Mac

⇒ Intuit To Rewrite Quicken, Demos TurboTax 2008 (link from Jan 19, 2008)

Oh, thank God. After trying a number of other financial apps for the Mac, I keep coming back to Quicken, because no matter how poorly it works, or how much it fails to integrate with the rest of the OS (e.g., ⌘+A opens the accounts window instead of selecting all; ⌘+D deletes entries), it's still the only financial package that does everything I want it to. The closest I ever came to switching was using Cha-Ching, which I even paid for because I thought it was the one, but I couldn't deal with the combined register view. I'll be extremely pleased when a new Mac Quicken hits stores. I'll be the first in line to purchase it.

⇒ iPhone 1.1.3 firmware is awesome (link from Dec 31, 2007)

According to this video, which I'm inclined to believe (because it's cool and makes me happy), the 1.1.3 iPhone update includes the ability to move items around the homescreen and to add Safari bookmarks directly to the homescreen. It also includes cell-tower triangulation for location-based searching in Google Maps, and (finally) multiple SMS recipient functionality. I can't wait. Here's a link to their original news story and a photo gallery of the updates.

⇒ It'll be time to get an iPhone when... (link from Jun 20, 2007)

...when AT&T Wireless finally brings 3G data access to Lexington. The link goes to the AT&T Wireless coverage map. Once you've entered a city or ZIP code, you can click the checkbox under the map to show 3G coverage in that area. According to the map, Louisville and Frankfort both have coverage, but Lexington does not. Yet. Does anyone know of anywhere online that I might find a 3g rollout schedule?

⇒ Just completed my first SuperDuper! backup (link from Jun 18, 2007)

After 36 hours and three failed attempts, I finally finished my first SuperDuper! backup. The first attempt, at work, threw an error after a few hours while I was trying to backup to our main network data drive. The second was at home, trying to backup over the network to the USB drive linked to my Windows PC, which threw an error at about 3.9 GB. For the third attempt, I brought the USB drive downstairs and hooked it directly to my machine. It stalled, throwing no error, at about 4GB. I assumed at this point that the troll stopping my backup was the ~ 4 GB file size limit on FAT32 drives, so I moved everything off the USB drive, repartitioned and reformatted it into HFS+, and it finally worked like a charm.

Was I doing anything obviously wrong, other than trying to break the rules of the FAT32 file system (and is that really where the problem was)? If you know anything about it, leave me a comment. Thanks!

⇒ Safari for Windows, 0day exploit in 2 hours (link from Jun 13, 2007)

Ouch.

I downloaded and installed Safari for Windows 2 hours ago, when I started writing this, and I now have a fully functional command execution vulnerability, triggered without user interaction simply by visiting a web site.

I have a very hard time understanding how Apple didn't anticipate something like this. One would think that the kind of people who would be excited to download and install Safari on their PCs are the same kind of people who will be instantly turned off by talk of security exploits and other problems with the browser.

⇒ Safari 3 Public Beta (link from Jun 12, 2007)

Safari, the native Mac OS web browser, is now available for Windows users. Safari is a nice enough browser, but I'm too hooked on my Firefox extensions to really switch.

⇒ Daring Fireball on WWDC '07 Keynote announcements (link from Jun 12, 2007)

WWDC 2007 feels more like ““WWDC 2006 2.0” - the same news, now less vague.

John also has an interesting (and to my mind, probably 100% accurate) take on Safari for Windows.

⇒ Binary Bonsai on WWDC '07 announcements (link from Jun 12, 2007)

I have to agree with his assessment of Spaces, because I work the same way.