Apple Releases New Snow Leopard Beta Build

Apple has released a new beta of its upcoming Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X, Ars Technica reports.

Snow Leopard — version 10.6 — was announced as a quieter update than other recent versions of Apple’s flagship operating system. The company touted under the hood performance tuning this time around, rather than a host of slam-bang new features.

Ars notes that there have been few changes in this most recent update, as the company is drawing closer to the expected release this summer around the time of the Worldwide Developer’s Conference. Apple is encouraging developers to test 64-bit kernel extensions in the latest build, and there are some crashing problems with QuickTime X and Rosetta. There is no mention of the rumored UI enhancements coming with Snow Leopard. Apple is likely saving those for a dramatic unveiling at WWDC.

Apple is also working on an update to Leopard. Ars reports that the company is still testing Mac OS X 10.5.7, which should be released any day now.

iPhone: Not For Serious Use

As part of Apple’s celebration of the iTunes App Store nearing one billion downloads, the company has updated iTunes with a listing of the top 20 most downloaded apps — both paid and free.

Read more

Apple shuttering .Mac HomePage

The last of the old iTools is finally going away. Apple announced that the .Mac HomePages, the user-friendly, dead-simple Web galleries and group sites that have been around since the days of Bondi Blue, will have its lights turned off on July 7, 2009. Existing MobileMe users will still keep their pages, but they won’t be editable and users won’t be able to create new pages, TUAW reports.

Apple’s full announcement recommends MobileMe Galleries as a photo gallery replacement, and of course iWeb for home pages. These have been standard features in iLife for a while now. It’s just sad to see the last of original iTools bite the dust.

Tethered iPhones

Will They Be Too Much To Handle?

Internet tethering is the process of connecting your cell phone to your computer, and using the phone as a modem. Once your phone is tethered to your computer, you then utilize the wireless 3G network to browse the internet at your leisure. This sounds like a fantastic idea, however it presents a couple of issues.

First off, the iPhone is not meant to tether. There are no straight-forward ways to allow it to tether, though someone managed to find them. Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted about how he managed to hack the tethering features, but doesn’t quite know how he did it.

Apple has brought up the idea of tethering made into a feature in the new iPhone 3.0, however it brings some memories to mind, on whether AT&T’s 3G network could even handle iPhones being used in this way.

At the South By Southwest Festival (SXSW), the iPhones overwhelmed AT&T’s 3G network from all of the browsing. Can you imagine what a bunch of computers using all of that data will do to their network? iPhone’s popularity is great news, especially with the use of all of their media plans, but is it becoming too much for their network to handle?

It looks like both AT&T and Apple are going to have to assess the capabilities of what they’re offering to people, before their whole network fails from overload. If that happened, there would be a lot more unhappy cell phone users running around.

Universal Remote Control – Bruce Wayne Might Be Able to Afford It

You’ve seen it in the movies, but the tech is here today that enables you to control all of your entertainment media in your house with one device. The MX-6000 touch screen two-way remote has WiFi ability and promises to control the outcome of the sporting events you watch. Turn any PC or iPod into high powered music server as well as being wirelessly wired into your home theater system.
Read more

« Previous Page — Next Page »