News for Friday, 19 October 2007

John will take you on the 27 min tour.
Hardmac shall share what you might have missed in 10 short lines (300+ is just too many).

1) Menu semi-transparent, new Finder/Desktop and the reflective 3d Dock
2) Stacks
3) Finder: highlights Coverflow - flipping pdf documents, playing a movie - all possible within the Finder
4) Spotlight: searches over network & Time Machine
5) Quick Look: works in Time Machine too
6) Time Machine: hourly backups for last 24 hrs, daily backups for the past month and weekly till full
7) Spaces
8) Mail: Popular email systems such as .Mac, Yahoo+, Google Gmail are really simple to setup! (nb: remember to enable POP in Gmail preferences)
9) iChat
10) Installing/Upgrading to Leopard

Some things to ponder about:
- Apparently 10.5 makes it so simple to search macs over networks, with wifi so prevalent, one will have to consider seriously consider security issues.
- Will Time Machine (TM) be able to ... for example, I'm working on a homepage. Will TM track my every code in intervals of 1 hour? I am thinking - Yes for at least the last 24 hrs as indicated above.
- Would you like at least 4-cores? I know I would. 1 Game Space, 1 iChat Video Space, 1 Adium Space & 1 MacBidouille/Hardmac Space! mmm, will that be enough?
So let's take the discussions to the forum.

Chinese counterfeiting industry is fast to copy and produce counterfeited Apple's products.
MacNN has updates on Meizu's M8 mobile phone. You can read more there. We have here, a short translation on what's on Meizu's forum, just to feed our readers' voracious thirst for knowledge.

Material used initially - stainless steel.
Now - Aluminum (can be made into different colors - grey, silver, back etc).
Photo shows the grey with a black shell, we'll talk about the other colors in the future.

We filed for patent --- "iop" keyboard. As majority of users are accustomed to the "qwerty" keyboard, they will have little difficulty in adapting to this layout.

Thanks to some (voluntary) leaks, we now know that AMD/ATI will release in November the new generation of GPU, engraved at 55nm, and named Radeon HD 3000
If performance levels remain unknown, it seems that heat release will be lower than with the current models, a first step towards greener graphic cards and a performance/watt strategy. As a consequence, those cards should also be less noisy as requiring smaller cooling systems.
Such cards could be available for the future Mac Pro revision as they are both expected to be unveiled for mid-November.
Let's hope that apple will also offer such graphic cards as retail version on the apple Store to allow Mac users to upgrade their current GPU models.

Not to let Hitachi be the only one to communicate about its med-term expectations and announcing 4TB HD by 2011, Western Digital reports to be on track to deliver a 3TB HD by 2010. They will use perpendicular recording and small magnetoresistive (CPP-GMR) heads to reach such capacity in a single HD enclosure.
They expect to produce plate able to accommodate 640GB of storage space, so 3TB for a five plates-based HD.
Seagate will probably be the next one to announce its future large capacity HD expected for 2010-2011.

Apple Updates (10/18/2007)

Xsan 1.4.2 Uninstaller
This uninstaller will remove Xsan from your computer. It will also remove the Xsan Admin application and documentation files.
Xsan 1.4.2 Filesystem Update
The Xsan 1.4.2 update addresses numerous issues related to overall reliability, usability and compatibility.
Xsan 1.4.2 Admin Update
The Xsan 1.4.2 update addresses numerous issues related to overall reliability, usability and compatibility.
Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 Admin
The 3.2 update is recommended for all users and addresses numerous issues related to overall reliability, usability and compatibility.
Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 Client
The 3.2 client update is recommended for all users and addresses numerous issues related to overall reliability, usability and compatibility.

You will require ARD 3.2 and later for Leopard - Link

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard requires Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) version 3.2 or later. Earlier versions of ARD do not work with Leopard.

.Mac users have received the following message:

Due to improvements being made to .Mac Sync on October 19, 2007, please note the following changes.
Mac OS X version 10.4 Tiger users:
To ensure uninterrupted service, you must be using Mac OS X version 10.4.10. To check which version you’re running, select About This Mac in the Apple menu. If you are not running version 10.4.10, click the Software Update button and install the update to 10.4.10.
Mac OS X version 10.3 Panther users:
To accommodate new enhancements, .Mac Sync will no longer support syncing of calendars between a Panther-based Mac and a Mac running Tiger or Leopard. Syncing calendars between Mac computers running Panther is unaffected.
These changes will help enable .Mac Sync to do more than ever. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for being a .Mac member.

Such changes might explain why many .Mac users in Europe were experiencing slow transfer speed, even though it remains to be confirmed; so do not hesitate to send us a message via our forum.