Dive into OS X

One of the common complaints about Apple’s iPhone–and one that did not get solved with the launch of the iPhone 3G–is the lack of a copy-paste function. An independent developer, Zac White, has developed a copy and paste system called Open Clip that works across applications on Apple’s mobile device.

OpenClip is not an application for the iPhone that can be installed. Rather, it’s an open source framework that developers can integrate within their apps, giving them copy / paste functionality with other participating apps.
OpenClip uses a technique developed by Zac White. It utilizes a shared space on the iPhone. Applications that use the OpenClip framework can access this common area to write to and read from, allowing copy / paste between participating apps.

The main question is: will developers implement the framework when there’s speculation that Apple will be implementing its own system in the future? As pointed out in the FAQ, Apple has stated that while copy and paste is on its to-do list, it’s not a high priority, making it unclear just how long users will have to wait.

According to a story in the LA Times eight people had almost $1,000 to burn on the useless iPhone application “I Am Rich” made by Armin Heinrich from Germany.

Armin Heinrich’s application does mainly nothing: The program loads a screen saver onto the Apple iPhone to remind users and alert others that the user has money to throw around. The “status symbol” does nothing but load a ruby red icon on the home screen, with the subtext “I Am Rich.” When the user activates the program, a large, glowing red gem appears. That’s all.

The “I Am Rich” application had a $999.99 price tag, the highest amount a developer can charge through the App Store. That’s one heck of a high cap for mobile software!

Apple removed application from the App Store. The application is still available on Armin Heinrich’s site.

Apple’s first-ever professional digital image-editing tool Aperture generated a lot of buzz when it was first announced. It aimed to solve the photographer’s workflow dilemma by providing a single application that performs sorting and cataloging, raw conversion, basic image editing, Web page generation, printing, and archiving. The program provides exceptional, unique tools.

Apple released Aperture 2.1.1 today.

This update supports general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues. Aperture 2.1.1 is a free update and is available via the Software Update application or as a download at the Apple Support Web site.

Just weeks after shipping, the iPhone’s second-generation software is getting a makeover with improved GPS functionality and background push capabilities.
The iPhone will be capable of turn-by-turn GPS tracking, meaning it can track the direction a user is heading in, as well as the speed of motion.

Apple released a beta of its iPhone 2.1 software to developers this week, fixing some of the shortcomings that reviewers and users had pointed out.

That’s not all. Apple has also issued a new SDK for the iPhone, though the new SDK can’t be used to publish applications to the App Store.

Everybody knows that Apple’s new push data service has failed but nobody knows what has been fixed already. Until now… Steve Jobs has asked an Apple worker to write a posting on the apple website every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe.

The day we launched MobileMe, we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated, with the result that access to the web versions of the MobileMe applications — Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk — was temporarily unavailable.

Strange, an surge in traffic at an unexpected level? With the world waiting for months for this service, what did they expect?

The team has also fixed over 70 bugs including one that was preventing MobileMe IMAP mail folders from syncing correctly between the web app and Mac OS X Mail or Outlook, plus others correcting display issues in Calendar and in general enhancing the performance of our web apps.

It looks that MobileMe launched as an unofficial beta. We don’t know the severity of all these bugs - Apple has no transparency on these kinds of issues - so it’s hard to evaluate fully and fairly. But this is not the Apple way of doing. That’s for sure.

MobileMe is Apple’s new Internet service for Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, and PC that takes the best of .Mac and adds many new features. With MobileMe you will continue to get services that take advantage of Mac integration such as iDisk, and photo sharing from iPhoto ’08. You also get a suite of new web applications at me.com; email, contacts, and calendar; and 20 GB of online storage.

If you are a .Mac subscriber, Apple appears to have activated the corresponding @me.com email addresses. If your email address was username@mac.com previously, you can now use username@me.com and emails should arrive in your .Mac mailbox. In the near future, Apple will be migrating all the email services over to Me.com, but users will be able to keep their @mac.com email addresses:

Apple has also published Frequently Asked Questions about the .Mac to MobileMe transition.

The @me.com transition is part of Apple’s shift to MobileMe, a new web-based service that offers “desktop class” email, calendar and address book functionality. MobileMe is set to officially launch in early July.

We don’t usually cover Wordpress themes but we make an exception for two nice Apple related themes. The first is the Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme. Any old Mac user will like it. The second, more modern theme is the iTheme Wordpress Theme.

Wordpress, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a very successful blogging engine which allows users to apply various themes to change the look of their blogs.

This week Apple confirmed that its long running rival productivity suite ‘AppleWorks’ has finally been put out to pasture. AppleWorks has been around some 23 years, beginning life as ClarisWorks before being taken over by Apple and renamed AppleWorks. AppleWorks was a great tool, and at one point it was the industry’s best-selling piece of software, beating even Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC.

AppleWorks was updated for Mac OS X and given a presentation maker, but it never received a Universal binary facelift after Apple moved its machines to Intel processor. In 2005, AppleWorks was shoved into the deep shadows as iWork debuted. AppleWorks had not been updated in three years and the news comes just nine days after Apple announced its successor iWork ‘08.

Apple has instantly removed all trace of AppleWorks from its site and redirected all AppleWorks queries to its new iWork suite and a search for AppleWorks returns iWork as the top hit. While AppleWorks does still come up on some of Apple’s foreign language stores, it seems safe to declare the suite terminated.

Although iWork is faster and more robust than AppleWorks, there doesn’t appear to be any upgrade discounts on iWork for existing AppleWorks customers, which is too bad.

Apple beats Microsoft at their own game by providing support for Open XML in iWork ‘08, something Office for Mac doesn’t have. Analyst Gregg Keizer says Apple are embarrassing it’s rival with the new office suite.Indeed it’s embarrassing for Microsoft since they, on top of this, recently delayed the release of their new Office suite until early 2008. And it’s funny that even a manager at Microsoft praised the new iWork:

“[iWork ‘08] reads the Office Open XML files with very high fidelity.”
Brian Jones, Program Manager, Microsoft

The name “CUPS” may not sound familiar, but it’s part of every Mac OS X installation. CUPS stand for “The Common Unix Printing System”. It’s a modular printing system for Unix-like computer operating systems that allows a computer to act as a powerful print server.

CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux. In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2 after initial attempts at developing a printing subsystem from scratch were abandoned.

CUPS implements a cross-platform printing system based on the Internet Printing Protocol and is, according to its web page, the defacto standard printing system for Linux.

Although the purchase was announced yesterday on CUPS’ website, it seems the actual deal went down this past February. In addition to acquiring the CUPS source code ownership, Apple Inc. has also hired Michael R. Sweet, its creator.