One of the driving forces behind the popularity of cloud computing and services like Dropbox and Apple's iCloud is the level of accessibility that it brings, and in a lot of circumstances it can make day-to-day computing activities a lot simpler than before. Rather than having to make constant backups of information or carrying external hard drives or USB drives around with us, having important data and files stored in the cloud allows us to quickly get access to that information from pretty much wherever we are as long as we have a network connection.
It’s not a secret that today is the day when Apple announced their earnings and sales figures for the third quarter of 2012, but it may come as an exciting shock that the earnings call managed to slip in a little piece of information relating to OS X Mountain Lion.
Every year, scores of security experts gather up in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the annual Black Hat conference, and plenty of major companies have swallowed their pride and involved themselves in an event which doesn't view exposing security vulnerabilities as taboo. Apple, however, has always been a glaring absentee, but in a real turn up for the books, the Cupertino company has agreed to give a presentation at 2012's Black Hat, taking place this Thursday.
Apple is all set to release the next version of OS X – OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” – as we’ve received news that the company has sent out (or “seeded”, the correct technical term for procedure) the code complete Golden Master version of Mountain Lion to specialists at AppleCare. Check out the details after the jump.
Of all the features that arrived when iOS 5 reached the end-user back in October of last year, iMessage has been arguably the most significant, and by now allowing messages to be sent and received in a faster, more secure manner across a variety of platforms, it has to go down as one of the best in the business. Granted, it has its occasional downtime, but it's not bad as is, and with the service also arriving to the Mac with OS X Mountain Lion, it will almost certainly become the sole mode of quick communication to many Apple enthusiasts.
Firefox's well-documented six week release cycle means as soon as one version arrives, the beta of the next edition is no more than a couple of days away. True to that motif, just two days after Firefox 14 was released for Windows, Mac and Linux, Firefox 15 beta has arrived, which, among other things, takes care of a few nagging memory leaks.
If you heard some murmurings earlier this month about the future release of yet another mobile operating system and wondered if you had been living in some kind of Total Recall fantasy then don't worry, you can rest assured that reality is firmly in your grips. Mozilla announced that they are planning on entering the mobile market next year with their Firefox OS, with the intention being to allow Alcatel and ZTE to ship some bottom of the market type devices powered by the operating system.
Many of us here at Redmond Pie use Windows on a Mac. There are two reasons behind this controversial use of a Mac. The first is that because productivity takes a huge hit when you can’t find certain things in OS X that you’ve been sub-consciously using in Windows for so many years; we’re not saying these features aren't there, it’s just that it takes extra time and effort to find them. Secondly, there are a few programs that are either not available on OS X (Windows Live Writer and Visual Studio is a prime example) or doesn’t work as well (Google Chrome, for instance!).
With iOS 6 beta 3 having just been seeded to developers, details within the changelog concerning the domain names of email addresses are are just beginning to become apparent, and those with a .me account should be aware that the transition to iCloud.com is now underway.
As 9to5Mac speculates, Apple could finally launch OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) on July 25th, the justification behind the guesstimate being the planned overnight updates occurring at Apple Retail stores on July 24th. During this update period, staff would assemble various marketing information such as posters, while also installing the brand new operating system on each and every Mac within a store. Given Apple has already confirmed OS X Mountain Lion would arrive later this month in a $19.99 upgrade over at the Mac App Store, the 25th would seem as legitimate a date as any, but although 9to5Mac seems fairly sure, reiterated that it is more knowledge-based estimation than unofficial confirmation.
