An odd mistake on the PR wire today. Apparently Bloomberg updated the Steve Jobs obituary and sent the article out to subscribers. Keeping obits ready in advance is a pretty common practice, but these are rarely seen outside of the editorial desk.
Gawker posts the piece in its entirety.
Today, Google announced the release of beta version of Gears for Safari. This open-source project is a set of JavaScript APIs which aid in the development of offline access to web apps. The potential is to make web apps as strong as regular desktop apps.
Proceed with caution and download your copy today.
One of the best parts is access to the Geolocation API which gives location awareness to web apps.
PopCap Games announced a new Peggle game today- “Peggle Nights.” More Peggle joy coming our way in just a few short weeks.
And a sweepstakes will kick off the gaming excitement.
Many users are having compatibility problems with the latest version of Microsoft Office. This version introduced a new file type for the first time in 11 years. These new documents can only be natively opened by the latest version of Office on both Mac and Windows.
My recommendation is to “save down” to the older version in order to minimize problems with sharing files with other users.
Below are instructions for doing this in each of the Office 2008 applications.
In Word:
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Go to the “Word” menu
Choose “Preferences”
Click “Save”
And in the “Save Word files as:” dropdown, choose Word 97-2004 Document (.doc)
Finally, click “ok”
In Excel:
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Go to the “Excel” menu
Choose “Preferences”
Click “Compatibility”
And in the “Save files in this format:” dropdown, choose Excel 97-2004 Document (.xls)
Finally, click “ok”
In PowerPoint:
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Go to the “PowerPoint” menu
Choose “Preferences”
Click “Save”
And in the “Save PowerPoint files as:” dropdown, choose PowerPoint 97-2004 Document (.ppt)
Finally, click “ok”
I’ve been spending a large amount of time in the MacOSX terminal lately. Naturally, I had to install a few fun terminal toys: (yes, I know both been out for a while)
Visor: gives you keyboard shortcut and slick animation to reveal a terminal window, similar to the Quake console
GeekTool: is a PrefPane that can overlay terminal output on your desktop. Very useful for watching system logs, graphs or any long-running process
A nice pointer on setting up Hamachi on OS X on the Magnetk blog. I had no idea that LogMeIn had bought Hamachi.
Apple is apparently getting serious about the MobileMess (MobileMe) issues at the request of Steve Jobs. The new status page reads:
Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering. Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and we’re going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.
Apple & Nike announced The Human Race 10K today- the world’s largest one-day running event. On August 31st, 25 host cities will be participating via the Nike+iPod sport kit.
If you register now, you get a free mix. (makes me wish I had a nano)
The folks over at Haklabs claim to have broken the Apple AppStore FairPlay protection. On a quick read, it sounds like you can manually copy applications to the iPhone if you’ve jailbroken and the applications will run properly.
If this is true, the only gatekeeper is the iTunes desktop application itself. This does sort of make sense because music works exactly the same way. You’re allowed to put DRM’d music on as many iPod/iPhones as you want.
Looks like this could be a real reason for many to jailbreak- too bad all the applications are digitally signed with an email address.
[via MacNN]
Rixstep has released SLIPOC – Root Exploit of Mac OS X. This is a package proves you can get root easily in OSX.
SLIPOC works on Tiger, Leopard and amazingly enough- Snow Leopard. This downloadable file doesn’t do anything bad, it just proves a point without taking advantage of buffer overflows, or anything of that sort. It simply exploits a long-standing design flaw in OSX.