Apple made more than a billion dollars in profit during the last financial quarter, but is that all? Due to the way the company books iPhone revenue, much of the device’s earnings are still to come – we have the numbers and the details. Also in this issue, Glenn looks at Microsoft’s new Live Mesh service and what it portends for the future of storing data, and notes that even after all these years a large number of Web sites are still built by hand-coding the HTML. Rich Mogull explains how the latest QuickTime improvements are just the first steps in locking down a potentially bad security situation, Mark Anbinder covers the latest iMac speed bump, and Charles Maurer returns with strategies and tools for the difficult tasks of cataloging and storing digital photos. In other TidBITS Publishing-related news, Ted Landau’s iPhone title has just been updated with the latest info about the iPhone 1.1.4 software, and our DealBITS drawing this week features the HoudahGeo photo geocoding software. Lastly, the TidBITS Watchlist this week spotlights updates to Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, TextExpander, Default Folder X, ScreenFlow, MacBook Pro Firmware, Apple’s Firmware Restoration CD, and Keyboard Maestro.
Apple has refreshed the consumer desktop iMac line with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors and availability of a high-end Nvidia graphics card.
Apple posted record laptop sales in its second fiscal quarter of 2008, and nearly every other metric other than gross margin saw significant increases over Q2 2007. Notably, Apple retail stores are now averaging $7.1 million in sales.
Live Mesh from Microsoft combines online storage, cloud computing, desktop folder synchronization, and remote access. But the real news about the technology preview is its reliance on well-used standards, and its notion of enabling developers to build whatever they want on Live Mesh's base.
Taking advantage of our freedom from print, we've released an update to Ted Landau's "Take Control of Your iPhone" that makes it unique among books in covering the iPhone 1.1.4 software.
If you can read English and write in either Dutch or Japanese, we need your help in translating TidBITS!
If you've ever wanted to geocode your photos, check out this DealBITS drawing for HoudahGeo, which provides a variety of automatic and manual ways of assigning geographic coordinates to images and can help you share your photos via Flickr or Google Earth.
Graphical Web design tools are all well and good, but most sites with any substantial amount of regularly updated content still code by hand - including TidBITS and the venerable New York Times.
QuickTime 7.4.5 offers more than just specific security fixes - in it, Apple started activating anti-exploitation technologies to protect users even when there are software vulnerabilities. But when will we see these technologies fully implemented in QuickTime, or even Leopard itself?
Digital photography lets us shoot thousands of images, but keeping track of them is a growing concern. Charles Maurer looks at programs that enable you to apply keywords and other metadata to your photos so you can find them easily later.
Notable software releases this week include Keyboard Maestro 3.0.1, Firmware Restoration CD 1.7, MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1, ScreenFlow 1.1, Default Folder X 4.0.5, TextExpander 2.1, VMware Fusion 1.1.2, and Boot Camp Update 2.1.
This week's discussions make TidBITS Talk look like tech support. You'll find answers dealing with migrating to Microsoft Entourage, listening to FLAC-formatted audio files, using Gmail with multiple Macs, shared printing, and more.