Macintosh

It looks like Apple won’t be having their usual Campus Bash at this year’s WWDC. Instead they’re having a “WWDC Bash in San Francisco” on Thursday night. I always looked forward to the Campus bash so I can pick up some Apple goodies at the company store. I guess it was getting too difficult & expensive to bus all of those people to Cupertino & back.

There has been a lot of buzz about Panic’s new web development app, Coda. I’ve been trying it out but I’m still undecided whether I’ll buy it. I already own both BBEdit and TextMate. Both have features I like and neither of them does everything I want.

I do more than just web development. I usually write articles for MacMegasite and WorldBeatPlanet offline in a text editor. I need to be able to reformat the text and remove linebreaks. I really like using TextMate’s BBCode plugin to markup the text. I also like TextMate’s auto-completion features. However, TextMate lacks some basic features of BBEdit, like being able to easily switch line endings between Unix & DOS, which is essential for me, since my company uses Windows-based VSTS for source control. I also like BBEdit’s FTP browser and file compare feature, which TextMate lacks.

For web development, I really like Coda’s integration and workflow, but the editor itself isn’t as nice as either BBEdit or TextMate. I also prefer using multiple windows.

Although I’m disappointed about Leopard being delayed until October, I’m not really in that much of a hurry to update to it. There aren’t any compelling features that make me want to update. I don’t use Safari or Apple Mail – I use firefox & gmail on the web, so I don’t really care about the improvements to those applications. I use Deja Vu to automatically back up my machine daily, so I probably won’t use Time Machine. The improvements in Leopard (minus the “top secret features” Steve Jobs hyped) are refinements rather than major breakthroughs.

Apple released a new developer build, 9A410, yesterday shortly before their announcement. As a developer, I downloaded and installed it on an external drive. There don’t seem to be too many major changes from the last build. I’m very disappointed that a bug I reported (which is already a known problem, rdar://4778258) is still present. It won’t calculate space correctly on my TeraStation share mounted via NFS, showing 3GB free rather than 525GB. Like the last build, I only boot it long enough to test my software and then go back to 10.4.

I’ve uploaded Michael Sliczniak’s modified version of Mii Transfer with the Mii Send feature, although I haven’t been able to verify that it works on my system. I haven’t had a chance to work on it for the last two weeks, so instead of continuing to sit on it I’ve decided to make it available for anyone who wants to hack it.

Since Scoble asked and everyone posted their list of favorite apps, here’s my list:

QuickSilver (which I can’t live without), TextExpander, Adium, iGTD, iTerm, Firefox, TextMate, Yojimbo, Parallels, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Default Folder X, Growl, ChronoSync, Fetch, Google Notifier, Graphic Converter, Stuffit Deluxe, Twitterific, VLC, Delicious Library.

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has discovered the first virus designed to infect iPod portable media players. The virus, which has been named Podloso, is a proof of concept program which does not pose a real threat.

The virus is a file which can be launched and run on an iPod. It should be stressed that in order for the virus to function, Linux has to be installed on the iPod. If the virus is installed to the iPod by the user, the virus then installs itself to the folder which contains program demo versions. Podloso cannot be launched automatically without user involvement.

Once launched, the virus scans the device’s hard disk and infects all executable .elf format files. Any attempt to launch these files will cause the virus to display a message on the screen which says ‘You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus’.

Podloso is a typical proof of concept virus. Such viruses are created in order to demonstrate that it is possible to infect a specific platform. They do not have a malicious payload. Additionally, Podloso is unable to spread. The user has to save the virus to the iPod memory for the device to become infected. Podloso has no malicious payload, and does not present a real threat; it simply demonstrates that it is, theoretically possible to create malicious programs for such devices.

So the dozen or so people running Linux on their iPods need to explicitly install and run a piece of software to infect it. Once they reboot into normal iPod mode so they can play their AAC tracks, it no longer has any effect.

Technorati Tags:
iPod

Via Blackfriars’: Given what we know and have seen of Leopard features such as Time Machine and the new iChat and in existing apps like FrontRow, this would make perfect sense, especially if it were implemented in OpenGL. Applications get their own canvases in a 3D world, and the OS is responsible for keeping those canvases updated and visible in various orientations. One visual 3D imaging model for all apps that the OS manages and keeps sorted. Sweet.

We may see visual effects similar to Beryl or Compiz on Linux. Apple has to come up with something visually striking to compete with Vista.