It’s Tuesday, it’s changes happening at Apple. Three things happened today: two pretty much anticipated, and one that wasn’t foreseeen.

As expected, Macbook Pros got an upgrade: new multi-touch trackpads as recently introduced on the Macbook Air, and the 17″ Macbook Pro gained the LED backlighting introduced to the 15″ version some months ago.

What was unexpected that the processors inside both the Macbook Pro and the Macbook got a bit of a speed bump – Macbook Pros are available now with Core 2 Duos at 2.4 and 2.5GHz, the Macbooks at 2.1 and 2.4GHz.

Macbooks are in stock now on the UK Apple website, Macbook Pros are delayed by 4-5 days.

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Macbook, Macbook Pro, update

Posted: February 26th, 2008 under News.
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New on Software Update: Keyboard Firmware Update for Macbooks and Macbook Pros. Ever had the situation where your laptop has been sitting idle, you press a key to wake it and nothing happens? We’ve had that many times, and we’ve never been sure if it was us or the computer at fault. We think it’s safe to say it was the computer all along.

Run Software Update now to get it if you need it. It doesn’t even need a reboot.

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Macbook Pro, Macbook, update, keyboard

Posted: February 20th, 2008 under News.
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Continuing the trend set from Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld, the Apple Store closed for an update today – the new business product being XSan 2. Interestingly though, there’s also a product missing from the shops – Apple’s previous RAID storage arrays for XServes.

XSan 2 gives a number of new and improved features: easier setup and configuration – Leopard setup recognises Fibre Channel controllers and configures accordingly, and the rest of the configuration is now handled by wizards. The Admin tool can manage multiple nodes and now has inbuilt realtime monitoring and notification. Most importantly, a single workstation or server can now access multiple XSan volumes at the same time directly, without the slow hop via Ethernet. This is ideal for any IT architecture which works in a staged manner towards the final production environment.

Initial impressions are that this is a solid and useful step up from XSan, and is priced at $999. UK Pricing isn’t yet available at time of writing.

But where have the Apple XServe RAID drive arrays gone? There’s no sign of them on the US site, though they’re still visible for now on the UK site. On the US site all that’s visible are Promise RAID subsystems – it may be that Apple have left the storage market. That’s a shame, as their cost per Gb was one of the best available.

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XServe, XSan, Promise, VTrak, XServe RAID

Posted: February 19th, 2008 under News.
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Not to be left out, Tiger users also receive an update today: Security Update 2008-01. The list of fixes can be found here.

Some of the fixes also apply to Leopard users, these are rolled up into 10.5.2. We think that’s bad practice: we like to be able to install security fixes quickly and easily rather than going through the process of testing and installing a full OS update. But clearly we’re not getting that, this time. Oh well.

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10.5.2, leopard, security, Tiger, 10.4.11

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
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You’ve no doubt read everywhere that Apple have released 10.5.2 for client and server. There’s a list of fixes documented for the client version, but the article for the server version isn’t very forthcoming.

As well as 10.5.2, there’s a update to Leopard’s graphics drivers. Hopefully this will relieve the freezes we’ve been having. For Web site design and deployment, there’s also the WebObjects 5.4.1 update. This fixes bugs inn deployment, database compatibility and web service serialisation.

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leopard, OSX, 10.5.2

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
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OK, perhaps it is asking a little bit much when the purchase price is 5p less than £100, but Microsoft Office 2008 Home and Student edition has no Microsoft Exchange support.

Now undoubtedly you’ll be able to get and send your email via IMAP or POP (as long as the IT Staff have allowed this) but as for the collaborative features? Forget it.

The people who this really messes about with is education professionals – or more importantly, their budgets in situations where Exchange is the central mail system. Rather than paying £100, they’ll now need to pay £349 (£219 on upgrade) for the required functionality. Ouch.

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microsoft, office 2008

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
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According to those nice people at O2 today, there is no need to extend your existing contract if you buy a new 16Gb iPhone – and that’s good news.

They suggest that all you need to do is replace the sim in your new phone with the sim from your existing phone. I’m guessing that this might not be right – in the US, a different process is reported as needed. Be aware of that, I think it actually may be the same here.

Either way, if you need to have more storage for stuff, at least you’re not going to need to extend your contract by several months.

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16Gb, iphone, O2

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
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We like internal IT. We think it’s vital from a company management and legal point of view. We also strongly believe in giving your users the tools they need to do their job. So while we see a need for Google Apps Team Edition for very small and small companies, we think that as soon as you have your IT infrastructure in your own control, it should be banned in-house.

What is it? It’s a simple to set up version of Googles’ existing web-based applications – word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, instant messaging and Start page. It doesn’t contain Gmail for the moment. It allows users sharing the same email domain to easily collaborate with each other, sharing documents and calendars.

It’s free for the moment, and does allow for upgrading to the other Google Apps products.

However, I’d still have my corporate data in my server, thanks.

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google, google apps

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
Comments: 1

This may help you more than it helps us – we’re regular travellers to the US, not Europe. However, the EU Commission have called for price reductions for roaming SMS and data traffic by the 1st July, or they will intervene and regulate.

We’ll see how this develops. The mobile companies found ways to wiggle around last years’ voice cost cuts – by requiring you to sign up to them, or to require a contract extension. The UK Government was actively against the cuts too.

We don’t hold out much hope of these proposed cuts coming to much, but any price drop is better than none.

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tariff, eu, mobile data, sms, regulation, mobile

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
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An article in MacWorld today goes into a really clumsy way of counting words in Pages documents. It surprises us that Pages doesn’t have better word-counting capabilities, but there’s a much better solution than the one in that article.

A freeware service called WordService, from Devon Technologies, installs (amongst other things) a “Statistics” item onto the Services menu, available halfway down the application menu. Select some text, choose Statistics, and you’ll get a word count for the selected block. Simple!

WordService is available from Devon Technologies’ freeware services web page.

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wordservice, macworld

Posted: February 9th, 2008 under Stuff We Use.
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