All of the big guns are looking to get in on the cloud computing act, and Microsoft is no exception with its SkyDrive service. As per the MSDN blog, much work has gone into improving SkyDrive over the course of the last couple of months, and now, a preview of the SkyDrive desktop client has been released, along with a plethora of improvements to existing services.
All those iPhone 4S and Siri fans who can't put the intelligent assistant down due to their love of her dulcet tones will be more than happy to find out that you can give your Mac Siri’s voice, yes, make your Mac sound just like Siri! When Apple launched OS X Lion; they introduced a large array of new features, with one of the main ones being the inclusion of Nuance powered speech technology.
In an attempt to push people towards iCloud and away from the imminently defunct MobileMe, Apple is reportedly offering users of the old cloud syncing service a free copy of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Just one month after Apple released the first revision to its Developer Preview of the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) OS, the third Developer Preview has just been seeded, and as the title reveals, it's only for those paying subscribers of Apple's Developer program.
Although patents are often filed at concept stage, they usually remain pending for a period of time - sometimes several years - before a patent is actually granted by the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Today, Apple has finally been granted the patent for the interface of its iconic iTunes Store, some eight years after the patent was initially filed.
Apple's long running spat with Samsung over just about everything they've ever sold had provided months of entertainment already. Both companies have sought sales bans in their quests to disrupt sales of new devices around the globe, and the spat shows no sign of coming to an end any time soon.
As of late, cloud storage services have been gaining significantly in popularity. Both Microsoft and Apple are involved in the space in some form, on top of highly successful startups entirely dedicated to providing such services (i.e. Dropbox). Thus, it only makes sense that Google would want a piece of the action as well. Since 2010, there have been murmurs that Google was planning to launch a cloud storage service, and, more recently, it was revealed on good authority that such a service was certainly in the pipeline, and that it is going to be called Google Drive.
Just as the Flashback Trojan for Mac was being dealt with by OS X users across the world, a new version of a backdoor Trojan for Apple's operating system capitalizes on an exploit in Microsoft Word in order to spread.
While Macs have been notorious for being impervious to viruses - at least in terms of perception, while they were vulnerable, far more viruses were produced for Windows than OS X - their reputation for impeccable security is certainly being questioned now. Flashback, malware built to grab private information such as passwords entered in by users in applications, has evolved over time into a very dangerous piece of malicious software. In its beginnings, it required user interaction - through a dodgy looking Adobe Flash Installer - to lodge itself into one's Mac.
Phillippe Starck, a highly-regarded and respected contemporary designer, has revealed in an interview that he's been aiding Apple with a new product set for release in the next eight months, which he describes as being "revolutionary".
