Iphone Updates

The iPhone Dev Team strikes at Apple’s core with the Pwnage tool. The PWN, which is publicaly available later today, Sunday March 30th, allows you to flash custom unsigned firmware onto the iPhone or iPod touch. Not only will PWN properly hack the iPhone and iPod touch, the iPhone Dev Team claims, “any subsequent firmware releases will also be vulnerable to “Pwnage”…like 1.2 (2.0) beta.” Is the iPhone Dev Team getting too arrogant for their own good or is it possible they’re that good to believe they’ve developed a tool that’s Jobs proof? Apple, I believe the ball is now in your court. Click over to watch the video and view screen shots of PWN in action.

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CNN Money has reported that some person familiar with the situation, told Dow Jones Newswire that Hon Hai will be the folks assembling what they’re referring to as a more advanced version of the first-gen iPhone. The unnamed source stated Hon Hai scored the exclusive contract from Apple. Unfortunately, the source declined to provide more details.

In case you’re wondering how much more advance the iPhone can really get. Lets just say at the moment it sorely lack 3G, integrated GPS as well as the not so-advance feature such as copy and paste. Well, the last one is an OS feature that doesn’t require new hardware - I just thought it’s important to throw in there.

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Apple’s decision to refuse third-party developers from using background processes on the iPhone has been a regular sore-point in discussion of whether the handset is a “true smartphone”, and at first glance Rupert Goodwin’s article on the subject comes across as just more bile-bait.  However, what differentiates Goodwin’s piece - once you look past his comparison of the iPhone to a 1981 IBM PC - is the fact that he offers some actual suggestions for how Apple could have handled the situation differently.

“If the design of the iPhone precludes proper always-on connectivity — which wouldn’t be the first time the company has gone for form over function — then have a decent scheduler, which understands the metrics of wireless access and makes intelligent decisions about when to allow what to connect. This does put the onus on application designers to understand the limitations and capabilities of such a channel and to create software accordingly, but then that is their job”Rupert Goodwins, ZDNet 

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Last year, we pointed out this cool campaign for iPods with video in South Africa. Tiny boxes of movie popcorn, posters and even a miniature “trailer” announced the idea of “Movies in your pocket.”

Today, Creative Bits describes another iPod campaign from South Africa. It features a set of earbuds that lead not to an iPod, but a pocket full of music, if you will. In one ad, a rock band does its thing in a woman’s purse. In another, a boy band croons on a desk and a hip-hop act features a microphone wire that leads to the wearer’s earbuds.

The images are great, and quite different from the silhouette ads we see in the US. Have you seen an interesting campaign or ad in your neck of the woods?

In “the seventh Aperture-related software release from Apple in a little over six weeks,” reports Rob Galbraith (robgalbraith.com) in his first look at Aperture 2.1, Apple rolled out the addition of image editing plug-ins. In addition to taking an extensive look at the Apple-developed Dodge & Burn plug-in — which he thinks will “quickly become an indispensable tool” — Galbraith also delves into what he considers “the real story” of this release: “among early plug-in creators are Nik, with Viveza, and PictureCode, with Noise Ninja,” and he describes the value that several expected plug-ins (including Power Stroke from Digital Film Tools) will offer Aperture users.

Sling Media have been talking about creating a version of their SlingPlayer software for the iPhone since April 2007, and the demand for just such an app hasn’t let up since.  We heard rumors that the development team there were looking at the iPhone SDK and considering the possibilities, and now Dave Zatz from Sling has confirmed that, if they can satisfy the tech side, there’ll likely be a client release on the horizon.

“We were definitely one of those 100,000 who downloaded the iPhone SDK, which we’re currently evaluating. We know it’s a hot platform and we’ll see what our options are” Dave Zatz, Sling Media

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Here’s a great trick from Macosxhints.com — set up your Mac to automatically preview all downloads with Quick Look.

It’s a simple two-step process. First, install the Quick Look Droplet, a simple application that displays any file with Quick Look. Next, set your browser preference to automatically open certain file types (say, PDFs, Word documents and JPGs) with the droplet. It’s much snappier than launching Preview or Word.

Released today, Aperture 2.1 introduces an open plug-in architecture that lets photographers use specialized third-party imaging software from right within Aperture. In fact, customers downloading the Aperture 2.1 update will receive a sample plug-in available for immediate use. Developed by Apple, the Dodge & Burn plug-in adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur. Aperture 2 customers can download the free Aperture 2.1 Update by visiting the Aperture download site.

Earlier this week, Karelia released Sandvox 1.2.7. If you’re unfamiliar, Sandvox is a great WYSIWYG website development application. It’s really fun to use, and features .Mac and iLife integration, templates you’ll actually want to put up on your site and a great user interface (in fact, it was the runner up in Apple’s 2007 Design Awards for Best Mac OS X User Experience).

Version 1.2.7 is a minor update, but includes some important changes, like

• Improvements to iMedia Browser, including new movie thumbnailing code
• Graphical Title Text replacement now works again under Leopard
• Updates to the Digg pagelet

There’s more, of course, and you can get the full run down here. Once you’ve got your Sandvox site up, share it at Sandvoxed.

Sandvox now requires 10.4.11 or 10.5.x, is a Universal Binary and comes in both pro ($79US) and “regular” ($49US) versions. Version 1.2.7 is a free upgrade for registered users.

Independent filmmaker Bob Radler has two very different documentaries currently in production: “Turn It Up!” and “SS United States: Lady in Waiting,” reports Jim Dalrymple (macworld.com). While both films offered rather unique challenges, Radler overcame every one — thanks to his MacBook Pro and Final Cut Studio. “Final Cut Pro was a godsend,” said Radler. “Using Final Cut Studio literally saved me tens of thousands of dollars.” In fact, he says “he couldn’t have made the movies as efficiently and economically as he did without Final Cut Studio and his Macs.”

Apple have today released an updated version of the iPhone SDK, the package necessary for developers to code sanctioned third-party applications for the cellphone (and its iPod Touch PMP counterpart). Beta 2 is primarily notable for adding Interface Builder, the drag’n’drop GUI development tool which allows, as its name suggests, coders to put together interfaces for their software. According to the SDK readme file, the rest of the changes are generally tweaks in response to known issues, although there are still outstanding problems Apple are yet to address.

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Today Apple has released an update to their photo workflow app, Aperture. Aperture 2.1, a free update for all Aperture 2.0 users, adds a new, and open, plugin architecture to Aperture. This means it will now be much easier for developers to extend Aperture’s builtin capabilities by writing little bits of codes that plug into the Aperture frameworks (hence the name).

Apple is already working with some developers, and is including a dodge and burn plugin of their own with Aperture 2.1. Aperture 2.1 is available now, and if you don’t already have Aperture it will cost you $199 (or $99 to upgrade from Aperture 1.0).

It’s just a matter of time until somebody ram-raids an Apple Store, gets caught, and blames Steve Jobs for making products so alluring that they were morally obliged to steal them.  Perhaps that should be the defence strategy for a couple of dastards in Salem, MA, who were caught by police after stealing 332 iPhones from the Rockingham Park Apple Store; they’ve apparently been swiping the coveted handsets since last year, and have taken $132,468 worth of stock in total.

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In that folder filled with photos, how can you quickly find the one you want — without even launching an application? With Quick Look. One of the great new features of Mac OS X Leopard, Quick Look lets you scan a collection of images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files. Find out how you can take advantage of Quick Look in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

It’s not often that we get to do an advice column here, but let’s see how this goes. An email arrived at the office just the other day…

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I work in the engineering college of a large private university, where I manage 6 Mac-based labs. I just tried to order myself a brand new Mac Pro to replacing my aging PowerMac G5 and was told by my dean that the college would no longer be buying Macs because they had absolutely no place in the engineering industry. He said that from this point forward, the college “would only be buying Windows computers, period!”

I know that he is wrong and that there are engineers that use Macs professionally and I can give a few examples to support that. If I am going to win this argument I’m going to need a lot of proof.

Signed,

Mac-lorn Admin

Dear Mac-lorn Admin,

Darling, didn’t you realize the Mac Pro is a Windows machine, and a darned speedy one? Last time I checked, Boot Camp + Mac Pro = a Windows dream! The adult in us loves the reliability and UNIX backbone, but the kid in us loves the GUI and tasty frosting! Having a single machine that can do double or triple duty with Mac apps, BSD/Linux engineering power and Windows compatibility would be the envy of any right-minded academician.

Still, we know that logic isn’t going to sway that mean ole dean of yours. TUAW readers, can you help Mac-lorn? Leave us your testimonials about using Macs in your professional lives — particularly in engineering or in higher ed — in the comments.

Love,

Auntie T.

In his earlier review of MacBook Air, Dan Frakes (macworld.com) thought it “interesting,” but, after using it for three weeks on the road, he now finds MacBook Air “compelling.” Not only does he now consider MacBook Air “a great computer for hardcore road warriors,” he reports that he knows a good number of non-techie people who’ve purchased the Air simply because it does everything they need, in a package that’s smaller, lighter, and more convenient for their around-the-house-and-down-to-the-coffee-shop laptop life. As for me, our family’s new MacBook Air arrived last week.”

According to sources close to iPhone Atlas, we could see a public leak of the iPhone 2.0 as early as this weekend. The update is currently officially available only to folks accepted into Apple’s $99 iPhone Developer program or who have been selected to beta test the release’s enterprise functionality.

Installation of the iPhone OS 1.2 beta generally requires a special signature from Apple, but an underground team has discovered a method for bypassing this signature and installing a modified edition of OS 1.2. This installation method requires the use of “Pwnage,” a tool that leverages an exploit found in the lower levels of the iPhone/iPod Touch bootloader. Exercising the exploit allows these devices to run unsigned code. With this capability in place, Pwnage can modify the iPhone OS 1.2 IPSW (installation file), pre-activating and pre-jailbreaking it.

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“Simply put, there’s never been an easier way to back up,” reports Bob Levitus (chronicle.com) in his review of Time Capsule. After a few minor installation steps, you just “open the Time Machine System Preference pane on your Mac and click a few times. Leopard’s Time Machine backup software takes care of everything else.” And Levitus notes that “in nearly a month of constant use, I’m happy to report that Time Capsule has done its thing every hour without fail, and has never given me trouble.”

Once the second-day rules went into effect for the PWN2OWN competition, allowing browser or email exploits to be used, it didn’t take more than a few minutes for Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff and Mark Daniel from ISE to get their 0day vulnerability to work on the target MacBook Air; they walk away with the laptop and the $10,000 prize.

Since the rules of the contest ensure that the vulnerabilities are immediately turned over to the Zero Day Initiative and the vendors are notified, this hole (presumably in Safari, although possibly in QuickTime or Java as last year’s was) should be patched in due course, and users are no more or less secure today than they were yesterday. It is a little troubling, however, that the other two laptops (Vista and Ubuntu) are still standing.

The fanboy Apple/Microsoft debate may rage on, but don’t doubt that both companies are viewing the iPhone as a big profit opportunity. Fortune has been talking to the Specialized Devices and Applications Group at Microsoft, who are responsible for Mac-friendly software like Office for OS X, and the team there are keen to stress that they’re seeing the coveted Apple cellphone as a prospective platform.

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone. To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president, Specialized Devices and Applications Group, Microsoft

“We do have experience with that environment, and that gives us confidence to be able to do something. The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We’re still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It’s just come out. So we had a guess as to what feasibility would be like, now we’ll really get our head wrapped around that” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president, Specialized Devices and Applications Group, Microsoft

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“The quad-core Xeon-based Apple Xserve is a superbly modern 1U server with powerful options for storage and remote access,” reports Andrew T. Laurence (macworld.com). As a result of his tests, he awards Xserve four mice (out of five) and notes that “the new Xserve’s AFP performance is so fast that I could not muster enough client computers to discover its performance ceiling.”

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told iPod Observer in an interview that he believes Apple has ordered a second batch of 3G iPhone, amounting to 10 million more units on top of the original 10 million first generation iPhone that Apple had already ordered and committed to sell by end of 2008.

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“We’ve tested the Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, the iMac, the Mac Mini, and the XServe,” exclaims Richard Hoffman (informationweek,com). “There’s not a bad Apple among the bunch, and some are truly superb.” In fact, Hoffman stipulates that “the entire product line is one of the strongest Apple’s ever had. Without hyperbole, it may be the best overall line of computers anyone has had, ever.”

No one escapes the TUAW visitation. Our methods are fear, surprise, and a fanatical devotion to the Apple! Under the best of circumstances, management can use our Reaper-like presence to convince everyone they need to get the hell out of Manhattan. In the case of Freeverse Software, the Exodus moment arrived. The entire crew has packed up their East Side offices and headed over to Brooklyn’s fashionable DUMBO district.

We wish the Freeverse crew well in the new office — with luck, those line extensions (like Airburst and Marathon:Durandal for XBox 360), iPhone games, new apps built on legendary engines, and killer vector graphics tools will keep on pumping out of the shop once the river has been crossed. We are particularly eager for an iPhone version of Jared.

A couple of months back, president Ian Lynch Smith and marketing director Brian Akaka were kind enough to show us around the old shop and let us take a few pictures for posterity before the move (gallery below). If you have questions about any of the mystery objects in the pictures, let us know and Brian can clear up any confusion. As for other independent Mac software developers? If you’re in NYC, Denver, Philadephia, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, Knoxville or the UK, let us know when we can visit. We promise not to poke you with a soft cushion.

Love that iPhone look but hating the on-screen keyboard?  Don’t worry, you’re not alone; Ruddy Ugarte was so fed up at smushing his fingers against the touchscreen and ending up with typo-filled emails that he came up with My Touch Keys, a transparent screen protector with cut-outs for the iPhone’s QWERTY keyboard.

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In awarding Safari 3.1 for Windows a four (out of five) star rating, Michael Muchmore (pcmag.com) indicates that in addition to being able to resize its window from any edge, “a slew of new improvements, some unique features, impressive speed, and future-looking standards support makes it a worthy browsing partner.” It gets flying colors for complience with HTML and CSS standards, kudos for color accuracy, raves for speed and memory tests, and a thumbs up for stability: “in a couple of days’ use of the new browser, I wasn’t able to crash it once” in Windows XP SP2, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard.

Doesn’t “Cherry Hill” sound lovely? It will sound even sweeter for Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based Apple fans this weekend when a new Apple Store opens on Route 38, next to A|X Armani Exchange and Mo.Ao.C Cosmetics (that’s right, a Mac store next to a MAC store). The doors will open at 10:00 AM on Saturday, March 29th. You can get full travel directions here. This will be The Garden State’s 10th Apple Store.

Residents of Philadelphia will also benefit, as this store is about 5 miles away from town (for some reason, Philly itself still lacks an Apple Store).

As usual, we ask any TUAW readers who visit the store to share their stories and/or pictures.

Thanks, Rico!

What do you get when you combine 332 iPhones and 2 crooked Apple employees? Felony theft charges, apparently, after a luckless pair of underhanded but enterprising Apple Store workers decided to set up their own iPhone shop using purloined stock from Uncle Steve. Now one is in the slammer, and the other is facing extradition to New Hampshire (from Massachussetts, not from the French Riviera — too bad for him). This all goes to show, crime does not pay — especially when you get caught with $132,000 of hot iPhones.

There is no official word as to what color t-shirts the thieves wore in their day-to-day work, or whether either of them could be reasonably classified as Apple Geniuses.

ComputerWorld posts that ChangeWave Research has studied satisfaction levels for corporate users of Leopard and Windows Vista. As you might expect, the Leopard users are altogether more satisfied than Vista users — up to 5 times more likely to report that they’re “very satisfied” with their operating system — but you might not have known the following:

• Leopard reinforces tooth enamel and ensures brighter, happier smiles.
• Leopard users are more likely to find attractive mates.
• Vista users are subject to early hair loss.
• Leopard helps eliminate embarrassing halitosis.
• Vista users are five times likelier to be audited by the IRS.
• Leopard washes your windows and leaves lemon-scented stacks of pre-folded laundry around your house.

Okay, well maybe not. Consult the ComputerWorld article for the (far less amusing) statistical results. One worthwhile number to note: while 7% of respondents said they’d be buying Apple laptops in the next 90 days, a hold-steady from the previous survey, the likelihood of most other laptop purchases went down since the last time they asked. A MacBook Air effect?

Apple have today released an updated version of the iPhone SDK, the package necessary for developers to code sanctioned third-party applications for the cellphone (and its iPod Touch PMP counterpart). Beta 2 is primarily notable for adding Interface Builder, the drag’n’drop GUI development tool which allows, as its name suggests, coders to put together interfaces for their software. According to the SDK readme file, the rest of the changes are generally tweaks in response to known issues, although there are still outstanding problems Apple are yet to address.

(more…)

It’s just a matter of time until somebody ram-raids an Apple Store, gets caught, and blames Steve Jobs for making products so alluring that they were morally obliged to steal them.  Perhaps that should be the defence strategy for a couple of dastards in Salem, MA, who were caught by police after stealing 332 iPhones from the Rockingham Park Apple Store; they’ve apparently been swiping the coveted handsets since last year, and have taken $132,468 worth of stock in total.

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After a brief false alarm earlier today, it looks like beta 2 of Xcode 3.1 (including the iPhone-ready version of Interface Builder) is actually released. A word of warning: Apple’s servers are getting hammered right now, and it may pay to wait a while before downloading the 2.1 GB package.

While you wait, you can peruse the release notes for Xcode and for Interface Builder. Never hurts to read the documentation. Have a good weekend, all you iPhone coders!

P.S. One of our loyal tipsters, PJ, noted that he sent us an email about 36 hours ago with his surmise (based on a link he saw, behind the Apple developer site login wall, to a Beta 1 -> Beta 2 diffs manifest) that the revised iPhone SDK might be imminent. PJ, for the record, you guessed right.

Thanks Nik + PJ

According to sources close to iPhone Atlas, we could see a public leak of the iPhone 2.0 as early as this weekend. The update is currently officially available only to folks accepted into Apple’s $99 iPhone Developer program or who have been selected to beta test the release’s enterprise functionality.

Installation of the iPhone OS 1.2 beta generally requires a special signature from Apple, but an underground team has discovered a method for bypassing this signature and installing a modified edition of OS 1.2. This installation method requires the use of “Pwnage,” a tool that leverages an exploit found in the lower levels of the iPhone/iPod Touch bootloader. Exercising the exploit allows these devices to run unsigned code. With this capability in place, Pwnage can modify the iPhone OS 1.2 IPSW (installation file), pre-activating and pre-jailbreaking it.

(more…)

In his earlier review of MacBook Air, Dan Frakes (macworld.com) thought it “interesting,” but, after using it for three weeks on the road, he now finds MacBook Air “compelling.” Not only does he now consider MacBook Air “a great computer for hardcore road warriors,” he reports that he knows a good number of non-techie people who’ve purchased the Air simply because it does everything they need, in a package that’s smaller, lighter, and more convenient for their around-the-house-and-down-to-the-coffee-shop laptop life. As for me, our family’s new MacBook Air arrived last week.”

If you fondly remember last year’s CanSecWest hacking challenge — won by researcher Dino Dai Zovi with a Java/QuickTime exploit that allowed him to take over the target MacBook Pro, thereby claiming it as his own — you’ll want to keep your ears open for results of the current challenge, now underway for the 2nd day in Vancouver. This year’s PWN2OWN competition extends the target space to three road warrior laptops: a MacBook Air, a Sony VAIO running Ubuntu and a Fujitsu machine running Vista.

No winners were declared on the first day; that’s no surprise to contest organizers, as the initial set of rules were the most restrictive. Today the ruleset allows for browser and other built-in application exploits by visiting a malicious URL, so it could get more exciting in a hurry.

Update: The MacBook Air has been claimed, per Macworld.

The fanboy Apple/Microsoft debate may rage on, but don’t doubt that both companies are viewing the iPhone as a big profit opportunity. Fortune has been talking to the Specialized Devices and Applications Group at Microsoft, who are responsible for Mac-friendly software like Office for OS X, and the team there are keen to stress that they’re seeing the coveted Apple cellphone as a prospective platform.

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone. To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president, Specialized Devices and Applications Group, Microsoft

“We do have experience with that environment, and that gives us confidence to be able to do something. The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We’re still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It’s just come out. So we had a guess as to what feasibility would be like, now we’ll really get our head wrapped around that” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president, Specialized Devices and Applications Group, Microsoft

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“Simply put, there’s never been an easier way to back up,” reports Bob Levitus (chronicle.com) in his review of Time Capsule. After a few minor installation steps, you just “open the Time Machine System Preference pane on your Mac and click a few times. Leopard’s Time Machine backup software takes care of everything else.” And Levitus notes that “in nearly a month of constant use, I’m happy to report that Time Capsule has done its thing every hour without fail, and has never given me trouble.”

In the rather rarefied atmosphere of web standards compliance, the Acid3 suite of browser tests is like a pro wrestler’s chair to the back of the head: if you can take it and keep standing, that’s very impressive. The Acid3 suite, first released at the beginning of this month, pushes browsers to the very edges of their rendering, SVG, CSS and DOM scripting capabilities — all necessary for a consistent and interoperable Web 2.0 experience.

As with the earlier Acid2 test, there’s been a bit of a horserace among browser development teams to be the first to the finish line with Acid3, including the WebKit squad responsible for Safari’s underlying engine; Acid3 dev Ian Hickson gives major props to Apple and the WebKit devs on his blog, including efforts to clear bugs in the test suite itself (he had to work quite hard to find standards compliance issues in WebKit). On Wednesday evening, both the Opera and WebKit teams declared a 100% score — not a full pass, as there are minor issues to clean up, but nevertheless the test looks like it should. With the Mac nightly build of WebKit available for download, you too can feel the power of this fully operational web standards battle station.

[A quick clarification: While both Opera and WebKit have claimed 100% on Acid3, only one of the browsers -- WebKit -- has a publicly downloadable version right now that can make that score. Opera's build won't be released for another week or so.]

Thanks Adam

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told iPod Observer in an interview that he believes Apple has ordered a second batch of 3G iPhone, amounting to 10 million more units on top of the original 10 million first generation iPhone that Apple had already ordered and committed to sell by end of 2008.

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“The quad-core Xeon-based Apple Xserve is a superbly modern 1U server with powerful options for storage and remote access,” reports Andrew T. Laurence (macworld.com). As a result of his tests, he awards Xserve four mice (out of five) and notes that “the new Xserve’s AFP performance is so fast that I could not muster enough client computers to discover its performance ceiling.”

Almost a year after those two photogs first tried to bring a class-action suit against Apple for supposedly underperforming colors on MacBook and MacBook Pro LCD screens, our own Mike Rose has been proven right — Apple has “quietly settled” the suit, and presumably Apple didn’t have to pay much: the plaintiffs apparently had trouble finding other people who had purchased the laptops solely for the “millions of colors” claim.

Which makes sense — why would you need any more than a few hundred thousand colors on a single screen? Of course, the drawback here is that we’ll never find out if you really can get millions of colors on a MacBook screen, as the photographers wanted. For all we know, they might actually be technically correct — widely recognized as the very best kind of correct.

“We’ve tested the Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, the iMac, the Mac Mini, and the XServe,” exclaims Richard Hoffman (informationweek,com). “There’s not a bad Apple among the bunch, and some are truly superb.” In fact, Hoffman stipulates that “the entire product line is one of the strongest Apple’s ever had. Without hyperbole, it may be the best overall line of computers anyone has had, ever.”

Love that iPhone look but hating the on-screen keyboard?  Don’t worry, you’re not alone; Ruddy Ugarte was so fed up at smushing his fingers against the touchscreen and ending up with typo-filled emails that he came up with My Touch Keys, a transparent screen protector with cut-outs for the iPhone’s QWERTY keyboard.

(more…)

In awarding Safari 3.1 for Windows a four (out of five) star rating, Michael Muchmore (pcmag.com) indicates that in addition to being able to resize its window from any edge, “a slew of new improvements, some unique features, impressive speed, and future-looking standards support makes it a worthy browsing partner.” It gets flying colors for complience with HTML and CSS standards, kudos for color accuracy, raves for speed and memory tests, and a thumbs up for stability: “in a couple of days’ use of the new browser, I wasn’t able to crash it once” in Windows XP SP2, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard.

Codeweavers has released CrossOver Games, a games-specific version of CrossOver, their Windows emulation software. Jeremy White has the story behind the release over on their blog — apparently the application team wasn’t working quite as quickly as they wanted, but the games team was chugging right along in terms of compatibility, so they decided to go ahead and ship what they’d done with games on its own.

The compatibility list isn’t bad (most of the Steam stuff is on there, which is great, although it is a little weird that they brag about World of Warcraft and EVE Online, considering that those two run natively on Mac just fine; guess you Linux folks need your MMO fix, too) but nothing really jumps out here that might encourage you to use CrossOver rather than just, say, Boot Camp-ing the game up yourself. DirectX 10 is apparently causing problems, too, since neither Crysis, Gears of War, or Unreal Tournament III are on there.

Still, a valiant effort, and if you’re desperate to get one of these games working and playable on your Mac (and don’t have a spare copy of Windows sitting around to install with Boot Camp), CrossOver Games might be just what you need. TUAW is working on getting a copy of it, and as soon as we do, we’ll run it through the grinder and see what we can get to come out the other side.

The screen shots below might be a rare sneak peak of the new App Store. As to whether they’re fake or real, only time will tell and it’s up to you to decide. From what I can gather from the images, the look of the supposed App Store appears to be very similar to installer.app with notable features include the ability to browse Featured, Genres, Top 50, Search and Updates.

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Just as many of you thought the Mac mini would die off in favor of a new class of consumer Macs, the rumor mill starts up again. AppleInsider is reporting that the Mac mini may receive an upgrade — and fairly soon, too.

According to AppleInsider, the Mac mini may receive the following upgrades:

• 45-nanometer Core 2 Duo mobile chips starting at 2.1Ghz
• 800MHz front-side bus
• Stepped-up Intel graphics processor (comparable to the one in the consumer MacBook)

AppleInsider remains speculative on a release date, but they’re sure of the forthcoming upgrade. They go on to say that “Penryn-3M-based systems reportedly remained within the engineering build stage as of mid-month.”

Back when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone SDK, he told excited developers that the only applications Apple wouldn’t be permitting through the AppStore were those illegal or pornographic.  Now that some of the dust has settled - and those 100,000+ coders sitting down in front of the SDK! - questions are being asked about just how accurate that statement was.  While it’s open-season for mobile entertainment software such as games, productive apps or messenger clients, developers behind services such as Rhapsody or Napster, who would rival Apple’s own iTunes store, are curious to know Steve Jobs stance on them creating programs for the iPhone.

“It’s an open question at this point how amenable Apple will be to offering products or applications that could conceivably interfere with its own iTunes revenue stream.  The real interesting test case will be Amazon.  Here’s a music vendor selling songs that are clearly compatible with the iPhone. Unlike with Rhapsody or Napster, there’s no DRM you need to make work” Ross Rubin, analyst, NPD Group

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Today Mac OS X hints offers an easily overlooked internationalization hint. You’re probably well aware of the trick where you hold down an iPhone button on the keyboard to view accented variations on the letter being tapped. What you might not have know about was the regional domains. In settings, choose General > Keyboards and enable some of those international keyboards.

Next go to Safari and start to enter a new URL. Tap the globe to switch the active keyboard from US English to some other nationality. (French is shown here.) Finally, tap and hold the .com button. After a second, a regionalized version of .com appears just to the left of the default.

It looks like Steve Jobs sharp criticism of Adobe’s mobile Flash offering was enough to send them scurrying off to download the iPhone SDK. The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] is reporting that Adobe have been examining the public release of the developer’s package, and are considering creating a special iPhone version of the Flash player.

“We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone. We have evaluated [the iPhone SDK] and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves”Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe

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