April 16, 2008

Ahead of the Curve: Back to the Mac

Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all,... more

TAGS: Consumer and lifestyle, Creative Pro, Design and engineering, Desktops and notebooks, Politics, strategy and culture, Servers and storage, Software, iPhone

April 16, 2008

Corrections to "Back to the Mac"

I made a couple of statements in my recent "Ahead of the Curve" blog that Apple contscted me to correct. First, contrary to my claim that the iPhone SDK is the first time that Apple has released a public preview editions of Xcode in the past, Apple claims to have done so. Apple tells me that it is not incorporating FORTRAN into beta 3 of its iPhone SDK, a release that includes the newest stable build of the GNU Compiler Collection toolchain. MacOSForge lists FORTRAN as a default language in its distributions of gcc after v4.0, This accounted for... more

TAGS: Design and engineering, New Products, Software

April 15, 2008

OS X Server break-in: Probably isolated, but a heads-up

On Sunday, I encountered a break-in on an Xserve running OS X Leopard Server 10.5.2. All Apple-issued fixes had been applied. I cannot locate the vector of intrusion, but following the break-in I noticed the following: Kerberos authentication was disabled, making the system extremely slow to respond to LAN-based secure shell (ssh) initiation requests. Screen sharing sessions would not connect at all. However, Server Admin was fully functional All e-mail was down A launch script for Communigate Pro 5.2.x had been placed in /System/Library/StartupItems, causing Postfix and Cyrus to abort on launch after logging that SMTP, IMAP and POP... more

TAGS: Design and engineering, Servers and storage, Software

March 31, 2008

iPhone SDK: Interface Builder added; WebKit kicks into overdrive

Apple isn't shipping the official iPhone SDK until June, but if you're planning to create apps for iPhone or iPod touch, the pre-release SDK just became more than a curiosity for those writing native code. Interface Builder, the Xcode tool for creating graphical user interfaces for Mac applications, has been added to the iPhone SDK. This not only gives developers the ability to add non-HTML GUIs to their native applications, but Interface Builder also makes it easier to carry hardcore Mac coding skills to iPhone. The SVG Animation in WebKit (Safari) is still under development, but in its latest... more

TAGS: Design and engineering, New Products, Software, iPhone

March 19, 2008

iPhone 2.0: Safari hosts local apps; SQL on a smartphone!; go get Safari 3.1 now

I have a secret: I love JavaScript. It has an extremely simple C-like grammar--it has far more in common with C than Java--and is readable and compact. I can teach it to a child in an hour. With just a few days of messing around, a beginner can write powerful client and server applications in JavaScript, and the minimum required toolset is a browser and a text editor. To test changes to your code, you refresh its browser page. I developed my appreciation for JavaScript by using it to create applications of surprising scale. In 1999, I wrote a... more

TAGS: Design and engineering, New Products, Software, iPhone