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Mac OS X 10.6 Called ‘Snow Leopard’, All Cocoa?

According to ArsTechnica, the next version of Mac OS X will be called Snow Leopard, and will of course be Intel only.

Ars also confirmed that it will be released in January 2009, and unlike previous releases will focus on speed and reliability.

Snow Leopard is currently on track to come out during next January’s
Macworld, and it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the
release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and
stability.

The author also believes that it will be better optimized for mobile devices, and Apple could possible move it to cocoa only.

There may be some disagreement here as to what exactly “Cocoa-only”
means, so take that into account when thinking about this. For example,
Apple may only axe Carbon UI stuff.

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Apple Launches Back to School Promotion: Free iPod Touch with any Mac

Apple has launched the Back to School promo for 2008.

If you’re a student, faculty, or staff member and you buy a Mac before September 15, you can get a free iPod touch or iPod nano. After all, isn’t college about seizing every opportunity?

Official list of Terms and Conditions have been posted, and is primarily targeted at college students, faculty and staff. The promotion runs from June 3rd to September 15th and provides a rebate of up to $299 for qualifying individuals who buy a Mac and an iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

Although they only list the MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac on the promo page, the terms and conditions specify that “All new Macintosh computers and the Configure-to-order versions of these products are eligible, except for Mac mini and 17” iMac”.

Customers may purchase an 8GB iPod Nano ($199) to receive a $199 rebate, or may purchase an 8GB ($299), 16GB ($399), or 32GB ($499) iPod Touch to receive a $299 rebate. The rebate can not be applied to the iPhone or any other iPod.

Like we had hoped, this is the best Back to School promotion that Apple has ever offered, and will likely massively increase the install base of the iPod Touch, considering the high amount (over 50%) of college students who own a Mac. As you should know, the iPod Touch has the same operating system as the iPhone, and similary will be able to use the iTunes App Store.

Websites You Shouldn’t Have Missed In May 2008

Today we have a round up of useful CSS, Ajax, Tutorials, tools, Graphics, WordPress and articles we’ve found in May that is worth your time. If you run a website, this list is an absolute must.

Click read more for details.

read more

New Spy Camera Software Blurs Faces of the Innocent

No matter where you go, you can almost garauntee that a camera can see you. They claim that they are used for spotting criminals and terrorists, and now that their technologies are advancing, they have now developed software that automatically blurs and encrypts the faces in the footage, unless there is an alarm on an investigation. Ironically, some of the same firms that made video surveillance extra Orwellian are now working to make the spy networks a bit more privacy-friendly.

If this software is adopted, we can now feel safe, and we’ll be reassured that we’re not being filmed, unless we are of course guilty of a crime. Of course, a security guard can decrypt the faces afterwards, if he wants to, so you still can’t be sure if you’re hidden from the cameras forever, although at least you can be sure that it’s actually getting used for a legitimate purpose.

For more info, see Wired.

Mobile Me?

During the previous days we have been seeing various rumours about how Apple has trademarked Mobile Me, and has now purchased me.com. Also, Apple has bought many .me domains, which could be in the style of fly.me, drive.me, and supposedly, mobile.me.

Here’s what we can expect from this “mobile me”:

Back to my Mac for iPhone
Back to my Mac is currently a service by Apple which lets you access your Mac from anywhere from the world. The routing is all handled by Apple, meaning you don’t need to worry about firewalls, DNS or IP addresses. What if though, you were able to access your computer, your music, movies and files from your iPhone. This could quite possibly change it from a 16GB computer to a handheld computer with your Macs harddrive. If Apple threw in streaming video and this could possibly be a killer app.

Cheaper
The current price for .Mac is a hefty $100. For the same price, you could get hosting from Hostgator, with all of the same features. In fact, in some cases you could even get the same services for free. Our sources, however say that Apple could be changing the price to as low as $25-$50. Also, for iPhone users we could expect this for free, in exchange for paying the phone bill.

Wireless syncing
Your iPhone/iPod Touch has WiFi, and while it won’t charge your battery, it is a quick way to send your new podcast episodes and the like to your iPhone when you’re in a rush. It seems that Steve Jobs’ mission, after removing all of the buttons, is now to get rid of all the wires.

Squirting
Sure, the Zune has had this for a while now, but sadly Microsoft crippled it with DRM. Hopefully though, Apple won’t fuck it up as badly. We can hopefully expect that it will have DRM on the songs, allowing you to keep a song someone sent for 3 days. However, unlike the Zune, we can expect that it will let you keep podcasts for an unlimited amount of time.

If you have any other ideas, let me know.

Free iPod Touch with Mac Purchase for College Students?

Apple is expected to launch it’s Back to School promotion tomorrow and we’ve learned that Apple is indeed going to make it their biggest ever.

According to our sources, Apple will be offering an 8GB iPod Touch for free to college students who buy a Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, iMac or a Mac Pro. Also, if they wish, students are free to get an iPod Nano instead. The promotion will run from June 3rd to September 15th 2008.

It seems that Apple is really starting to push their Touch OS X platform over the coming months, and it won’t be long until we see a 3G iPhone. They also recently released their iPhone SDK, giving developers an opportunity to get their applications posted in the iTunes Store.

However, current iPod Touch owners will have to pay a small upgrade fee in order to get the 2.0 iPod Touch firmware. More details will likely be available either tomorrow, or at WWDC next week.

We can expect an official announcement tomorrow.

Open Blender Movie

Big Buck Bunny is a film made in Blender, an open-source 3D animation program. Today, they have released the movie files of Big Buck Bunny. Just one look at the site shows that it’s not just some amature film with no point, but that it is actually a very well developed film. As you can see by going on the site, there are some very realistic 3D models used.

See BigBuckBunny.org now for information.

Top 5 Best Home Pages

If you do a lot of web browsing, you may find that Google is a bit limiting, as just a search engine. If you want to be able to get up-to-the-second news updates, then maybe it’s time to change homepages. Your home page is the first thing you see when you open your web browser, so you need something that you personally want and like.

1. iGoogle.

Well, what is it? Simple. It’s Google on Steroids. It’s a fully customizable dashboard of widgets of your latest news, and whatever you want on there. They have an enourmous collection of these widgets, and you can ave as many tabs as you like.

2. about:blank

If you aren’t much of a fan of a start page, and you want something as fast as possible, just set your hompage to about:blank. If you do that, you get a nice blank page, and you will likely find your browser loads quite a bit faster.

3. Netvibes

Netvibes just does one thing, and it does that one thing very well. It’s a simple and very customizable start page, and it even works as a very nice RSS reader.

4. Speed Dial

If you have the Opera web browser, this is awesome. It’s basically a page that shows thumbnails of 9 websites that you choose, and it updates automatically. In fact, it was such a hit a Firefox plugin with the same purpose was released shortly after the Opera feature was added.

Thanks for reading!

By the way, if you have any ideas for other start pages, let me know via the comments.

Apple releases Mac OS X 10.5.3

Today Apple has released the 10.5.3 software update. This update (for Leopard) should appear in Apple Software Update.

The 10.5.3 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1141.
For detailed information on security updates, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Apple has mentioned many new features/fixes on their website, although the highlights are:
- Includes additional RAW image support for several cameras
- Addresses an issue with stuttering video and audio playback in certain USB devices
- Improves 802.1X (Wifi) behavior and reliability and when using Time Machine
- Includes fixes for Time Machine compatibility with Time Capsule

Facebook To Go Open Source

It is rumoured that soon, possibly even this week, Facebook.com will be releasing their platform as open-source software, Tech Crunch tells us. The immidiate effect would be that many social networks could be formed from their CMS, as well as making it possible for other social networks to pick up their code, making it possible for Facebook applications to work on a variety of different social networks.

Bebo already licences the Facebook platform, allowing developers to easily port applications to Bebo. With this new announcement, however, it will become easy for social networks to implement features from Facebook into their social networks. This could mean that applications made for Facebook could work with any social network around the world.

If they were to go about this in a similar way to OpenSocial, third parties could easily modify the Facebook code for their own uses, allowing them to deploy them on their own sites. Of course, having these changes implemented in the official Facebook platform, would require Facebook’s approval.

Let’s see where this goes…

Source: TechCrunch

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