August 2013 Notable features: Calendar is now location, travel time, weather aware and adds local weather and Meeting Notice travel time directly to calendar events. Safari is All meetings, except for the December, will be at the much faster and comes with some handy sidebar Grande Prairie Library at 3479 W 183rd St., Hazel improvements to Bookmarks, Reading Lists and Crest. The December meeting will be held at the Shared Links. A new dedicated Maps application Homewood Public Library. features bookmarks, real-time traf!c and one-click send to iOS. A surprising omission is full Siri Meetings are held at the Flossmoor Station Brew support. Pub on the second Tuesday of the month at 7:30 PM. iOS 7 Walter Palmer, Editor The most anticipated software announcement was iOS 7, the next major release of the OS that powers the iPhone and iPad. New features include Control Center, iTunes Radio, AirDrop and major updates $95 billion (editorial) to Noti!cation Center, Multitasking, Siri, Camera, Photos and Safari. Like Mavericks, iOS got the "at Companies have been suing Apple right and left, treatment, but even more dramatically. The entire countries are reviewing how much Apple pays in OS has a more subdued and subtle look and feel taxes. My advice is that they make large donations and all of the Apple icons are simpler and cleaner. to charity or they will loose more then the any donation to charity to all kinds of people. Notable features: Control Center provides a slide up tray with quick access to AirPort, Bluetooth, brightness, music, AirDrop, AirPlay and a welcome World Wide Developer’s Conference 2013 built-in "ashlight. Noti!cations, Multitasking and the Camera app are greatly improved, but the show stealer is iTunes Radio, which is free ad-supported By Jason D. O'Grady for The Apple Core Internet radio. The kicker is that iRadio is ad-free June 11, 2013 for iTunes Match subscribers (which costs $25 per year) -- a nice surprise. OS X Mavericks MacBook Air Apple ran out of cat names so it switched naming conventions to California landmarks for its major On the hardware front, Apple used WWDC to operating system releases and OS X "Mavericks" is announce refreshed MacBook Air notebooks based the !rst. The newest version of the Mac desktop on Intel's latest Haswell processors, 802.11ac Wi-Fi operating system is due in the fall and focuses on and PCIe-based "ash storage that is up to 45 better battery life and responsiveness. It boasts over percent faster than the previous generation 200 new features including a tabbed Finder, (Note: (approaching 800 Mbps in early benchmarks). The Your editor has used TotalFinder, which patches best feature in the new MBAs is all-day battery life. the Finder to provide tabs, for some time and and The new 13-inch MacBook Air gets up to 12 hours tabbed a Finder is great!) Tags and much improved of battery life and the 11-inch MacBook Air delivers multiple-monitor support. As expected, Mavericks up to 9 hours of battery life. The 11-inch models is decidedly "atter in design as evidenced by the featuring double the storage and 13-inch models updated Calendar app which has ditched the leather starting at a new lower price of $1,099. and paper metaphor for a more simple and clean design. Mac Pro 32GB and 64GB models. At just $229, it’s cheaper Billed as a "sneak peek into the future of the Pro than its 32GB and 64GB counterparts by $70 and desktop" the new Mac Pro is just one-eighth of the $170, respectively. volume of the previous Mac Pro (9.9 inches tall, 6.6 inches in diameter). The new Apple tower (or PRISIM should I say cylinder?) features a new uni!ed thermal core, with three logic boards mounted on a triangular-shaped heat sink with a fan at the top. By now, I am sure that everybody on Earth has Hardware-wise the new Mac Pro features a new- heard about PRISIM and the US Government’s generation Intel Xeon E5 chipset with up to 12 ‘review’ of telephone and computer traf!c. It turns cores of processing power, 2.5x faster dual out that during the Civil War telegraph traf!c was workstation AMD FirePro GPUs (4096 stream routed to the government and France has a similar processors, 384-bit memory buses, 528 GBps total program. Since I !rst wrote this it has been reveled bandwidth) and 2.5x faster "ash storage (PCIe that other governments do something like this - controller, 1.25 GBps reads, 1.0 GBps writes). including the Lincoln Administration, which had all telegraph traf!c routed through the Federal It also features 2x faster ECC memory (1866MHz Government. That was during wartime. Aren’t we DDR3, four-channel controller, 60 GBps in a war? Well, yes, but it looks to go on for the next bandwidth) and 4K video support (multiple hundred years or so. streams, supported on every port, three simultaneous displays). The new Mac Pro comes As I frequently point out, the Bill of Right was no with a ton of ports on the backplane, including six sooner rati!ed than the government started trying Thunderbolt 2 ports being driven by three to think of ways around it. “Everybody does it” and controllers (20 Gbps throughput, 6 devices per port, “It’s been done for a long time” don’t really make backwards compatible), four USB 3 ports, two your editor feel any better about it. Gigabit Ethernet, and a HDMI 1.4 port. Apple said that the next-generation Mac Pro is Frankly, I am more concerned about unauthorized, coming "later this year" and that it's designed and free-lance snooping by government employees than assembled in the United States. I am about policy-driven ‘inspection’. It’s going to come out if it is done of!cially, but the free-lance Less Expensive iPod Touch inspection is too wonderful an opportunity for blackmail to pass up. Combine that with third-shift Apple Unveils iSight-Less 16GB Fifth-Gen iPod boredom and watch out. touch, Now Available For $229 At bottom, the problem comes from the fact that we by Aldrin Calimlim (edited) want crime and other nastiness stopped before it happens. If anybody knows about a way to tell what people are GOING to do before they do it Ever so quietly, Apple has just discontinued selling without snooping, please share it with others. the fourth-generation iPod touch from its online Ironically, just before this story broke a survey was store. Instead, it is now selling a new version of the released stating that people were willing to give up current generation of its popular portable media some privacy in return for greater security. Well, we player. have one, let’s see if we get the other. The new version is a !fth-generation iPod touch that comes with just 16GB of onboard storage. Of course, this is half of what the previous lowest- capacity !fth-generation iPod touch holds. More notably, the new device model comes without an iSight rear camera, which is found on both the Apple Smart Watch According to the report, Apple has also been acquiring smaller !rms which specialize in Apple Hiring ‘Aggressively’ For iWatch, Aiming technologies related to the smart watch, and is For Late 2014 Launch aiming to launch the product in late 2014, rather than 2013, as previous analysis has indeed by Joe White, AppAdvice indicated. For some time, the company is said to have had 100 or more designers working on the product, which is rumored to be a wristwatch capable of performing some of the tasks currently reserved for Apple’s line of iDevices. From what we understand, a touch- optimized display and curved battery could also be in the cards. Furthermore, Apple has recently been on something of an “iWatch” trademark spree in countries spanning the globe. Trademark applications in Russia, Jamaica, Japan,Mexico, Taiwan, and (Speculative picture) Turkey have so far been uncovered, though Apple could have trouble securing the name in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Apple is said to be “aggressively” hiring new employees for its anticipated smart watch, in a move which suggests that the Cupertino, Calif. It seems that an iWatch is indeed in the works. company is now seeking additional expertise to Though whether it’ll arrive before many are able to assist in the development of the so-called “iWatch.” get their hands on a Pebble smart watch, either online or in person at Best Buy, remains to be seen. The news comes from the Financial Times: The company has begun hiring aggressively for the project in recent weeks, say people familiar with Apple’s plans for the wearable device, a move that shows it has stepped up development but which raises questions over the ability of its own engineers to develop wearable technology. As Apple moves from iPods, iPhones and iPads into an entirely new category of product, it is looking beyond its existing staff in Cupertino for the talent required to build it an indication that the endeavour involves hard engineering problems that they’ve not been able to solve, according to one source. Pebble Smart Watch. This is what is being talked about. (Think about it - if someone works for Apple, whether as an employee of an acquired company or a direct hire, they become one of Apple’s own engineers.) Why a smart watch? iWatch’s novelty emerges as Apple taps sensor and !tness experts 8:00 AM It would mean that I would not have to dig my by Mark Gurman phone out from under a coat (during the winter) when I had an iOS noti!cation.