The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

iPhone OS 3.0 is coming, preview on March 17th

by Joshua Topolsky, posted Mar 12th 2009 at 12:06PM

We just got the announcement, iPhone OS 3.0 is coming. Set your clocks, mark your calendars. It’s going down March 17th. Apparently, we’ll get a sneak peak at the new OS, as well as a look at a brand new version of the SDK. Exciting stuff indeed, and we’ll be there live at 10am PST (1pm EST) with the liveblog. Apple’s calling this an “advance preview of what we’re building,” so we’re not expecting anything ready to go as of the 17th, but hopefully this will allow developers to start building toward future functionality (hey, how about some push notifications?), and presumably users won’t have too many months to wait after that for the real deal.

via iPhone OS 3.0 is coming, preview on March 17th.

iPhone 3.0 to Get MMS, Tethering, and Finally… Copy and Paste?

Friday March 13, 2009 10:03 AM EST; Category: iPhone

Written by Arnold Kim

Mac Rumors

News that Apple will be hosting a media event next week about iPhone 3.0 has generated a lot of speculation about what might be coming in the new release.

BoyGeniusReport claims to have heard two possible features that would certainly make many iPhone users happy. They believe that iPhone 3.0 will introduce MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and Tethering.

MMS would finally offer iPhone users the ability to send photos by way of SMS, and tethering would allow you to share your iPhone’s internet connection with your laptop computer. An alleged Steve Jobs email even confirmed that Apple had been working on a thethering solution, so it certainly seems feasible. BoyGeniusReport’s record, however, has been spotty, so we can’t be entirely confident of the report.

A more interesting report comes from John Gruber about his “guesses” for iPhone 3.0 from back at Macworld:

First, a new home screen app (a.k.a. SpringBoard), designed from the ground up for a system where users have a few dozen or more extra apps installed. Managing dozens of apps on the iPhone today is simply a pain in the ass. Second, maybe an answer to the question of where the background notification API is — you know, the one we were told at WWDC to expect a few months ago, but which we haven’t heard a word about since. And maybe — pretty please, Mr. Forstall, with sugar on top — copy and paste.

While Gruber labels this as his “wish list”, we have good reason to believe that these features will indeed be found in the iPhone 3.0 firmware. That could mean a better app-managing SpringBoard (with categories?), a solution to “push” notifications (background tasks?), and, yes… even copy and paste.

Finally, there has been evidence in the latest version of Snow Leopard’s CoreLocation framework (which is shared by the iPhone) that Apple is building in support for magnetometers, which could suggest the use of a digital compass in future devices, much like the Android G1.

via iPhone 3.0 to Get MMS, Tethering, and Finally… Copy and Paste? – Mac Rumors.

Does your Mac wake-up at the same time each day regardless of the energy saving settings?  Mine did, until I found this fix (below).  The latest Software Update patch also fixes this issue.

Mac OS X 10.5: Computer starts up unexpectedly at the same time each day

* Last Modified: September 15, 2008

* Article: TS1831

Symptoms

In Mac OS X 10.5 through 10.5.4, your Mac may start up unexpectedly each day (at midnight UTC/GMT) even if it is not scheduled to start up in Energy Saver preferences in System Preferences.

The local time when the computer may start up will vary depending on which time zone you are located in and whether or not daylight savings time is being observed. For example: Midnight UTC/GMT may be 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) or 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST).

This could happen after upgrading from Mac OS X 10.4 to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Products Affected

Mac OS X 10.5

Resolution

Download and install Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later.

Additional Information

If you’re not ready to update to Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later, you can use this workaround:

1. Choose Go to Folder from the Finder’s Go menu

2. Type or paste the following, then press Return:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

3. In the SystemConfiguration folder, locate and delete the file named “com.apple.AutoWake.plist”

Your computer should no longer start up at midnight UTC/GMT (unless you later add a scheduled event in Energy Saver preferences).

Tip: If you need to schedule your Mac to sleep, restart, or shut down at a specific time, you should also schedule it to wake or start up at a time when the computer is likely to already be powered on. For example, if you need the computer to shut down every day at 6:00 PM, you could schedule it to wake or start up at 5:55 PM. The computer will not start up at midnight UTC/GMT on any days, as long as it is scheduled to start up or wake at some other time at least one day a week.

Mac OS X 10.5: Computer starts up unexpectedly at the same time each day

Breaking news about Google’s GMail, it’s updates and enhancements can be found at the GMail Blog

If you like to keep your finger on the GMail pulse then this is a great place to start.

This is a tale of a crashed iPod Touch and it’s subsequent painless restore:

A few days ago my iPod Touch (16GB) crashed and went into restore / recovery mode, or perhaps I put it into restore / recovery mode accidentally. At boot-up it showed the restore / recovery screen: a USB cable being plugged into iTunes (see image on the right).

In case you don’t know:

• to quit a hung application you press and hold the home button, for 5 to 10 seconds
• to force a complete device restart you press and hold the lock/unlock button along with the home button for about 5 to 10 seconds

I’d been having a few problems with it, prior to the crash: it wouldn’t stay connected to my home wi-fi network and had started behaving strangely. I forced a device restart (maybe 2 or 3 times) and it then showed the ‘restore-me’ icon (as described above).

Maybe it ‘decided’ it needed a restore (as system problems were apparent) or maybe I didn’t let go of the home button – I was distracted reading a web page at the time about the upcoming Apple event ( New  MacBooks look amazing BTW).

I re-connected it to iTunes which detected an iPod Touch in restore/recovery mode and offered to re-flash/reload the firmware and operating system and I accepted – the firmware and OS were loaded, verified and the iPod Touch rebooted (took about up 30 mins up until the reboot I think).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using Parallels desktop for a few weeks now and here are my inital impressions.

From the first moment of loading the install package I’ve been really impressed by Parallels implementation of co-hosting Windows on my Mac. From the beginning of the windows install everything has gone smoothly and without any incidents.

I choose ‘Express Install’, ‘Windows XP‘. I was prompted for my windows license key and install disk (it has to be a Service Pack 2 build – see this page for details on how to upgrade your install disk from SP1 to SP2). Parallels handled the windows install from this point onwards performing a quick and efficicent unattended install of Windows XP (no user intervention needed). After a couple of the windows instance restarts (part of the usual Windows rigmarole) I had a brand new clean windows desktop within a Mac application window.

Interestingly, of the many numerous installs I’ve done of Windows (must be well in excess of 100) this was the fastest and smoothest I’ve ever encountered.

Parallels Desktops allow you to run Windows in 3 modes:

Read the rest of this entry »

In my system console log I noticed errors connected with Apple’s built-in updating routines, and over in Apple’s discussion forum I had a thread describing the problem I was having with the Software Update process. I’m posting details of this issue here in case it proves helpful to others.

Symptoms included errors in the log reading:

• Package Authoring Error: installation-check results requires a message
• JavaScript error “Undefined value” while running “__choice_su_visible”
• __choice_su_visible returned error: Undefined value

At the same time updates that my Mac may have needed were not downloading automatically. It looked like Software Update had failed. Read the rest of this entry »