News

Well you can now pre-order your less than impressive refresh of the iPhone. The new iPhone 4S pre-order sites went live around 3am this morning. However, despite several years of launching new phones none of the companies in question appear to have been ready for this. For some unknown reason Apple decided to perform maintenance on their Apple.com servers right around midnight.

According to many this caused the servers to be unavailable until almost 45 minutes after the pre-ordering frenzy began. Reports are that both Sprint and AT&T servers are overloaded and will require multiple attempts and patience to get to. Meanwhile other carriers are having similar issues. I have to wonder if some of this is not staged. After all, how can we see this with EVERY iPhone launch unless either Apple and their carriers are completely incompetent (which I do not believe) or they intentionally fail to prepare for this and want to spin the server downtime and other connectivity issues into their reports of how much in demand their new phone is. We know that Apple has overstated numbers before often including shipments to retailers in their initial sales reports, so why not leave things like this and make the claim that demand brought down their networks. It is all good press in the end really.

It should be an interesting day no matter what the real reasons are.

Discuss in our Forum

The word is out all over the net; Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder and visionary has passed away after an extended bout with cancer and the complications that come with it. Jobs’ death marks the passing of an era of sorts. It was Steve Jobs that helped to bring Apple back to life when they were failing. He helped to navigate the company to an unprecedented success for such a small (at the time) technology company.

During his leadership Apple reinvented themselves and released several market changing products. It is no secret that I am no Apple fan, but I will not deny that they did pioneer the way we think of our mobile phones and have steered the direction of many other products. Jobs had a very dynamic way of talking about his products and drawing people into his vision. With this enticing ability he has been able to convert a number of people from the PC world into the Apple fold.

There was another side of Steve Jobs though. This was his outspoken public rants against, Flash, Adobe and other companies that he was at odds with. It showed that while he was controlled and charismatic he was also passionate about what he believed. This passion helped him to navigate his way through many obstacles and to drive Apple into a force to be reckoned with in one of the most volatile markets out there.

It is a sad day to see someone that was as passionate and driven as Steve Jobs pass. I might not have agreed with him or liked some of his actions, but I will not take anything away from his contribution to the technology industry.

Photo Credit Apple Tribu

Discuss in our Forum

The day before Apple holds its three ring circus for the next generation of iPhone Adobe shows off a few choice apps for Android’s Honeycomb Tablet Operating system. One of these is their top end Photoshop app with a completely new touch interface. Now, Adobe does have these out for both the iOS and for Android (both free and paid versions), but these new flavors appear to much more specifically designed for the larger screened Android based tablets. It is also worth mentioning Adobe’s partnership with nVidia here as there are a number of tablets based on the Green Teams dual core Tegra 2 SoC.  

Of the six Apps shown off (Photoshop Touch, the other apps are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, and Proto) one already exists for Apple’s iOS as it is now and one has existing versions (although not as complete as the new Photoshop Touch) for both Android and iOS. The other four are new and from the look of them are aimed squarely at the Android platform.  

The releases are interestingly timed. All of them appear to be developed using Adobe’s AIR platform, which technically is capable of developing across multiple platforms.  However, our guess is that this is a subtle slap in the face of Apple for their former CEO’s obnoxious rejection of Flash based applications and at one point an outright ban on any app that was developed in Flash (even if it was later packaged to operate without the need for Flash). What better way to pull some potential clients away than to announce a group of “professional” applications designed for the competition?  The question is, with the launch of these apps slated for November will this make any difference at all? Our guess is no, after all people that want an iOS device will get one and the people that want an Android Tablet will get that. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. In the long run, a few people may opt for Android over iOS if they are looking for a tablet in that time frame, but if someone already owns an iPad or iPad2 they are unlikely to make that bold of a shift just because of Adobe. Plus Adobe has already alluded to the fact that they plan on versions for the iOS later…

But all the posturing aside it is nice to see some serious productivity apps hit the non-Windows based tablets. Now if they could only come up with a decent office suite it really could pull the tablet out of the “cool toy” category and make them truly useful.

Discuss this in our Forum

Sometimes old news is funny news and this one falls into that category. On Friday the 30th of September a new malware definition database for Microsoft’s Security Essentials (that comes with almost every current version of Windows) began mistakenly (?) identifying Google’s Chrome Web Browser as a form of Malware known as Win32/Zbot.  As a result it either blocked or removed Chrome from the “infected” system.

Now Win32/Zbot is a nasty little piece of malware that is known to steal passwords and other personal information. According to information about Zbot in the internet it is capable of grabbing FTP passwords, E-Mail passwords, lowering security on IE, FireFox and other browsers other malicious activities. Microsoft quickly released an updated signature database that corrects the false positive, but it is also worth mentioning that Google released an updated version of Chrome as well.

My question is this, if Chrome was not exhibiting any “unwanted” behaviors then why change it? After all Microsoft released an updated engine to prevent it from being removed unintentionally. Perhaps it has something to do with the way that Chrome scavenges user data and stores browsing history (even if the user tells it not to). Since its release there have been concerns over the way Chrome caches browsing history, passwords and other sensitive user information. In fact in the early releases we tracked the software writing to the System Volume Information folder and then sending this data back to Google serves. We have heard that this behavior is no longer happening but have not tested the latest versions.

Unless I have completely missed the mark I have a feeling that there is a little bit of truth to the accidental identification of Chrome as a Malware and that Google had to respond to prevent other Malware prevention software from finding the same thing. Meanwhile many IT departments still prohibit the use of Chrome for security reasons… you be the judge on this one.

Discuss this in our Forum