Apple to ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard Aug. 28
August 24th, 2009 | 
Author: Apple will ship its newest operating system to customers a little earlier than expected. The company said Monday that Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be available this Friday, August 28.
(Credit: Apple)Apple made it clear from the beginning that Snow Leopard was not as much about adding new features as it was about refining the code in the operating system.
For instance, according to Apple, 90 percent of the Mac OS X code has been worked on for the Snow Leopard release. This isn’t just application code, it also includes working on the Finder, making it more responsive.
Apple says that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous operating system and frees up to 7GB of drive space once installed. No doubt this has to do with the refinements in the operating system, but Snow Leopard also only supports Macs with an Intel-based processors, not the older PowerPC processors.
As for speed increases in Snow Leopard, Apple said that its Mail application loads messages twice as fast, Time Machine does its initial backup 80 percent faster, and the included 64-bit version of Safari is up to 50 percent faster.
Snow Leopard also supports Exchange Server 2007. This means that you can use Mac OS X Mail, Address Book and iCal out of the box with Exchange.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard will cost $29 as an upgrade for Leopard users. For Mac OS X Tiger users, the Mac Box Set, which includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife ’09 and iWork ’09, will cost $169.
Apple had said at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June that Snow Leopard would go on sale in September, though more recently some tech blogs had been bandying about an August 28 date.
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Corporate BlackBerrys to get Google Apps syncing
If your office has given you a BlackBerry for work purposes, you may soon be accessing your Google Apps Gmail, calendar, and contacts via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
On Friday, Google announced that some functionality in Google Apps, its suite of premium enterprise-level applications, will now give company-issued BlackBerrys some push and sync functionality.
The Google Apps Connector promises to push Gmail messages within 60 seconds, and sync in-box actions like assigning labels and archiving messages. You’ll also be able to search contacts from the company’s global address list, a huge bonus for mobile workers. Synchronization between the Google Calendar and the BlackBerry calendar is one-way in this release, with Google’s calendar populating your schedule on the phone. Google plans to include bidirectional calendar syncing in the future.
While the connector opens up syncing to some of the Google Apps, in this iteration it does not sync with Google Docs, the intranet site-hosting app called Google Site, and Google Video. You’ll still be able to view content through the mobile browser, however.
The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (download) is available for free to corporate Google Apps Premier and Education Editions customers, and must be implemented by an IT administrator.
Check out more details in this Google blog post.
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CNETNews Corporate BlackBerrys to get Google Apps syncing http://bit.ly/DoKeS
Photoshop.com adds video hosting, group albums to repertoire
(Credit: Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET, photos by Lori Grunin, Michael Ricca/CNET)Photoshop.com may be Flash-y and Air-y with photo-editing capabilities, but it surprisingly still seems to lag sites like Flickr and Facebook when it comes to various sharing features. For instance, only this week has Adobe launched video-hosting and group album capabilities (available for free accounts as well as paid), long available from its competitors.
There are some done-it-better aspects, however. For example, Adobe allows for larger videos: a maximum of 2GB vs. Flickr’s 150GB/90 seconds. Of course, the more large videos you upload the closer it will push you to the 2GB storage maximum of a free account. As it’s taking forever (it’s up to about an hour and still hasn’t completed) to process my short 177MB video, however–everything gets transcoded to Flash video–I shudder to think how long a 2GB file would take.
There are still a few UI kinks to work out as well. If you e-mail an invite to someone at an e-mail address other than the one connected to their Adobe ID, there’s no way to link the addresses or even allow the person to reply to you with the correct address.
People you invite as Collaborators to Group Albums aren’t automatically added as your friends. And while it notifies you via e-mail of updates to the album there don’t seem to be other notification options, like posting Twitter, Facebook, or even an RSS feed. (Concurrently with the rollout, Adobe updated Photoshop.com’s terms of service. There doesn’t seem to be anything objectionable in the new terms. Yay!)
You can see how Photoshop.com’s editing capabilities stack up against the competition in 15 online photo editors compared.
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WordPress gets own URL shortener
As I have said in recent stories about short URLs, I believe that content management systems (blogging platforms, for example) should have their own short-link generators. Why hand over control of your traffic — and your analytics — to a third party, after all?
Automattic’s WordPress.com has launched just exactly this: its own built-in short-link generator. When you’re creating a post on the WordPress.com service, you get an option to create a wp.me link alongside the post’s default link.
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CNETNews WordPress gets own URL shortener http://bit.ly/u8XgT
Los Angeles gets its Google Apps groove
On August 11, Randi Levin, the chief information officer of the city of Los Angeles, stood before City Council members at a hearing of the information technology committee and made her case for why the nation’s second-largest city should adopt Google Apps.
“The ability to get whatever information the city needs, whenever they need it, on whatever device they need it on will fundamentally change the way the city works and enhance productivity greatly,” she said. “In a fiscal crisis it is difficult to find technology solutions that will save money without requiring a significant capital outlay to achieve those objectives.”
Security concerns have kept many government agencies and large corporations away from Google Apps. That is starting to change. A number of small U.S. cities are using the suite and there are Google Apps pilots in more than a dozen federal agencies. If Los Angeles signs on, it would join the District of Columbia as one of the largest government adoptions.
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CNETNews Los Angeles gets its Google Apps groove http://bit.ly/4ptPH3