News for Monday, 29 October 2007

Orange is getting ready for launching the iPhone in France on November 29th. It seems that Orange will use its new shop on the Champs Elysées to be one of the main attractive centers for this introduction.


So, the iPhone will be on the most prestigious avenue for its launch in France, not too bad after so many problems to be settled down between Apple and Orange.

One can already from Mac OS X 10.4 resize partitions on a Mac volume via the command line “diskutil resizeVolume”:

YCO-BATIF-MacBookPro:~ yoc$ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage: diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of .
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3 10G
JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" "HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap"

However, using the terminal is far from being straight forward for many users preferring the intuitive and rich Mac GUI, one would have to purchase a dedicated application such as iPartition.
With Leopard, the resize partition tools are now included in the disk utility, and we will show hereafter how to proceed.
First, select the partition to be decreased in size, then using the bottom right corner or the "size field", enter the new storage space value; then apply those modifications:

To add a new partition, click on the "+" button:

We called it "Ma Partition".
Then click Apply, and ... that's it! Done. However, one would not be able to mode a free space from one partition to another existing one; so partition management application can still be useful. This new feature seems to work for all Leopard-supported Macs (Intel, G4 and G5).

If you do not like the new design of the dock in Leopard, and would like to get Tiger's dock back, this is possible. You can recover Tiger's presentation, via the terminal. Launch the terminal and enter the following command line:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
Once validated, close and re-open your user session, or relaunch the dock but entering the following command line:
killall Dock
To recover the new Leopard's dock you will need to enter this command line:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO.

Apple released over the week-end several updates:

Aperture 1.5.6
The Aperture 1.5.6 Update addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Other specific issues addressed in this release include:
Resolves some minor compatibility issues with iPhoto 7.1, which organizes images by Event rather than Roll.
Addresses issues related to metadata and sort order when sharing previews with iLife Media Browser.
Improves reliability of queries based on Import Session.
Addresses reliability when recovering an Aperture Library from a Vault.
This update is recommended for all Aperture users.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306387

Apple Remote Desktop version 3.2
Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) version 3.2 can be installed on computers that have:
- Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
- An Ethernet (recommended), AirPort, or FireWire over IP network connection.
- Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) 3.0 or 3.1.
Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 is a Universal Binary updater application that will upgrade Apple Remote Desktop 3.0 or 3.1 installations on Intel- or PowerPC-based Macintosh computers which meet the above criteria.
Update packages
Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 provides two update packages:
- Apple Remote Desktop 3.2.1 Client
- Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 Admin
These updates can be downloaded from Apple downloads.
Compatibility with previous versions of Apple Remote Desktop
Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 allows you to Control or Observe Apple Remote Desktop version 2.0 or later and 3.0 and 3.1 clients.
If you choose not to upgrade your clients to the current version, you will have limited backwards compatibility and will only be able to control/observe computers that are running version 2.1 or later of the client software.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306490

Login & Keychain Update 1.0
This update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard.
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/loginkeychainupdate10.html

Backup 3.1.2
Backup 3.1.2 is highly recommended for all users of Backup 3. This update includes reliability improvements and improves compatibility with Leopard and iWork '08.
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/backup312.html