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All posts tagged "2009"


Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Apple in 5th Place in France

Posted by Jeff Campbell in "Apple News" @ 10:00 AM

http://www.appleinsider.com/article..._in_france.html

"According to research firm Gartner, Apple shipped 182,000 machines in the fourth quarter of 2009, earning the company a 5.5 percent total market share in France. Apple's emergence in fifth place came as a result of 43.5 percent year-over-year growth in the market."

Not only are they succeeding in France, but all over Western Europe with increased shipments during the fourth quarter of 2009. Worldwide, profits for Apple increased 50% on sales of 3.36 million Macs, which was the best quarter ever for Apple.


Thursday, January 28, 2010

2009 Year in Mac Security Report Released

Posted by Jeff Campbell in "Apple Software (OS X)" @ 08:00 AM

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/...lashdot:+Apple)

"Mac OS X and iPhones that haven't been jailbroken fare pretty well (although vulnerabilities exist, there's not been a lot of exploitation). Apple does come in for criticism for 'time to fix' known vulnerabilities. Jailbroken iPhones are a mess. The biggest risk to Macs are Trojan horses, often from pirated software."

Interesting that one of the biggest complaints in the report is how Apple handles reports of problems with the security of OS X, which unfortunately is very slowly. Even after acknowledging that OS X could be vulnerable, and placing an anti-malware feature in Snow Leopard, the report states that "as of January 2010, this anti-malware feature has not been updated, and still scans for the same two Trojan horses and nothing else."

If you are interested, you can download the full report here.


Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Favorite Apps in 2009?

Posted by Jeff Campbell in "Apple Software (iPhone/iPod Touch)" @ 08:00 AM

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/29/our-...phones-in-2009/

"...we thought we'd shine a spotlight on some of the favorite apps we used this year. These are the "sticky" apps, the ones that lingered on our iPhones after we gave them a preliminary spin. There's so much on the App Store, good, bad and indifferent; here are a few suggestions for items that deserve your attention."

This was an article from the last week of 2009, but it has a nice list of apps that they found useful. I have several of them and use them everyday, such as Evernote, Sportacular, Instapaper and Dropbox. One that wasn't on the list that I have really gotten a lot of use out of over the last year is Shazam. What do you use that isn't on the list?


Tuesday, January 5, 2010

How Many "Best Of" Lists Are There?

Posted by Jeff Campbell in "Apple News" @ 11:00 AM

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune...-of-the-decade/

"Steve Jobs and Apple appeared in an extraordinary number of 2009's "Best of" lists. Our favorite: 'There's an app for that,' the Yale Book of Quotations' No. 3 quote of the 2009, right before Rep. Joe Wilson's 'You lie' and after Captain Sully Sullenberger's 'We're going to be in the Hudson.'"

I just found this interesting from the aspect of not realizing there were so many lists you could be ranked in! It seems that this will just lead to "Best Of" lists becoming more and more irrelevant unless it is for something that is a bit more objective than "Top Ten Quotes of 2009." Unless it is something you can quantify, hard for me to put much stock in some of these lists. And maybe that is more to the point, that they aren't to be taken serious just generate some thought and discussion. What are your thoughts?


Wednesday, December 30, 2009

In Other iPhone Sales News...

Posted by Jeff Campbell in "Apple iPhone & iPod Touch" @ 09:00 AM

http://www.9to5mac.com/iphone_booms...t=Google+Reader

"Apple has achieved almost 10 percent of the entire French mobile phone market in 2009, according to leading French newspaper, Le Figaro."

The article from Le Figaro states that Apple has sold between 1.8 million and 2 million iPhones in 2009. This nice number gives the iPhone about 8.5% market share in the French mobile phone market. This translates to about 20% of the value of the same market. Making it available on so many carriers certainly has it's advantages, right Apple?


Friday, June 5, 2009

WWDC is Coming... Time For Predictions and a Contest!

Posted by Vincent Ferrari in "Apple Talk" @ 06:00 AM

Alrighty, folks.  WWDC is upon us, so you have the whole weekend to get your predictions on the record.  I have some beautiful Vaja and Senna iPhone 3G cases in my goodie bag to give away, so here's what we're going to do...

In the comments section, leave 3-5 predictions for WWDC.  We'll give away one case to a random commenter, and one case to the person who went most out on a limb and hit a nail on the head.  The cases are valued anywhere from $30 to $75 so this is a good giveaway for you all to take part in, and it's pretty easy stuff.

Rules:

1.  Minimum 3 predictions per post. One entry per thread, although you're welcome to post as much as you want, we'll only count one post.

2.  Open to residents of the US and Canada only for the cases but international readers can have a $35 electronic Amazon gift certificate if they happen to win.

4.  Editors of the site will judge whose predictions were best including whether or not they just repeated what we already knew.  More weight will be given to those that don't predict the obvious.

5.  Don't flood the comments section with multiple lists of predictions just to win the "random reader" prize.

6.  All decisions are final.

7.  No whining!

Good luck, and here's to a great WWDC!


Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Apple Details iLife '09 Up To Date Program

Posted by Vincent Ferrari in "Apple Software (OS X)" @ 11:00 AM

http://www.apple.com/ilife/uptodate/

"As usual, Apple has rolled out a low-cost upgrade ("up-to-date" in Apple parlance) program for iLife ‘09. It works like this: if you purchased a Mac (even a refurbished one) on or after 06 January 2009 that doesn't come with iLife ‘09 you can upgrade to iLife ‘09 for $9.95 plus tax. The reason is that all Macs sold after last Tuesday's Macworld Expo keynote address are sold as "shipping with iLife ‘09." To be able to claim that Apple needs to make iLife ‘09 available inexpensively to every Mac sold on or after that date."

When I bought my first iBook back in 2004, I took part in this program also. It's not a bad deal, really. A $10 upgrade path to the latest version of iLife is definitely an enticer for people who are on the fence based on the included bundle potentially being outdated.


Will Google Chrome be Your New Browser?

Posted by Jeff Campbell in "Apple Software (OS X)" @ 10:00 AM

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/w...comments/19697/

"Brian Rakowski, Chrome's product manager, said the company wants to release Chrome for Mac and Linux before the first half of 2009 is up," Stephen Shankland reports for CNET."

My use of Google products is slowly increasing, but I really like the interoperability of Safari with my iPhone (the main reason I don't use Firefox). This will probably keep me from using Chrome much, but I'm sure I'll check it out to see if I like it. How about you? Is Safari your browser of choice or do you experiment?


Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Microsoft Working on Office 2009

Posted by Vincent Ferrari in "Apple Software (OS X)" @ 02:00 PM

http://www.officeformac.com/blog/A-...and-Development

"Office 2008 included many new painstakingly crafted features, more than are easy to list - a year after launch a few that I'm still commonly pointing out to people because I know they'll get hooked on them are Publishing Layout View, SmartArt, and Ledger Sheets. Since Office 2008 launched in January, we've been highly focused on developing and releasing continuous updates, with a focus on monitoring and improving the stability and performance of the product. Just in our Office 12.1.2 update for example, Word's launch time improved by as much as 30% and Excel's calculation performance by as much as 50% (some calc-heavy test cases saw even more improvement - the result of floating point math optimizations.)"

It's hard to argue that Office 2008 didn't suck less than Office 2004, but there are still things it does seriously poorly (for example, why do Pivot Tables still suck and why is there still no ODBC drivers for MS Jet (Access) and MS SQL included with the suite?). Sucking less probably wasn't their goal. In fact, I don't use Office on the Mac all that much anymore except when I need Excel. For word processing, I still use Pages, and for presentations I use Keynote and that's due in no small part to Microsoft's insistence on making an inferior version of Office for the Mac available in an effort to keep people on the Windows Platform. Here's a tip to the team: Make 2009 not only suck less, but make it better.


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