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

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.

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).

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Nashville, Tennessee – RingtoneFeeder has evolved since its launch in April 2008 and the subscribers are getting more value for their money now than when they signed up originally. When RingtoneFeeder first started the subscribers would be getting just a single ringtone every week.

Currently the subscribers are receiving 4 ringtones every week. One vocal and one instrumental ringtone, both of them in two versions, with and without a ringing sound embedded. This option was made available recently based on user feedback, but the price structure remains the same.

The annual subscription which is priced at just $19.98 will now provide 218 ringtones as the subscriber will

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A short video about the key new features in WordPress v2.6:

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 »

Apple’s Safari web browser is built around the open source web engine called Web Kit. This is developed by the open source community and updated each and every day (and is recompiled nightly).

This ensures that the browser’s ‘engine’ is the most up to date possible, supporting emerging standards and compatibility. Additionally you benefit from faster rendering of pages and their content.

Web kit is available for both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems so the vast majority or users are covered (sorry Linux users!). The Web Kit runs Safari as the front-end application but with Web Kit as the rendering engine running “under the hood”.

To quote the Web Kit site:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60′s S60 WebKit development.

The Web Kit open source home is at webkit.org to download either the Mac OS X or Windows version click on the nightly builds button:

To test your current browser you can run Acid3 Test <- note: this link runs the test. The Acid3 test puts the Read the rest of this entry »

Update:  A further update has been made to Security Update 2007-009, it’s now v1.1

19th December 2007:  Apple has released it’s latest security updates (Security Update 2007-009) comprising of updates to the following items:

Address Book, CFNetwork, ColorSync, Core Foundation, CUPS (x3), Desktop Services, Flash Player Plug-in, GNU Tar, iChat, IO Storage Family, Launch Services, Launch Services, Mail, perl, python, Quick Look (x2), ruby (x2), Safari, Safari RSS, Samba, Shockwave Plug-in, SMB, Software Update, Spin Tracer, Spotlight, tcpdump, XQuery.

The Security Update 2007-009 may be obtained from the Software Update pane in System Preferences, or by using Apple’s Software Downloads web site

For Mac OS X v10.5.1

The download file is named: “SecUpd2007-009.dmg”

For Mac OS X v10.4.11 (Universal)

The download file is named: “SecUpd2007-009Univ.dmg”

For Mac OS X v10.4.11 (PPC)

The download file is named: “SecUpd2007-009Ti.dmg”

Information is also posted to the Apple Security Updates web site

Full details of the updates in this batch follow:

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Most of us have a wide range of applications installed on our Macs. A lot of them are self-updating either when you load them or if you instruct them to look for updates using one of their built-in menu options. Additionally, the Apple Software Update service takes care of keeping the OS updated automatically (accessed via Apple Logo menu item located in the far left of each menu bar).

Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that combines all of the above, plus also managing updates to ALL your applications in one place?

Well, now you can with the website iusethis and it’s associated program AppFresh

Simply register with the website, run the application and you get a custom-built report on your applications and if there’s a newer version available. Where possible you can also initiate a download of the updated application.

The site covers Applications, Apple OS, widgets, plug-ins and preference panes.

It’s a great one-stop-shop to keep your Apple Mac as fresh as a daisy

If you don’t like the idea of a 3rd party application examining your system then there’s even a manual version: simply search for the application on the website and add it to your profile.