Apple Reporter

Apple has posted their Black Friday deals for this year up on the Apple Store. While there are no extravagant deals on the expensive items, there are many small price cuts that are sure to appeal to a variety of shoppers.

Here’s a list of some of the most important cuts (note: these are not all of them):

• Macbook, save up to $101, now from $1048
• iMac, save up to $101, now from $1148
• Apple Bluetooth Headset, save up to $21, now from $108
• iPod Nano, save $11, now from $138
• iPod Shuffle, save $11, now from $68
• iPod Classic, save $31, now from $228
• $100 off Office 2004 with mail-in rebate, and with purchase, only a $6.95 upgrade fee to Office 2008

For all the great deals, either visit the Apple Store today, or download this simple image containing all the deals below.

Maclife has a great post showing three art designers’ sample ideas for iLife ‘09 packaging. While these are all speculation, they are similar to the Apple design and aesthetic appeal. Check out the post on Maclife for more info, but pics are below.

A common theme in all of these packaging ideas is that they are environmentally friendly. Hopefully this will become a common idea throughout Apple and other companies’ products.

As every Mac user has probably realized, the Dock is probably the most used part of your Desktop during your daily computer use. Everyone has different docks, some with apps that I’ve probably never even heard of. But I thought I would post my dock, and I would hope that everyone else would do the same. If it’s really cool, maybe I can add it to the post so other people can see it too.

Apps in order: Finder, Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, Adium, iChat, Colloquy, Address Book, Coda, Pages, Photoshop, Netnewswire Lite, Marsedit, Final Cut Express HD, and then my stacks: Downloads, and my Home folder, and then of course, the Trash.

Don’t just look at this and say, oh that’s cool looking. Use this as a forum to share your favorite Mac apps with other people, maybe even something that will save someone an hour of their time everyday. The choice is yours, whether to participate or not.

Here at Apple Reporter, we’re going to start a new segment called App of the Week. Each week, I’m going to outline a new application that you should check out for yourself. Whether it’s cool looking, convenient, or something you never thought you could do with your Mac, there are many apps out there that everyone could use on their Mac. The first of these is called Adium.

Adium is a chat program that was first developed in 2001 by college student Adam Iser. Since then, it has had a long and confusing developing cycle, involving name changes and version number mix-ups. As of this writing, Adium is at version 1.1.4, and is currently the most popular IM solution for Mac OS X. While there is virtually nothing wrong with it, one frequently requested feature is A/V chat, which is being worked on as I write this. Adium offers almost complete customization, from message styles to contact list windows, dock icons to sound sets. It is also open source, and completely free. Is there anything wrong with it?

Adium is available for download here.

This is what Adium looks like on my computer.

Apple covertly released the newest version of Final Cut Express this morning. Boasting 4 main new features, the video editing software is now available for the low price of $199. The new features advertised are:

While there are features in Leopard that are seldom ignored, i.e. Time Machine and Spaces, there are some things that are often ignored. The Spotlight in 10.5 has been updated, and there is a new feature that has slipped its way in that is surprisingly helpful. This is the addition of a Dictionary and Calculator built right into it. Type in “2+6″ and it shows up in the spotlight as “2+6=8″. The dictionary function is the same way. Type in a word, such as “spotlight”, and a dictionary definition appears as one of the top search results. Overall, it is a very useful function when you need to quickly check a calculation or you’re not quite sure how to spell a word.

The update, now available on iTunes, adds the ability to add and edit calendar events. The function, which was only available by replacing the iPod Touch iCal with the iPhone iCal app, was one major complaint from early Touch adopters. Also in the update is the ability to see the battery life remaining in iTunes when the iPod has been plugged in, a feature which has found its way into every current-gen iPod and iPhone. The TIFF exploit, used most famously by jailbreakme.com, has also been patched, but according to Erica Sadun at TUAW, the jailbreak for 1.1.2 is now available in a simple GUI format. Any iPod Touch users find any more new features?

The new update for the iPhone is officially on the Apple page. No word on features or anything yet, but hopefully soon we will see what has changed. My guess is that jailbreakme.com will not work. Sorry jailbreakers.

Update - Apparently the iPod Touch was jailbroken before the patch was even officially released. Here’s a picture, courtesy of the iPhone/iPod dev team.

[Download link]

Quicksilver, the popular Spotlight replacement, has been released as an open source effort. If you have been using Quicksilver and are interested in downloading the source code, it can be found here. More info on the app itself can be found here.

Google is, at this moment (9:41 AM PST at time of post), announcing their new OS, “Android”. The rumors of a new gPhone are false, but Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google says,

“Imagine not just one Gphone, but a thousand Gphones as a result of the partnerships… the many other people who will be joining the open initiative. We forgot to tell you that it’s available next week, and the terms are the broadest in the industry.”

More info is being released by the minute, but we know as of now that the “Android” OS is a Linux-based, but is instead:

… the first truly integrated mobile operating system. … What’s particularly notable is that it’s available under a mobile open source license…

Yes, there is now Linux on your phone. Apparently you will easily be able to write apps and completely customize the OS for yourself. No word on all the supporters of the OS yet, but a list has gone out of the speculated ones:

MEMBERS OF GOOGLE’S ALLIANCE

Aplix, Ascender Corp., Audience, Broadcom Corp., China Mobile, eBay Inc., Esmertec, HTC Corp., Intel Corp., KDDI, Living Image, LG, Marvell Technology, Motorola Inc., NMS Communications, Noser, NTT DoCoMo, Nuance Communications Inc., Nvidia Corp., PacketVideo, Qualcomm Inc., Samsung Electronics, SiRF, SkyPop, SONiVOX, Sprint Nextel, Synaptics, TAT - The Astonishing Tribe, Telecom Italia, Telefónica SA, Texas Instruments, T-Mobile and Wind River Systems Inc.

9:58 AM PST: Eric Schmidt in response to “What’s it mean to the average consumer?”, “This is fundamentally a developer platform announcement… the quick way of saying it, as a result of this platform you can do amazing things with mobile devices…” Interesting. Will there be a Android dev team like the iPhone dev team for people to easily customize their OS?

10:01 AM PST: Conference call finishes, Schmidt in response to “Is there any coincidence of the timing with OpenSocial and this?”, “Google announces products when they’re ready; OpenSocial apps will run well on Android…” Thanks to Engadget for the liveblogging so the rest of us know what is going on. A general overview of this announcement will be up soon.

Intego, a security research company, has issued a security alert for Mac users about a new Trojan Horse called OSX.RSPlug.A. Specifically, the Trojan changes your DNS address and points it to phishing and adult sites. If you have this trojan, more then likely you acquired it from a.. adult site. But if you haven’t (promise?) then you’ll know it’s there because a fake codec will be “required” to watch videos and once you install it, you will: a) not have said codec, and 2) have a Trojan Horse on your computer. Luckily, your virus software (if you have any) will probably remove it, or you can follow these simple steps as described by Macworld:

In the Finder, navigate to /Library -> Internet Plug-Ins, and delete the file named plugins.settings. Empty the trash. This deletes the tool that sets the rogue DNS Server information.

In Terminal, type sudo crontab -r and provide your admin password when asked. This deletes the root cron job that checks the DNS Server settings. You can prove it worked by typing sudo crontab -l; you should see the message “crontab: no crontab for root.”

Open your Network System Preferences panel, go to the DNS Server box, and copy the entries you can see to a Stickies note, TextEdit document, or memorize them. Now retype those same values in the box, then click Apply.
Reboot your Mac.

Even if you don’t think you have OSX.RSPlug.A, it probably isn’t a bad idea to check. All it requires is looking for a file called “plugin.settings” in your Library folder (presumably the one in the root of the HD, check your user Library folder too though).

Apple announced that Leopard sold 2 million copies on its opening weekend, far outselling Tiger, which was previously the best selling Mac OS. It’s pretty obvious that Apple is starting to make an impact in the computing world. The interesting bit is that Vista sold 20 million the first month, using simple mathematics, we can compute that Leopard will sell 20 million copies too (2 million divided by 3 times 30). Of course, that’s estimating, but with an 34% growth in Mac sales and 2,164,000 Macs sold this quarter (according to Apple 4th Quarter sales results), it is safe to say that even if Leopard doesn’t sell as well as Vista, it is still doing pretty well.

Andy Ihnatko wrote a great piece on Macworld about the individual features in Leopard and what they add up if they were each individually priced. A lot of the features, including Time Machine, he is very critical about and I think he does a good job in showing that some of these “killer” features aren’t so killer, but have been available in better ways for a very long time.

(Link)

The Adium dev team announced today that they have made huge breakthroughs in Adium’s most requested feature: AV chat. Currently, there are few Mac apps that support quality AV chat, namely Skype and iChat. Adium, however, is easily the best chat app out for Macs. The dev team predicts that by version 2.0 (Adium is at 1.1.3 at time of writing) video chat will be fully implemented in AIM, MSN, and Yahoo protocols.

Adium supports AOL Instant Messenger, Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous), Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, LiveJournal, Lotus Sametime, .Mac, MySpaceIM, Novell GroupWise, QQ, SIP / SIMPLE, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Japan, and Zephyr protocols.

[Source]

So if you haven’t heard, Leopard, also known as Mac OS X 10.5, comes out tomorrow. Some of us, I am sure, will be out at the local Apple Store to test drive it and presumably get their own copy.

But onto the software itself. Boasting over 300 new features, Leopard appears to be the most full-featured Mac OS X update yet.

So far, the reviews have been pretty solid. I’ll have my review up soon, I hope.

How many of you are planning to get Leopard?

Also, you may have noticed that I’m new here to the site. I’m Kristian and I’ll be taking over Apple Reporter duties. I hope to meet you all through comments, etc.