World of Apple

Apple yesterday released a new freeware application that allows you to take full advantage of your broadband connection, its generally for connections with high latency (5Mbps or greater) but will work with those that are slower.

The applications simply adjusts the size of the send and recieve buffers allowing more data to be transmitted in one go.

The following system parameters are set as the following, they are sysctl variables;

net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000

Apple today began selling gift cards via its online store, the cards can be redeemed at any Retail Store or online. The cards can be purchased in any denomination from $25 - $2500 and are sent via post to the recipient, an optional personal message can be included.

The cards cannot be used on the iTunes Music Store.

The application is rumoured to be called Dashcode allows the creation of Dashboard widgets in a WYSIWYG environment although powerful javascript debugging tools are available for the more advanced developer.

The application allows the creation of a widget with very little configuration, four templates are currently available including web search, Quicktime, webcam and RSS.

The feature that stands out is that the whole application is very user friendly making it very easy to resize and position elements.

The application also automates a lot of the processes involved in creating a widget such as the info.plist and the widgets default image and icon.

As for the the development of this application it is unknown whether it is being developed within Apple or if it is a third party contribution.

Apple has begun recruiting for its first mainland Europe Retail Store, an advertisement has appeared on the Italian retail website recruiting for the usual positions.

The page also reveals that Apple will open the store in 2006. The location is still under wraps.

Back in the 70’s when Apple was only a sparkle in Steve Jobs’ eye IBM created a processor family called the PowerPC range, of course when Apple first started up they used Motorola processors and through there great success used a whole range of processors from Motorola, one of the most notable was the 68000. But this is a story about the future and not the past. So lets jumpy forward to 1994 when Apple began to use the PowerPC line of processors, starting with the PowerPC 601, then 603, 604 and moving onto the G3, in 1999 Apple introduced the G4 and it still stands proud in the Mac market but not for long, there is a new kid on the block; Intel. Of course in 2003 Apple gave us the PowerPC G5 that runs side by side with the G4.

Most notable during the transition to PowerPC systems Apple used a translation routine that booted with the OS and it is estimated that early PowerPC systems were up to 95% emulated and with the introduction of OS X in 2001 the systems became native to PowerPC code.

On June the 6th of this Steve Jobs stood up on the stage and announced that Apple would make another transition to the x64 (x86) platform, similar to the previous transition Apple is using a dynamic translation system known as Rosetta to emulate as much PowerPC code as possible.

The big question is how will the naming work, anybody who has been around those new to the Apple world will know that the computers are often recognised by there processor family and it has become common place to call the PowerMac G5 just the G5, with this massive brand recognition will Apple choose to throw it away and start a new or will it continue to name there processors in this fashion. Of course G3, G4 and G5 technically have no relation to the chip or manufacturer at all they are simply branding techniques much like Pentium and Celeron. For example the PowerMac G3 used 4 different processors during its lifetime, all manufactured by Motorola, they go by the names PPC 740/750/745/755 and you probably recognise that the current G5 processors are in fact PPC 970MP’s. So is there any harm in Apple continuing the trend and upgrading all its machines to the G6 processor, this may a problem when the average consumer noticed the PowerBooks jump from G4 to G6 in a matter of hours.

Apple has another alternative and that is to introduce a whole new naming scheme, Apple may opt to use Intel’s fancy naming such as Pentium 4 although this processor line was half merged with the Pentium D, or for the mobile computers the Pentium M. This just doesn’t seem Apple style and the website will end up looking too much like Dells with all the confusing names, if Apple do one thing very well its branding processors to make life simple.

Its obvious that this is an end of a great era, with Apple likely to drop the Power from the beginning of some of its computer as it will no longer be using the POWER line of processors and it may well begin to use its recently trademarked “Mactel”.

What do you think?

Next Week - Emulation

A company by the name of Navio which specialises in digital-rights management have taken it upon themselves to reverse engineer Apple Fairplay DRM format. The format is used to protect songs bought from the iTunes Music Store.

The company plans to allow other online music stores to sell the songs and to allow playback on iPods.

“Schaaf described Navio as “DRM-agnostic,” adding that the company was only providing the technology that its customers are asking for. “Whether it’s Helix, WMA or FairPlay, our customers indicate what kind of DRM encoding they want and then we provide them with a solution,” he said.

A number of sites have reported on the appearance of Aperture on Amazon, according to some customers of Amazon they have received an email stating that Amazon has already received copies of Aperture but is unable to ship it too the public.

“Apple Aperture Post Production Tool for Photographers (Mac DVD) on hand, we are not able to ship it to you until its official release date, November 30, 2005.Many manufacturers, publishers, and record labels restrict retailers from selling or shipping their products until the official release date.”

[Update 1] Apple has posted a shipping time of around 1 week on the US store.

[Update 2] Apple has updated the Aperture page confirming that Aperture is now shipping to some customers, it is unknown whether Aperture will be available in Stores in Monday.

Around one week after the first seed emerged Apple has reportedly released another seed of its upcoming Mac OS X update 10.4.4. The build is labelled 8G9 adds more fixes to the previous seed including Bluetooth and the MS DOS filesystem.

Right now testers are unable to confirm when they think the update could land in the average users systems but it is likely that this update will be released before the years end.

Apple today confirmed that it has invested a massive $1.25bn to help secure flash memory supplies.

Apple has reached agreements with Hynix, Intel, Samsung and Toshiba which will help the company support a supply of NAND memory until 2010.

SJ himself, said “We want to be able to produce as many of our wildly popular iPods as the market demands”

As with previous years Apple is planning to offer discounts on selected products on the 25th of November.

In previous years Apple has varied which products it has applied discounts too and varied the amount of discount.