The past week have seen the anniversary of the first moon landing, my own birthday and the death of Walter Cronkite. This week we will also have the latest Apple quarterly results. My Post article this week looks at some of the ways key commands may be used when working with a Mac.
Helper Keys when Starting Up a Mac
I hate to say it but I forgot something in this week's article. In the Post version, I mention Safe mode, but omitted how to do this: with the Shift key. Well, that was not the first error we have ever made and I am sure someone will ask.
If you use the words Safe Mode to search in Google, that will bring up a page of XP possibilities, plus a link to the Apple Support article. If you use Safe Mode plus OS X as search criteria, that will find the same link as above plus a few more.
This week's article followed my idea of trying to get back to basics, which will change next week with my first look at the new 13" MacBook Pro. I was fairly surprised by the statistics from the web host that showed more people looked at the article and downloaded the related podcast than for a long time. I must have done something right. My thanks to you.
Later on I will have some information about the quarterly results from Apple, and I see this week that the shares have risen some $5 or more to just over $152 although there were some reports of early selling. John Martellaro of the Mac Observer has some comments on fluctuations in Apple's share prices.
Like a lot of people, I can remember where I was for certain events like the Kennedy assassination, the World Trade Center attacks and the first moon landing. For the first I was in the family home in suburban NW London waiting for my mother to come home; and the World Trade Center saw me in suburban Bangkok standing at my front door still wearing motorcycle boots which I did not take off for several hours. The Moon Landing, and specifically Neil Armstrong's moon walk saw me in Blackheath, south London, on a beautiful July night and I watched it right the way through. Like a lot of people I went outside later to look at the moon with a sense of awe.
Walter Cronkite demonstrated that same sense of wonder and reporting on Armstrong's One Small Step comment, he was for once at a loss for words. There have been almost as many tributes to him in the last few days as for Michael Jackson, although somewhat more reserved and with considerable substance. He became a voice of middle America and was noted for the sort of objectivity that many wo use forms of communication these days can only aspire to. His objectivity was a factor when he stepped outside on the occasion of his Vietnam documentary: because he had been noted for trustworthy comment, expressing an opinion had more effect on the United States and on the President, than anything up to that moment. Some commentators regret that there was no Cronkite at the time of the second invasion of Iraq.
Some of my own influences were writers like Bill Connors, who used the name Cassandra in the Daily Mirror when it was still a newspaper; the writing that appears in the New Yorker Magazine; and William Zinsser, whose On Writing Well, is now in its Fifth edition.
I found a link this week in a TUAW news item telling us about more courses from Yale University that may be found online at iTunesU, the education part of the iTunes shop. Normally we have to be in the US store for direct access, but this link -- and I have put it on the page that goes with the podcast -- takes us straight to the pages; and then when we click on the iTunes Home icon near the top of the page, we are back in the Thailand shop.
I would prefer a link in the Thai app store, to make all podcasts and the iTunesU links available to us, as there are not the same copyright concerns; but although I have mentioned it to some of the Apple people have come into contact with, this is not a high priority, to put it the best way.
There is an Apple page to explain the purpose of iTunesU with a QT video and that page has a link to the iTunesU pages. I also have that link on the eXtensions podcast page and that will take anyone to iTunesU. Now why can't Apple provide the same link on the Thai App store pages?
Another new arrival on the iTunes store is Barnes and Noble, the booksellers. Like a lot of traditional sellers, they are accepting that they have to move with the times and they are doing this by providing online content. I already have a book reader, called Stanza, that accesses those copyright-free titles that were originally part of the Gutenberg Project out of the University of Illinois, and also some online sellers, like O'Reilly.
I downloaded the Barnes and Noble app and put it on the iPod touch first then started the registration. Once done in the app, I had to do it online with more details but it did not like my strong password. When I tried again, the server was not accessible. 30 seconds and I am ready to dump the app. On a 3rd try we got through. There are some free books, like The Last of the Mohicans, but the purpose is to sell books using the new medium, which is fair enough. I clicked on the James Fennimore Cooper book and it downloaded, taking about 3 minutes: over 1200 pages of clear text, including notes. We slide the screen to the left to turn a page, or tap to see other controls.
There are several sections and classifications. Selecting any one takes us to Safari and a search page. OK if you know what you want, but I want to browse as well. I put those comments on the iTunes page. I later also put this on the iPhone but setting the second device up needs the user to be sure of the account settings on the original device.
Nokia has always been one of the major competitors for Apple in the Smart-phone area and they are apparently expanding with the registration reported of some new trademarks according to Electronista.
However, we also see that there are reports that Nokia's earnings have dropped by a massive 66% in the second quarter we are told by Karl Ritter in Business Report.
Perhaps not unrelated is a report from Deutsche Bank that Apple's iPhone and the Blackberry account for 20% of the cellphone industry's profit last year. They only have 3% of market sales, according the the article in the Wall Street Journal, but their effects are far reaching.
We have mentioned that a lot of users have been dissatisfied by the way AT&T handles the iPhone, both in terms of the plans and technically. We mentioned last week a rumour that Apple was thinking about other carriers and this is a bit more concrete this week with the idea that it is courting Verizon who would love to be a partner. Apple however, would have the upper hand here as Electronista examine in an online article.
Google's servers over-reacted with an excess of hits about Michael Jackson, then McAfee sent out files that crashed computers, and Computer Associates followed suit, and now this week, Symbian have joined the club and let a Trojan slip by their security system. Apparently the Trojan was disguised as a legitimate application and passed through automatic screening. Symbian have a wake up call here and they recognise this.
But something caught my eye in Tom Espiner's CNET article when he wrote about the automatic processing: "the Trojan had not been subjected to human scrutiny" That is what happens to Apps that need to be authorised for the App Store, of course, and despite a few bad calls, there have been no Trojans slipping through onto our iPhones or iPods at all. Not that the knee=jerk columnists who scream about Apple without thinking will mention that, of course. Come to that, did we see anything locally about those McAfee or Computer Associates errors?
In Apple land, we are sort of used to Redmond copying what comes out of Cupertino, from the GUI and mouse, up to the iPod with the Zune. We have mentioned a few other things from time to time. Imagine the chuckle I got this week when I read that there were going to be Microsoft Stores opened near Apple stores, and in some cases right next door.
There were plenty of comments on this in the few days following, but the best is from Bryan Chaffin who has written the blog I would have wanted to have created myself on this. No point reinventing the wheel, so the link is on the podcast page. His conclusion is about right after analysis when he wrote that, "That makes it a boneheaded move."
A couple of days later, Dennis Sellers on Macsimum News tells us that a former Apple vice-president, Charles Blankenship is assisting Microsoft with setting up the shops. He had earlier been with Gap. Shouldn't he be nicknamed Charles Jumpenship?
Let's be kind to Redmond, at least for a moment. This week we hear that Office for the Mac is about to get a service pack release which Ina Fried tells us is "designed to improve speed and stability as well as add new features for connecting to SharePoint servers and to Microsoft's Office Live Workspaces.
Is that an admission that it was not fast and was not stable before?
Let's run with this benign Microsoft idea as The Register tells us that they are about to release a number of plug-ins for Office, although I suspect this is for the Windows version rather than the Mac version as well. The plug-ins will be for scientific applications and released under Microsoft's OSI-approved open-source licenses. The article by Gavin Clarke also suggests that Microsoft is going to get friendly with Linux. Sounds a bit like Little Red Riding Hood to me.
For those who want to dump the PC and start using a Mac, there are a number of ways to transfer all the necessary data; and one of the best known of these is the aptly-named Move2Mac which this week I hear has been updated to version 5.0 and should be available later this month at $39.95.
As a note, I am testing a 13" MacBookPro right now and did a lot of the moving of settings using Mobile Me, including passwords, bookmarks and all the mail account settings. The address book was also transferred but not iCal as that seems to have problems. I can sync the iPhone, the iPod touch and my own 15" MacBookPro, but not the iMac. Nor the 13" MacBook Pro. To get round this, it is easy to export data by using the iCal Backup command in the File menu then using that to restore on another machine.
With Address Book there are two ways, both in the Export item in the File menu, The archive which is similar to the backup in iCal, or the export of the vCard; but with this, first highlight all, so every entry is included in the export. That can then go onto other systems, like Window's Outlook.
Some different security concerns have been raised this week by the Register who report on a Black Hat conference that will take place next week in Las Vegas -- this must be a pre-release to drum up publicity. We are told that there will be a talk on the way that some people are expressing interest in developing root-kits for OS X. Sony developed one we may remember in an effort to thwart people copying their music and brought a whole load of trouble down on their heads because of it. A local music company also installs software without permission on PCs when the CD is put into a drive, or at least they did.
It is not that there is any specific security weakness in OS X, but this is how things work and it is possible to extend the kernel we are told. One hopes that Apple will be working on ways to secure the system.
The BBC are reporting that a recent update for Blackberry users in the United Arab Emirates might allow the carrier, Etisalat who sent the update out (or others) access to email and other personal information. The news item says this update was not from R.I.M. The Register also has its own look at this. While the BBC keeps mainly to the facts, the facts with the Register's interpretations is a lot more fun.
We take a lot on trust sometimes with our devices. I was chatting at the end of last week with the editor of the Straits Times, Digital Life, Grace Chng who was here for a few days. We know each other from trips to San Francisco for Apple events. During our extended chat, which actually lasted most of the afternoon and into the early evening, we were comparing some of the settings on the iPhone. We found that the installations of the iPhone 3.0 update were different. Hers, has a setting for tethering, mine does not. One wonders what else might be different.
I spent a lot of time over last week and the weekend and have come to a conclusion about why my Thai students often get the words wrong. They trust the software too much. I rarely use an office suite and rely on a text editor with spellchecker. What I found when I had to use NeoOffice was that it kept offering to finish the word I was typing and it was more often than not wrong.
At least when typing in the iPhone, it is easy to take the suggestion by ignoring it, or to refuse it by pressing the big X in the suggestion box. With the office software, this kept completing the word for me and it would have been easy to miss had I not kept my wits about me.
The rumour of the iPod touch with a camera has surfaced again and David Carnoy reheats it on CNET.
Apple announced its financial results the third quarter showing revenue of $8.34 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.23 billion, compared to last year's revenue of $7.46 billion and profit of $1.07 billion for the same quarter. Gross margin was 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent. International sales accounted for 44 percent of this revenue. Even the Register glowed.
Apple estimates it sold 2.6 million Macs during the quarter, which is a 4% increase over the same period last year. However, the 10.2 million iPods sold represent a 7% unit decline a situation that was anticipated by Apple, while 5.2 million iPhones were sold, which is 626% growth.
Despite the drop in sales of iPods, they are still selling and 10 million is no drop in the ocean. With new ones expected to be coming soon, we can expect the figures to rise again, while iPhones (a type of iPod of course) are set to rise even more with, for example, Tim Cook telling everyone in the room when the financial results were released, that nearly 20% of the top 100 companies in the US have ordered 10,000 or more iPhones.
A really weird story has appeared on several sources concerning an engineer at FoxConn, the company in China that makes a lot of Apple products, who apparently committed suicide after losing a prototype iPhone 4G, then being roughed up by company security guards. Nothing to do with Apple directly of course, and they have put some distance between themselves and this event fairly quickly, but it won't be long before the commentators who are not even interested in listening to any explanations get their paws on the story. And as I put this together, the story was already moving off the IT-related pages into the mainstream press.
Apple have apparently been working to bring out that iDisk app for the iPhone that was announced right after the Developers' Conference last month and which I for one am really looking forward to. TUAW tells us of a tech note that appeared briefly on the Apple Support pages early this week, then evaporated. I already use things like Documents to Go and Air Sharing, but the Apple one is overdue.
Also overdue, in my opinion is an app to sort apps. If you reinstall, the apps are organised alphabetically after the standard Apple set, but as we add or delete apps, and reorganise as we go through a working week, so there are gaps or we might have some that are installed late that we might want to put on the first page. Getting the apps to shake and then dragging them is OK for one page, but if you have several pages and want the app at the start page, that gets frustrating especially if you knock apps off a page as I tend to.
We could use the search facility and the app can be activated directly from that, but I still think either an app or a way to organise from the iTunes settings pages would be more useful.
