News for Tuesday, 6 November 2007

Apple just released Source Code of Darwin 9.0, the Unix layer of Leopard 10.5.
By offering Darwing Source Code, Apple expects to make developer works easier, esepcially for drivers.

Apple resubmitted an update dedicated to iMac Alu in its version 1.2.1.

iMac Software Update 1.2.1 (Tiger)
This update is for 20-inch and 24-inch aluminum iMac computers with 2.0, 2.4, or 2.8 GHz processors running Mac OS X Tiger.
It improves the performance and reliability of graphics-intensive games and applications and fixes an issue that some customers encountered when installing Mac OS X Leopard after applying iMac Software Update 1.2.
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imacsoftwareupdate121tiger.html

Apple just published a TechNote describing a problem with backup performed with Time Machine.

Issue or symptom
In the Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine "time travel" window, past backups may not appear if your computer name includes certain characters.
Products affected
- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
- Time Machine
Solution
Check your computer name in Sharing preferences. Make sure the computer name only includes ASCII characters from following set:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
0123456789
If this is a new Mac, make sure the computer name uses the same as what was used on your previous Mac.

The company Paragon Software offers a software, entitled NTFS Mac, allowing users to write on Windows NTFS partitions with a rather good performance level.
You can download the beta version after registering from the following site: NTFS Mac.

First a report from Arnaud:

Hereafter is part of the answer sent by Orange following my request for additional information:
Please find enclosed the official Press Release. We will not provide additional information for the iPhone subscription plans before November 12th. You can register on the website: http://iphone.orange.fr/ to be the first to know

So, Orange will unveil information on subscription plans only 2 weeks before the launch of the iPhone in France, probably to avoid the grey market to react too quickly. Let's hope that as with T-Mobile and O2 subscription plans will all include unlimited data.

As promised by Epson couple of weeks ago, the new Leopard-compatible drivers are now available from the following website: http://esupport.epson-europe.com
You might have to look around for the proper drivers as the page does not include them all. For example, the driver for the RX560 is available from this link: "http://esupport.epson-europe.com...UU003D.
It seems that drivers designed for Tiger are still working with Leopard, if one re-installs them following Leopard. The only bug we could notice is a mix between languages (here French and English) in the printing interface. If you own an EOL Epson printer for which the company did not plan to release a Leopard-specific driver, you might want to give it a try with the Tiger driver.

Samsung announced new SSD models. Featuring 64GB storage space, they are different than the previous models by both performance levels, 100MB/s in writing and 120MB/s in reading mode, and power consumption: 1.9W (50% less than a standard 2.5" HD. This new series of SSD will be available in 1.8" and 2.5" format in both PATA and SATA interface, however prices remain unknown.
One can clearly identify how HD and SSD manufacturers will fight in the coming years for securing their share for the notebook/mobile storage market: storage capacity vs. Performance and power consumption.