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Drown yourself in Apple info

More news Leaked Lost in all of the buzz surrounding the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco was the fact that Apple has three new job listings for antenna engineers. Well, that is until Engadget unearthed them after sitting unnoticed since June 23rd, or one day before the official launch of the iPhone 4 and the very same day that the now infamous reception issues came to light. Here's a little snippet from the job description.

An Apple employee (call him "Alpha") who works in the iPhone Development Department has leaked some information to us recently, most of which will come as a surprise to many. The amount of shocking information leaked is beyond the grasp of an individual and shows how far Apple and AT&T will go to lock their users and steal their information while they have no clue about it.

Last week, google announced that the Google Docs viewer supports .doc and .docx attachments. Today we're also releasing a mobile version of the Google Docs viewer for Android, iPhone and iPad to help you view PDFs, .ppt, .doc and .docx files you've uploaded to your documents list, without needing to download the file.With our mobile viewer you can switch quickly between pages and pan/zoom within a page. On your iPhone and iPad, you can pinch to zoom in or out.

artist David Kassan finger-painting on an iPad using the iPad Brushes app.The iPad is far more subtle, in fact it really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million. It will change the way we look at everything from reading newspapers to the drawing pad. It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine.

According to NewTeeVee the rental program Apple is promoting would work just like existing movie rentals: users would have 30 days to start watching the show, and would then need to finish within 24 hours of starting playback. NewTeeVee report Apple is trying to get TV programmers to let it rent individual TV shows for 99 cents each, as opposed to the $1.99 it receives for sales of standard-definition episodes and the $2.99 it gets for selling HD episodes. The TV rental program would work in much the same way that movie rentals now work through iTunes; once an episode is purchased, the consumer will have 30 days to start watching the video. And once started, the TV rental will be available for 24 hours before it expires.

Propagator provides a GUI for pushing out files to Macs on your local network. This is useful for OS X system administrators who wish to update all of their managed client machines with a specific file, most commonly property list (.plist) files. This functionality can also be achieved using Apple Remote Desktop, but a free alternative is always worth taking a look. My two favorite aspects of Propagator are its Common Places drop down menu for quickly specifying common locations to drop files (such as long ~/Library paths), and it's Set Ownership check box for giving proper ownership of the file to the right user accounts. The option to Lock Files After Copy prevents users (in my case, students and unknowing faculty) from messing with your work, accidentally or not.

Boutique analyst firm Freeform Dynamics took a run at standardizing on Macs but the switch was not worthwhile. They're now back in the Windows fold. Their report starts by posing a series of questions about business benefit. They found that when pressed, business users were hard put to come up with anything other than woolly answers. So what usually happens when an average business user switches to Mac?

Almost a year ago Apple gave us Leopard (OS X 10.5), and along with it came virtual desktops for the masses, in the form of Spaces. For many this was an interesting new way to expand their workspace virtually. For the rest of us [power users?] it was a letdown in execution. What was worse, the third party options looked to be dwindling as well. Last November I called for third party developers to bring the competition - let's take a look at the result of that call to arms.

The Intel Developer Forum makes it clear what Apple's new notebooks - which I predict will be announced Tuesday, September 16 - will offer. Will it be worth the wait? If longer battery life and higher performance are important to you - yes. And if you weren't waiting? The new designs and features may make you rethink your allegiance to Windows - as so many already have.

Overall customer satisfaction within the computer industry fell slightly for the second consecutive year, according to newly published data from the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). But while PC makers far and wide are struggling to improve, Apple seems to be moving in the opposite direction with a score of 85 on a scale from zero to 100. Not only is this a new all-time high for the industry, the roughly 8 percent year-on year leap puts 10 points between Apple and its nearest rival. The score is attributed to the success the company has had with its iPod, iPhone and Mac lines, but it is also pointed out that dissatisfaction with Windows Vista might have hurt the scores for Apple's rivals.

Sure, the iPhone and the Apple TV provide access to YouTube videos, but this access is not the same as downloading a YouTube video to your hard drive. For that, you can use TubeTV 1.0, a straightforward, basic YouTube video downloader. Just enter the URL of the YouTube video into TubeTV (or use the Search field) and click on the "Download movie" button, and TubeTV saves the video to your Mac.

Are you using the latest version of Mac OS X efficiently? Try our tips and watch your productivity soar.

Bottom line: Macs aren't "way more" expensive than PCs. So where do things get really hairy with Apple? Upgrades. Apple really stabs you in the face when you're upgrading your Mac. All goes well when you want to buy a base system, but as soon as you want to add options, be prepared to be murdered. I'll talk about this later.

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Way back in the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or "Error-diffusion" filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop).

The dither matrix was implemented an option in Apple's HyperScan software (A HyperCard stack with some XCMDs/XFCNs) that would connect to a flatbed scanner. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years-but not forgotten! I was able to email Bill Atkinson in January, 2003 and inquire about the details of the algorithm; he was kind enough to respond with a brief write up of the routine-15 minutes later I had it up and running.
It's taken a few spare afternoons since 2003 to pack everything into a nice little application with documentation and an icon-better late than never!

Complex desktop app is equally complex on the iPhone