Appletell

There has been tons of rumors lately about what the new iPhone is going to look like and and what features it will have.  Sure, the iPhone is bound to be updated (or announced to be updated) in June at WWDC, but what about that little thing we call the iPod?  Can’t we give them a little loving?  What is the next iPod going to be like?  Unfortunately, it seems like this device has gotten lost in all the iPhone shuffle.  Well, let’s bring it back into the limelight, even if only for a little bit!  Keep in mind, I have no idea when they will be updated, but it’s always interesting to speculate on what they may look like and contain.

So, what do you think?  Is that old scroll wheel out of fashion?  Will they eventually all have wifi and Safari?  Are they all going to contain some sort of touch screen?  These are all good questions to ask, and with the way Apple keeps its secrets, any of those could be just as possible as the next.  I strongly believe they will all have some sort of advanced touch system, whether it be the actual screen or just adding multi-touch to the scroll wheel.  Apple has learned a lot from both the iPhone and iPod Touch about multi-touch displays, and the consumers seem to love them.  Furthermore, I think they will all be capable of wireless connectivity.  Even if it’s not Safari, Apple could possibly even add a more simplified iTunes Store to normal iPods.  This would be a great way for Apple to sell more songs and users to find even more music.

Now let’s talk more hardware.  With flash memory get cheaper everyday, will the new iPods move to flash?  I hope not.  Well, at least not now.  The Classic and its 160GB are great for people who have a ton of music as well as some movies, and I don’t believe hard drives are dead just yet.  Going along with my multi-touch theory, I also believe the new iPods will get larger screens to make them more able to support that feature.

What are your thoughts? Let them fly in the comments!

Graphic via [Gadget Reviews]

Although Safari has a very measly presence in the PC world, those numbers are changing.  With Safari 3.0, Apple had a fairly constant .07% of the PC Internet Browser share.  With the recent automatic download of Safari 3.1 angering and alienating many of those PC users, it was fairly unknown what the impact on the market share would be.  Things seem to be looking up for Safari 3.1, with the overall market share jumping to .21%.  This is seen as a good jump for Apple, but they still have a bit of work to do if they want to further increase that. 

According to Net Apps, the Safari browser is blowing up on the Windows platform… to the tune of three times its last month of total of market share.  No doubt in large part due to (un)equal parts coming out of beta, the great reviews and Apple’s somewhat questionable strategy of slipping the application into the iTunes software update...When you are playing on Microsoft’s field, you have to play by Microsoft’s rules....or when in Rome?- Seth Weintraub for 9 to 5 Mac

Hopefully this will also help Safari in their overall market share, as they trailFirefox by more then 10%.

What browser do you prefer?  Any complaints about a specific one?  Sound off below.

Via [9 to 5 Mac]

Earlier this week, in response to controversy surrounding the fact that Apple had chosen to include Safari as a download in Software Update for Windows even if the user never had Safari in the first place, Apple released a Software Update 2.1 Update that now categorizes Safari 3.1 as “New Software.

There are a couple catches though. First, the Safari box is still checked, so for those tons of people who just say yes whenever they see “Update Needed,” they will still be surprised to find Safari on their computer. Secondly, the Software Update update requires you to run Software Update to get it, thus installing Safari anyway if you don’t uncheck it.

Personally, I see no big issue with this for consumers. Worst case scenario, they don’t pay any attention and install the best browser in the world. The area where this gets annoying is in business networks when instances of Safari start popping up all over the network. Most IT people don’t want to deal with safari and then have to spend time deleting them all.

Have you had a Windows Software Update experience? Share below. 

PayPal was considering blocking Safari users from accessing their website due to security risks that the browser has a few days ago. Because Safari doesn’t have any built-in support for anti-phishing, it was considered very unsafe by PayPal. I can bring Safari and PayPal users good news: Safari has been spared from PayPal’s list of soon-to-be-banned web browsers. I have a feeling there was a lot of controversy about this decision; considering Safari now affects Windows, OS X and the iPhone.

PayPal has definitely raised awareness that Safari is less safe to use than Firefox which has phishing prevention methods. Hopefully, Apple can integrate and learn some of Mozilla’s security techniques into the next version of Safari. PayPal will still be blocking “old browsers and old operating systems” - a.k.a. Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 98 - a situation I’m sure few of you have.

Via [MacUser]

Citing an increase in attempted Phishing attempts on PayPal’s user database, PayPal says there is a very good chance that older versions of Internet Explorer (IE 4 and later), along with the all versions of Safari, may be blocked from the site.  Safari and older versions of IE lack phishing blocks, and in an arena in which large amounts of money are transferred daily, those are imperative.  The company says that PayPal users will be warned of their use of an old browser, and eventually blocked, at a time not announced.  “At PayPal, we are in the process of reimplementing controls which will first warn our customers when logging in to PayPal of those browsers that we consider unsafe,” says a PayPal employee. “Later, we plan on blocking customers from accessing the site from the most unsafe—usually the oldest—browsers.” Although other popular browsers such as Firefox and Opera also lack Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layers (EV SSL, a simple anti-phisher), they have both announced plans to implement such technologies.  As of now, Apple has no such plans made public. 

Via [MacWorld]

Just after my recent Safari rant, Apple publishes an update.  This version, 3.1.1, fixes 39MB worth of security issues and bugs, one of which was the one that allowed a hacker to get full access of a MacBook Air at a recent PWN2OWN conference.  This update deals with four specific bugs and, in my opinion, is a very good step in the right direction.

More specifically, this update fixed an issue involving the way WebKit handled a host name containing a semi colon in the URL.  This bug, according to Apple, could allow a malicious URL to gain access to a machine.  Another issue fixed consisted of buffer overflows while handling JavaScript expressions.  This update is for both Mac users and Windows users, so be sure to download it for a more secure machine.

You can finds Apple’s detailed notes on this release at their site.

Gizmodo has done some looking around iPhone Firmware 2.0, and has found a great feature in the 2.0 Safari. Tapping and holding on an image, as you can currently do with links to see the URL they point to, provides the option of saving the image to your iPhone. Once saved, you can do with it what you like, just as a regular photo. Send it via Mail, set it as a wallpaper, or use it as a contact picture.

This is a great feature and is yet another thing I eagerly await in iPhone firmware 2.0. Now where’s that copy and paste implementation?

Speaking of which, what is wrong with using a simple tap twice, holding on the second tap approach? it seems natural enough. Double tap as if to zoom in, but hold on the second tap, and after a second, you can begin to drag to select text.

How do you think that would work? Have an idea of your own? Sound off below.

A while back, Cisco’s WebEx division (WebEx Meeting Center, WebEx WebOffice, etc) began to support Mac OS X.  Again, some more good news has arrived.  They will now be extending this support to not only Mac OS X Leopard, but Safari 3.1 as well.  Why?  Well, according to Ilan Kasaan, director of product management, “You can’t deny that the Apple Mac is becoming more prevalent in businesses; in fact, we have seen Mac usage double in last year.” Cisco is really driven on getting WebEx to work just as well for Macs as it does for the PC and has recently began paying close attention to multi-platform support.  This is definitely a step in the right direction.

With this added support users will experience, among other things, better sharing performance and increased launch speeds.  More specifically, there will be better VoIP sound quality when broadcasting and improved 3D animation in Keynote documents.  This division of Cisco has slowly been releasing new updates and improvements over the past few months with, hopefully, no intention to stop soon.  Keep it up guys!

Via [MacNN]

Safari has recently made the news quite a bit, but not for reasons Apple should be proud of.  First, back in February, Safari was caught red handed using undocumented API’s that were not yet available to third party developers.  These frameworks were said to give Safari a speed edge over other browsers and sparked a minor controversy stating that Safari was “crippling” other browsers.  Then, in March, iTunes users on PC’s received a nice little surprise in the Apple Software Updater.  What was this?  Apparently, Safari 3.1 was included with the iTunes update, causing Windows users and the Mozilla’s CEO to accuse Apple of “forcing” the download on their customers.  Not to shortly after, also in March, a MacBook Air was the first to fall in this year’s Pwn2Own hack contest.  How did this happen?  The hacker, Charlie Miller, achieved access of the system through a Safari security bug that involved opening a port the hacker could telnet through.  Soon after this, in April, some Firefox users ran tests with the new Firefox 3.0 beta 5 and found it to be faster than Safari 3.1, just shortly after Apple claimed Safari was the “fastest browser.” That’s three bad months in a row.  Get it together, Apple.  If you claim Safari is, “[T]he world’s best browser,” on your site, make sure it is.  Right now people are really upset with it and that’s no way to get its market share up.

However, despite all this bad news, Safari is still a great, functional browser.  Getting a 100/100 on the most recent Acid 3 Test proves one of Safari’s strong points, web standards.  This is great for web developers and really eases the process of making a website.  Another area Safari is glowing is the mobile browsing marketplace as it is the most popular mobile browser in the US. So come on Apple, you can do better.  I love Safari, so give me more reasons to stick with it.

The few people who actually read license agreements before installing updates may have noticed that the Windows version of Safari 3.1 contained a very curious statement.

“This license allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time,” was what the End User License agreement displayed to tons of Windows users using non-Apple-labeled computers last week. While just a typo, it is curious to think that they simply copied and pasted the Mac OS X Safari license agreement into the Windows version without bothering to check.

Don’t worry if you were, Apple has amended the Windows license agreement, deleting the bit about Apple-labeled computers.

Via [MacNN]