Dive into OS X

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.

The Safari 3.0.2 Beta is now available for download. This beta includes fixes for international users and for missing text issues caused by having a large number of fonts installed.

Apple announced yesterday that Safari for Windows has been downloaded more than 1 million times within its first 48 hours of existence. But will this be enough to compete against Internet Explorer and Firefox? Safari currently holds 4.9 % market share, where Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox holds 59.8 % and 33.7 % market share respectively.

In addition, the company also released Safari for Windows 3.01 after security concerns arose earlier this week.

The new version is available through Apple’s software update or downloaded from Apple’s site.

Apple released the 3.0 beta on Monday, and hackers started digging up bugs within hours.

The Safari 3.0.1 update, released early Thursday morning, fixes three bugs in the Windows beta browser, including bugs that were discovered earlier this week by researchers Thor Larholm and Aviv Raff. According to Apple, two of the three bugs don’t affect the Safari 3.0 beta that runs on Mac OS x, but the third can also crash the Mac browser.

Apple describes the bugs being patched as follow:

The updated version patches CVE-2007-3186, a command-injection vulnerability that may lead to arbitrary code execution; CVE-2007-3185, an out-of-bounds memory read issue that may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution; and CVE-2007-2391, a race condition that may allow cross-site scripting.

The updates come just four days after the company released a beta version of Safari for Windows at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. This quick update is remarkable because Apple managed to fix some serious security vulnerabilities in a very short time frame. Their usual response time is mostly counted in weeks or months. This indicates that Apple is serious about being an important browser contender for Windows users.

This is the first time that Apple has released a version of Safari for the Windows platform. Because it now can be run on a much larger number of systems, the code has been getting more attention from the security community.

Security analysts expect to see several more updates from Apple in the coming weeks.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Apple released a beta of their Safari web browser for Microsoft Windows.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, said at the Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday something that is not surprisingly for Apple tools: “What we’ve got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world”.

But is this true? I have some doubts!

Security vulnerabilities have been revealed within just a few hours of release.

Aviv Raff claims to have found the first security vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser on Windows only hours after the software was released. Raff tested the application against his browser security testing tool: Hamachi.
Raff wrote on his blog: “A first glance at the debugger showed me that this memory corruption might be exploitable. Although I’ll have to dig more to be sure of that”.

Thor Larholm who described himself as “a pretty ordinary guy from a small town in Denmark”, also downloaded and installed Safari for Windows on his PC. After a few hours of testing he found a serious bug: “I now have a fully functional command execution vulnerability, triggered without user interaction simply by visiting a web site.”

And also David Maynor reported security vulnerabilities on his site: “we found a total of 6 bugs in an afternoon, 4 DoS and 2 remote code execution bugs.”

Yes, it is still a pre-release code, but we expected something better, especcialy from Apple! It is possibly the most crap browser on the planet! So, now, remains the question: Why produced Apple a Windows version of Safari and not do it properly? How is this helpful for the company?

The clue’s on that unavoidable start page and it’s called iTunes. No doubt, Apple’s future is based on selling content, not computers, and this is a next (clumsy) step to this new goal.

Apple said today that it would make its Safari Web browser available for Windows-based PCs.
“What we’ve got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during his keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Jobs also claimed that “Safari performs twice as fast as its competitors”.

Safari, which was released a few years ago for Apple’s Macintosh computers, has captured about 5 percent of the world’s browser market share with more than 18 million users, Jobs said. Internet Explorer, which is built into Windows, has a 78 percent share, while Firefox has climbed to 15 percent of the market, he said. Jobs continued by saying that allowing Windows users to download the browser will help boost market share the same way that making iTunes available for Windows users helped that application.

But the most important point is the fact that Apple’s upcoming iPhone will run Safari. That means, Jobs said, that any application designed to run on the Safari browser for Macs also would be fully compatible with the iPhone — Apple’s highly anticipated combination cell phone, iPod and wireless Web browser. The iPhone will be available in the U.S. on June 29.

The move to make Safari available to non-Mac users is not unprecedented: Apple also makes its iPod media players and iTunes Store for Windows. The strategy is aimed in part at drawing more people to its Macintosh computers. “It will create a much more significant consumer platform for the iPhone,” said Mike McGuire, a research analyst at Gartner, an industry research firm based in San Jose, Calif. This move indicates that Apple is increasingly confident in its ability to compete against Microsoft’s desktop computing monopoly.

The Safari news was unexpected; A test version of the program will be available beginning today for downloading from Apple’s Web site.

Much of the rest of the presentation focused on showing of 10 new features of the company’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system.