Tuesday June 10, 2008

- Snow Leopard: first screenshots, Safari 4 beta - xavier - 21:43:22

Orchard Spy has published the first screenshots of Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard, build 10A96.

Like Apple promised, most applications were significantly sized down (see screenshot). No big news furthermore, except for screenshots showing some new icons for the System Preferences panel.
Or is there? Sure there is! In the last few days, many rumors were heard, stating that Apple would likely drop all 32 bit support in Snow Leopard. This would mean that early buyers of the first-gen MacBook would not be able to run Snow Leopard - their MacBooks feature a Core Duo chip (not Core 2 Duo), which does not fully support 64 bit. And guess what, the screenshot above proves that Snow Leopard still runs on a Core Duo computer - and therefore, it will still run on these early Intel-macs!

And as you can see on the screenshots, there's a Safari 4 Developer Preview circulating. Macrumors reports that this beta is being handed out to a selection of ADC members, and there are seperate builds of the beta for Tiger, Leopard and Windows.
Safari 4 is widely expected to be based on webkit's new Squirrelfish project, offering up to 53% faster Javascript execution time.

- .Mac is dead, viva MobileMe [updated] - xavier - 09:31:09

Together with the new iPhone 3G at yesterday's WWDC keynote, Apple introduced MobileMe.
Unlike the .Mac service, which was not much of a huge success for Apple, MobileMe has great potential - all thanks to its push technology.
So what exactly is push technology? Quoting Apple:

MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars on a secure online server - or "cloud"- and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don't have to wait for it or remember to do anything - such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually - to stay up to date.

MobileMe is (likely) going to keep all existing .Mac features, such as webspace, @mac.com e-mail (may be renamed), and sharing your favourite photo's/videos with family and friends.
iDisk is going to be improved, with an online interface allowing you to manage your documents and other files.
And, last but not least, push technology is going to keep all of your contacts, calendar events and email in synch on all your devices (XP/Vista PC's, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Mac OS systems of course).


The price of this service remains the same as for .Mac: $99 a year. That includes 20Gb storage, and 200Gb of traffic a month. There will also be a Family Pack with five accounts, with 5 seperate e-mail accounts, and 5 Gb of combined storage, and 50Gb monthly data transfer. This pack will cost $149, and both packs can be upgraded.

Read on about MobileMe at our HardMac blog.

Update: One of our members, Boomer, has had contact with the .mac team, and they confirm that
- you will keep your @mac.com e-mail address
- you are going to get an @me.com address too, with the same username
- all your websites will be saved, and moved to the new MobileMe service.
The updates are gonna take place sometime in July. If you're a .mac user, you may want to read the .Mac to MobileMe transition FAQ

- WWDC 2008 Keynote Video Available [Updated] - Eric - 09:20:54

You enjoyed our live coverage of the WWDC 2008 Keynote yesterday, but you would like to watch the demo of Pangea CroMag Rally on the iPhone. No worries, Apple just posted the WWDC 2008 Keynote Video on its website.
Direct link to the video: WWDC 2008 Keynote Video

[Update]
Direct link to the HD video: WWDC 2008 Keynote Video HD

- Toshiba SE1000: Cell-based Accelerating Cards Are Back - Lionel - 09:05:47

Source : TGDaily

During the Computex 2008, Corel was demonstrating an accelerator board based on the Cell BE processor, known as Toshiba’s SpursEngine 1000 (SE1000). The 65 nm Cell BE processor clocked at 1.5 GHz (compared to the 3.2 GHz in the Playstation 3) and featuring 4 active SPE units (compared to 8 for the PS3) and 128 MB XDR DRAM memory (compared to 256 MB for the PS3) is sitting on a PCI 1x card. Corel was demonstrating the power of such video accelerating card in transcoding 1080p H.264 video to a smaller resolution, and comparing the performance level with a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU-based system.

With such task-specific card, the SE1000 completed the work about twice faster than the Quad Core hardware, demonstrating that specialized functions can be completed much faster while consuming less power than using one of the best desktop CPU available on the market. It reminds us when coprocessors were associated with processor couple of years ago to boost specific tasks. Are we going back to a more task-oriented architecture? It will for sure be interesting to know the price of such card, as most of the PCI slots in our Mac Pro are not being used.

[translation by Linathael]

- Several details on Snow Leopard - Lionel - 08:08:02

Source : Apple

Even though Mac OS X 10.6 had a very an brief announcement, being completely eclipsed by the iPhone, Apple nevertheless put a page online about it.
It will be a total continuity of Leopard, all at least at the interface, the changes being done deep in the system:

- Support of Microsoft Exchange: Apple made it clear that without being compatible with MS Exchange, there is no way for entering corporate market and make enterprise switching to Mac. The best strategy will be to have Mac inside corporate to induce the transition to Mac and its OS.
- A management of the multi-core CPUs optimized with a handful of new technologies called " Grand Central" which will be able to take full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. It will also ease the work of developers as they will not really have to think their application as multicore directly from the code.
- Improvement of the management of the 64 bits instructions
- QuickTime X which will support more codecs, and will be faster.
- Open CL is Apple's name for NVidia CUDA (we were talking about yesterday ), aiming to take unlock the computing power of GPU to redirect it for general-purpose computing (other than 3D rendering).

In short, Mac OS X finally became mature, or will be, with Snow Leopard which resembles its ultimate variation. It would not be surprising if Apple prefers to start out with the design of Mac OS 11 so that can be launched at the same time as Windows 7. Let us hope that Snow Leopard be sold at a cheaper price than the preceding updates.

[translation by crispin]

- TomTom will run on the iPhone - Lionel - 07:53:20

Source : Engadget

Following the launch of the iPhone 2 and of its integrated GPS, TomTom announced that they will bring out a compatible version of their software for the iPhone.
Even though no date is mentioned, this is rather good news since this is a true navigation system, rather than that relatively frustrating Google that often increases the length of the journey.

[translation by crispin]

- The iPhone will not be available at Apple Shops in the UK ? - Lionel - 07:47:40

In France, the iPhone was only sold in the shops of Orange in France, however in the UK it was available in Apple Store just like in the United States.
If we believes the online Apple Store in these countries, it will be always possible to buy the iPhone at an Apple shop on the American continent, but no more in the UK where it would be only available at O2 and Carphone Warehouse.
Note that if world launching will be on July 11, in France it will be launched one week later on July 17.
We are still unaware if Orange will really offer to update those who bought the first version of the iPhone.

[translation by crispin]

- Soon a Raptor at 20,000 rpm? - Lionel - 07:36:24

Source : Bit-Tech

A rumour states that Western Digital works on a new Raptor disk able to spin at 20.000 rpm, that is to say the double of the current model.
The acknowledged goal would be to make an advance against the SSD disks, whose performances could outclass disks such as Raptor.
There remains a fair amount of work still to be made, especially on the level of the generated noise and thermal dissipation.
This disk, always with the format 2,5" will be perhaps encased up in a shell designed to regulate these two problems.

[translation by crispin]

- QuickTime 7.5 Available - Cheerful - 04:29:56

Source : Apple

One can either get it via our typical Software Update or from Apple's QT Page.
For more details, please click here. The document simply outlines security updates QT 7.5 for both platforms, Mac OS and Windows.

p.s. iTunes and Front Row updates are expected to follow shortly. You can be certain that we will alert our readers when that happens.