Apple Services Keep Apps Fresh

November 29, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

Anthony asked:


Software Update Server and client-side update tools form the core of the patching model.

Apple is slowly introducing client and server software elements that wrangle together all the disparate Apple hardware and software installed across the network by giving administrators control over what applications and patches are presented to users for installation.

Mac OS X Server already provides administrators centralized control over what software updates are presented to Mac clients, and it seems a sure bet that the same software platform will logically extend to the Apple iPhone. Add some support for Apple applications on Microsoft Windows PCs, and it would not be beyond the realm of possibility to find companies of all sizes suddenly adding a few Apple servers to their data centers.

Back in 2005, Apple added the SUS (Software Update Server) to Mac OS X Server 10.4, which allowed companies to host a local patch and application repository (similar to Windows Server Update Services). Mac clients could then be configured to check with the local repository for available installation packages. This allowed the company to use less bandwidth (since the files needed to be downloaded from the Internet only once) and enabled administrators to centrally control when updates would happen while enforcing a level of software standardization across their client computer base—as long as those clients were Macs.

The next version of SUS (that came with Mac OS X Server 10.5) took it a step further, offering updates for Apple’s Windows applications—such as iTunes or QuickTime—but only for Windows XP or Windows Vista installed on Apple hardware via Boot Camp.

Assuming the Windows via Boot Camp updates work as advertised (which seems to be a big “if,” as I could find no documentation for how to reconfigure the Boot Camp clients to check with a local SUS and very little discussion of the feature online), there seems little reason why Apple could not extend that support to Windows installations on non-Apple hardware, save for Apple obstinacy.

Many Windows PCs already have Apple client update software installed, since the application has been installed automatically with iTunes for the last several months. Users became all too aware of this update applet recently, when Apple started offering the Safari 3.1 browser as an opt-out “upgrade”—even if the browser was not yet installed on the PC.

But this version of the client update software does not appear to be configurable to point to a local repository. I’ve combed through the Windows registry and file system, and I have not been able to locate where the address for the update server is defined—suggesting Apple has hard-coded it into the application somewhere. Whether this will be remedied in future revisions is simply speculation at this point.

Also in the realm of speculation is the role an SUS could play in the corporate use of the iPhone. The next major revision to the iPhone software will introduce a number of enterprise-friendly features to the mobile platform—including Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Cisco VPN, remote wipe, digital certificate support, application installation and policy-based configuration.

Apple has even started a $299 Enterprise iPhone Developer Program—enabling developers to create what the company calls “proprietary, in-house applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.” But little has been said to this point about how the configuration policies and these homegrown applications will be deployed to iPhones in an enterprise setting. SUS would be a logical platform for that kind of deployment.

However, SUS has some serious limitations for this kind of deployment. For instance, you cannot have different software distribution policies on the same SUS server. If you want different versions of applications available to different clients, then you need to have another SUS iteration available with the different policy.

This may be adequate for applications on a computer—Apple representatives would argue that the majority of IT departments want to keep software versions consistent—but this would definitely not be the case for a mobile device. Different departments would require specialized applications—so a one-size-fits-all application package would be a poor fit indeed.

There can be no doubt that Apple is courting the enterprise to the iPhone. There can also be no doubt that Apple is releasing tools to help administrators control the sprawl of Apple software in an organization. But we can only hope the two themes will intertwine to provide administrators a single solution to rein in both Apple’s hardware and software footprint on all devices.



The Introduction Of The iPhone Advances The Cell Phone Industry

October 5, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

Daniel Millions asked:


With the release of the Apple iPhone, multimedia communications has evolved to an amazing level. The Apple iPhone has all the features you would expect from a modern cell phone; you can make calls, conference, merge and hold.

You can text message and add custom made ringtones to individualize the call alert for all your friends and family. But that is only the beginning of the useful and entertaining functions this state of the art communications device can perform.

The iPhone originally held a four-gigabyte memory card. That has subsequently been discontinued in favor of eight gigabytes and soon the iPhone will be available with a huge sixteen gigabytes of onboard memory. One must pick the size they need when they purchase their iPhone as there are no add-on memory card expansion slots. Software updates and security patches for the operating system are delivered through the iTunes interface.

The Apple iPhone can hold an entire library of music and as an improvement over the old iPods, can be cataloged alphabetically by title, artist, genre, playlists and more. With an iTunes account you can create your own custom ringtones from the songs you have purchased through iTunes.

Like iTunes, the iPhone allows scrolling through a cover art gallery of songs in your library as well. If you get a phone call while listening to your tunes, the iPhone will automatically fade the song out and fade it back into play on the completion of your call without missing a beat.

Using an adapted Safari web browser, the iPhone will allow internet access through a local WiFi connection. Web pages can be displayed in either portrait or landscape orientation and you can switch between the two by merely rotating the iPhone in the direction you wish to have your web page shown.

The iPhone does not support Flash or Java but a specially created program will allow the viewing of YouTube video on the iPhone. The Apple iPhone will accept streaming video and you can watch television show feeds through your iPhone. The iPhone can access Google Maps for ease in finding directions and locations from wherever you may be.

There are only a few physical buttons on the iPhone. Most of the command input takes place on the skin sensitive touchscreen display. The technology that runs this touchscreen allows multi-speed scrolling, hover, magnification and menu command entry all through various finger commands.

Being electrically sensitive, you can not use a stylus or a gloved hand to utilize the touchscreen of the iPhone but only bare skin or special gloves that are electrically conductive. The touchscreen is a three and a half inch liquid crystal 160 pixel per inch HVGA screen.

The headphones for the Apple iPhone also have a built-in microphone and has a multi-function button that allows you to play, pause and skip your music tracks as well as answer and hang up the phone without having to touch the iPhone itself. The onboard speaker can be used for phone calls and media files but it does not include voice recording. Wireless “Bluetooth” earpieces can be obtained for the iPhone but must be purchased separately.

There is a built-in two megapixel still photo camera included in the iPhone package and the ability to insert the pictures into the email function. With the variety of features that are included in the iPhone one will hardly miss that there is not a video camera built-in. Apple routinely creates new features and functions for the iPhone and these widgets and web applications can be found on their website through the Safari browser links.



iPhone Development projects

September 17, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

Stig Kristoffersen asked:


You now have opportunities to learn programming of your iPhone for FREE, enabling you to make killer applications on the Apple gadget that has touched many through the last year. You have the options to either download free training documents to be able to for FREE follow lectures at Stanford University on how to program the iPhone.

Apple and NDA

Apple has lifted its NDA and developers are now free to talk about developing for the iPhone. In this article you’ll get familiar with the opportunity you have with iPhone SDK to build simple application and get a preliminary taste of what the mysterious Object-C is.

iPhone Development training through electronic documents

Developer Learning Solutions is a technology company specializing in hands-on training on the latest Microsoft and Mac OS X technologies. They have made available a PDF file with introduction to iPhone development.

If you have always wanted to learn iPhone development but do not know how to get started, download their free PDF file on Getting Started with iPhone Development. Try it out and see how easy it is to get started!

The document covers SDK for firmware 2.1, and therefore features seen in version 2.2 of iPhone firmware are absent. However it will give you a good starting point and great platform to explore more at a later stage.

Learning iPhone Development through your iTunes

If you want to be really sophisticated, you can sign up on Stanford University  iTunes U option made available as of April 1st 2009. This FREE course offers you an opportunity to follow Stanford School of Engineers lectures with videos and associated PDF files of lecture notes, to learn how to program iPhone SDK.

What You Need for iPhone Development

To get started with iPhone programming, you’ll need the following:

An Intel Mac running Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.4 The iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 2, which you can download here. The iPhone SDK contains all the tools and utilities you need to develop iPhone applications. In particular, it comes with Xcode 3.1(the development IDE) and the iPhone Simulator that allows you to test your application without needing a real device. Lots of patience and perseverance!

iPhone and iPod Touch are vulnerable to hackers and new viruses

September 12, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

Stig Kristoffersen asked:


holes in iTunes

Are you using iPhone or iPod? Then its about time you udate the software used by these hardware platforms, iTunes and QuickTime.

Security breaches have been found in the software associated and distributed worldwide with the iPod and iPhone from Apple. There are several security leaks of which some are pretty extensive. The most known security holes have been blocked in new patches of these two software applications. There are ten different security holes that can be tightened up through automatic update on both the Windows and Mac OS operating systems.

The errors utilized in QuickTime lies in the media player that is associated with the media software iTunes. Most of the iPod and iPhone users utilize iTunes to update their media player with new music, videos and podcasts. The software iTunes is needed to use the iPhone at all, and to restore, update or handle media files.

The security errors can in worst case make it possible for malicious hackers to install software on your computer that should not be there.

They disguise this destructive and malicious software as movie cuts that will make the users to open them and give access to the hackers. The malicious code will make QuickTime to crash and if possible to install other malicious software to work in batch on your computer without you knowing it at all.

It is really bad news that malicious code is hidden in media files and let users believe that its only a movie they open up and not a malicious code hidden in it. The internet transfers more and more media files, so it is of great concern this trend.

A security hole in iTunes will also be fixed now together with an upgrade patch that will make the software ready for the next version of iPhone operating system 3.0 which is expected within short time.

So my advise to you is to update your applications iTunes and QuickTime now, and make sure you are updating it on a regular basis to implement the latest versions with fixes that at least takes the most common and known security holes in these applications.

 



Introduction of Client and Server software elements

July 24, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

Anthony asked:


Apple is slowly introducing client and server software elements that wrangle together all the disparate Apple hardware and software installed across the network by giving administrators control over what applications and patches are presented to users for installation.

Mac OS X Server already provides administrators centralized control over what software updates are presented to Mac clients, and it seems a sure bet that the same software platform will logically extend to the Apple iPhone. Add some support for Apple applications on Microsoft Windows PCs, and it would not be beyond the realm of possibility to find companies of all sizes suddenly adding a few Apple servers to their data centers.

Back in 2005, Apple added the SUS (Software Update Server) to Mac OS X Server 10.4, which allowed companies to host a local patch and application repository (similar to Windows Server Update Services). Mac clients could then be configured to check with the local repository for available installation packages. This allowed the company to use less bandwidth (since the files needed to be downloaded from the Internet only once) and enabled administrators to centrally control when updates would happen while enforcing a level of software standardization across their client computer base—as long as those clients were Macs.

The next version of SUS (that came with Mac OS X Server 10.5) took it a step further, offering updates for Apple’s Windows applications—such as iTunes or QuickTime—but only for Windows XP or Windows Vista installed on Apple hardware via Boot Camp.

Assuming the Windows via Boot Camp updates work as advertised (which seems to be a big “if,” as I could find no documentation for how to reconfigure the Boot Camp clients to check with a local SUS and very little discussion of the feature online), there seems little reason why Apple could not extend that support to Windows installations on non-Apple hardware, save for Apple obstinacy.

Many Windows PCs already have Apple client update software installed, since the application has been installed automatically with iTunes for the last several months. Users became all too aware of this update applet recently, when Apple started offering the Safari 3.1 browser as an opt-out “upgrade”—even if the browser was not yet installed on the PC.

But this version of the client update software does not appear to be configurable to point to a local repository. I’ve combed through the Windows registry and file system, and I have not been able to locate where the address for the update server is defined—suggesting Apple has hard-coded it into the application somewhere. Whether this will be remedied in future revisions is simply speculation at this point.

Also in the realm of speculation is the role an SUS could play in the corporate use of the iPhone. The next major revision to the iPhone software will introduce a number of enterprise-friendly features to the mobile platform—including Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Cisco VPN, remote wipe, digital certificate support, application installation and policy-based configuration.

Apple has even started a $299 Enterprise iPhone Developer Program—enabling developers to create what the company calls “proprietary, in-house applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.” But little has been said to this point about how the configuration policies and these homegrown applications will be deployed to iPhones in an enterprise setting. SUS would be a logical platform for that kind of deployment.

However, SUS has some serious limitations for this kind of deployment. For instance, you cannot have different software distribution policies on the same SUS server. If you want different versions of applications available to different clients, then you need to have another SUS iteration available with the different policy.

This may be adequate for applications on a computer—Apple representatives would argue that the majority of IT departments want to keep software versions consistent—but this would definitely not be the case for a mobile device. Different departments would require specialized applications—so a one-size-fits-all application package would be a poor fit indeed.

There can be no doubt that Apple is courting the enterprise to the iPhone. There can also be no doubt that Apple is releasing tools to help administrators control the sprawl of Apple software in an organization. But we can only hope the two themes will intertwine to provide administrators a single solution to rein in both Apple’s hardware and software footprint on all devices.



Wow gold—Upward and onward

May 30, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

julia asked:


I am lazy so I don’t have enough time to go out or farming wow gold. HOHO! See you next time!

To buy wow gold online is safe or not? I don’t think anyone can give the exact answer. Many players are crowd at some game forums and communicate with other players often to know much about wow gold. Of course there are some cheats in it. So you should choose a good company and do some research. It is so important that we should keep our money and account safe.

 There was really just one topic on the show last Saturday, and it was patch 3.2. We finally went down all of the new features and class changes we’re expecting in the patch, and laid out (with the help of some of our chat channel folks) who was buffed, who was nerfed, and which classes are, in Turpster’s estimation, “rubbish anyway.” Alex Ziebart and Lesley Smith helped us decode some of the more complicated changes, and of course we answered your emails, including how the fishing daily can make you 4k gold, whether our characters are really getting stronger or not, and Blizzard’s problems with cosmetic items and armor dyes.

 The show is available at any of the links below (or for listening right here on this page). If you haven’t yet subscribed to the show in iTunes (where you can listen to it for free on your iPod or iPhone), please do. And while you’re there, feel free to leave us a rating or a review — the more we can get, the better. Thanks for listening as always, and we’ll see you next week.

 Have you heard about WoWathon? Three gamers have been playing WoW since August 1, broadcasting live in order to raise money for the charity, Child’s Play. They are streaming live right now on Ustream and have been for 54 hours as of this writing. Starting from level 1, they have leveled their characters to 35 so far, all while responding to chatters.

 They are not account sharing and have the blessing of their realm’s GM, for those of you who are worried about them going against the ToS.

 Child’s Play is the charity that the guys at Penny Arcade put together to provide toys, games, books and cash to sick kids in children’s hospitals. The WoWathon team’s goal is to reach $5000 in fundrasing for the charity and are currently near $2300. If you wish to donate to help them reach their goal, please go to their website and click on the Chipin button.

 We are talking to them now, so stay tuned to WoW.com for an interview with the team. I love games and wow gold, of course, is the best one I have ever met. But for several people this isn’t sufficiency content.  I energy a full-time job, and act WoW in my thin time…and I conform most of my WoW playing on learning gold-making techniques. Some players are posting wow gold topics online on there blogs. They know a lot of tips of how to farm wow gold or buy wow gold. wow gold farming is a way of getting wow gold. Many players have many ways to earn wow gold.

 

Wow gold buying