battery life and faster computing to the technology bundle of a processor, chipset and wireless card. Intel will keep the name Centrino Duo for the consumer version, although changes include a faster Core 2 Duo processor, support for the draft version of 802.11n wireless networking and a Turbo Memory feature that supplements the standard hard drive with NAND flash for faster booting.

Every MacBook Pro model includes an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB of shared L2 cache, an 800 MHz frontside bus and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory as well as the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, which Apple claims is more than 50 percent faster than the original MacBook Pro with Core Duo. It is available in three models: 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro models, and a 2.4 GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro model.