Jul

31

Patching a Chink in the Armor

Filed Under Alerts!, Apple News, iPhone | Leave a Comment

iPhone Security Update

A couple of programmers revealed at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas this week (actually earlier than that – they felt Apple wasn’t listening and they were going to reveal the vulnerability publicly) the following security flaw in the iPhone’s new 3.0 software:

The flaw reportedly affects not only the iPhone but also other phones running Windows Mobile and Google’s Android operating system, although the iPhone has gained the most significant publicity regarding the issue due to its high-profile status.

As disclosed by Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner, the vulnerability lies in the modification of data that accompanies text messages and is not seen by the user. Because most operating systems use similar mechanisms to handle SMS data, the vulnerability affects a range of operating systems and devices.

Apple has released a patch to this security issue. If you plug in your iPhone iTunes will detect the 3.0.1 update (beware those of you with unlocked and jailbroken iPhones – you may find your phone unusable after the update – if you don’t know what that means then you probably won’t be affected).

Jul

25

Augmented Reality

Filed Under Very Very Cool, iPhone | 1 Comment

This is not a post about drugs. It is however, about the next generation of Apps coming to an iPhone near you:

Augmented reality uses the device’s GPS, camera and digital compass to overlay real-time data onto live video. Other possibilities include iPhone games as well as the Layar browser we’ve highlighted before…

Augmented Reality is described as a combination of real-world and computer-generated data, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

This type of app won’t be available until the next update of the iPhone OS (3.1) comes out – but I like where this is going…

Jul

14

Word Play

Filed Under Applications, Rants, Uncategorized, Views | 2 Comments

Something that comes up a lot for my clients is the collective dislike of most things Microsoft – especially Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage). The current Mac version of this monolithic suite is Office 2008. As Darrell Etherington points out in a recent NY Times article:

Sometimes I swear Office 2008 was just a ploy to get me to install Windows on a Boot Camp partition and run Office 2007. I find command and menu placement to be completely unintuitive and just plain awkward on the Mac version.

Those who use Excel a lot have a special hate on for the suite and continue to keep the older 2004 version around. To make matters worse those business users who require access to Exchange networks for email and calendaring functions have to purchase the more expensive Standard edition which runs over $500 rather than the Home/Student edition of old for $199 and which included 3 licenses and support for this type of system.

The biggest problem seems to be that many users are afraid to move away from Office applications for fear of not being able to share or open documents with and from others. Thank goodness there are alternatives. One is Google Docs – basically online versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Couple that with Google Mail and Google Calendar and you have a full-featured suite of applications – and it’s FREE.

Sometimes it depends on what you want. If you’re looking for a decent word processor, nothing fancy etc.. then you might consider another free alternative – Bean:

Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It doesn’t do footnotes or pre-defined styles and is only partially compatible with Word’s file formats

However, it does the job for most things. There is also Apple’s iWork 09 Suite and it’s companion iWork.com (still in beta) which comprises three applications: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. These are excellent alternatives to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Documents created in iWork 09 can be exported to Microsoft’s versions and they in turn can be imported. Microsoft is currently working Office 2010 and supposedly the Mac version will not be coming out at the same time:

Apple Mac users shouldn’t expect to get any of the new features being touted in Microsoft’s Office 2010 in the near future the company has said.

Microsoft has said that the new office suite, announced on Monday, will go on sale in the first half of 2010 for PC users, however isn’t likely to come to the Mac OS until either late 2010 or as far out as 2011.

Yet another alternative is OpenOffice – a free suite of applications very similar to Office from MS. In the meantime I suggest checking out alternatives to the evil empire’s offerings and not to feel boxed in by the marginalization approach Microsoft often takes towards the Mac.

Jul

3

Beam Me Up Scotty

Filed Under Very Very Cool | Leave a Comment

This is going to be amazing – when can the rest of us can our hands on it?!

Creating the app you see above was a matter of combining those technologies–first, the speech recognition part, which transcribes what’s being said, and then applying Sakhr’s know-how in translating the text that’s produced. Zoinks! The future, apparently, is now. And while the military applications are obvious, we can’t help but think the commercial applications are far more vast. How cool would it be to have something like this working for you while hiking in the wilds of India, or China, or any other Federation planet?

Check out the article here.