Apple first previewed Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2008. They announced that the next Mac OS X would be releasing sometime within a year. According to MacRumors it’s looking like it might be a little less than a year.

Jordan Hubbard, one of Apple’s engineers spoke at a conference where he focused on engineers and system administrators. Most of the presentation you might not be too interested in, but he did drop some very revealing information. On of his slides Hubbard either purposefully or mistakingly put the Q1 2009 release for Mac OS X 10.6 on one of his slides. The image of the slide is down below:

There have been some improvements for Snow Leopard mentioned. It looks like those upgrades are mostly going to be taking place under the hood. Here are a list of features you can expect to see when Mac OS X 10.6 releases.

• Support for connecting to Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers will be included in Address Book, Mail, and iCal.
• Faster installation times and smaller hard drive footprint.
• Support for up to a theoretical 16TB RAM by further developing 64-bit kernel technologies.
• Grand Central: a parallel-programming technology that aims to have the OS take greater advantage of multi-core CPU.
• QuickTime X which will feature optimized support for modern codecs.
• OpenCL (Open Computing Language): allowing developers to code applications to use the GPU for non-graphics purposes.

I’m not going to harp on the benefits of Time Capsule, as nearly everyone knows of its greatness by now. If not, then all I’ll say is, it’s a two-in-one system where you’ll have a wireless backup for your files, and a wireless network.

I figured I would take the time to let readers know of what they need to do to get Time Capsule setup. Also, a couple of troubleshooting steps to make sure Time Capsule is able to run effectively. So let’s get to it.

Installation Steps - For people using Time Capsule for their wireless network, and backup

1. Your first step will obviously be to get your modem connected to Time Capsule. Once the hands-on part is done, you’ll want to first open up AirPort. The click Time Capsule on the right

Troubleshooting Tip - If Time Capsule isn’t showing up through Airport, try connecting via Ethernet. If not try a hard reset. You can do a hard reset by pressing the button on the back of Time Capsule for a few seconds, until the light flashes quickly.

2. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to recommend that you do a manual install. For the manual install, make sure the AirPort heading is selected, and then click the Time Capsule tab.

3. The next step will be getting all of your general account information setup. Type in a name for Time Capsule, then a password for access, then check “Set Time Automatically”.

Tip - Your Time Capsule name shouldn’t reflect the name for your SSID. It can, it just can get confusing when needing to configure your network later. Also, make sure you have your time set correctly. If not your backups might start at less that convenient times ;)

4. Next, you’ll want to select which radio mode that you want to use. If you want background devices to be used in the network select 802.11n, if not select 802.11n 5Ghz.

5. Then you’ll want to select a channel for your network to be on. The default setting is channel 1.

Tip - Although Channel 1 is fine for most cases, keep an eye out. If you’re in an apartment building or somewhere with a large amount of wireless networks you might need to switch it to a higher number.

6. Your next step is to setup your network password, which will either be your WEP or WPA key.

Troubleshooting Tip - If you’re having problems setting up a WEP encryption, trying switching to WPA. There have been instances that people have had trouble with WEP

I hope that everyone will find use with these installation instructions. Time Capsule isn’t a hard setup, but there are some problems that people should be made aware of. If you don’t have Time Capsule, then it’s definitely an investment I recommend. If you’re a Windows user, you can take advantage of the Time Capsule benefits as well.

Time Capsule has a couple of options in terms of backup space.

Although I didn’t join the party until Apple moved to Unix with OS X, when I bought my first notebook in 2001 (a shiny white G3 iBook) — It’s still hard to believe that it is less than 20 years since Apple released their first hopeless attempt at a notebook computer: the dreadful 4-inch thick, 16-pound so-called Macintosh Portable. Probably more memorable for its membership of the PC World 25 Worst Tech Products of all Time, or for being so portable that it featured on the cover of MacUser magazine being used on an airbed in a swimming pool by a swimsuit model, than for any actual redeeming qualities of its own:

Since then, Apple have put out a new model every 12 months on average, with 19 distinct notebook models coming out of Cupertino since 1989. But most surprising of all (intel transition aside) the basic design of the Macbook Pro is barely changed since the release of the PowerBook Titanium in 2001:

In a little over 24hrs, we can look forward to the announcement of what will hopefully turn out to be the radical game changing product transition Peter Oppenheimer warned of in the last quarterly conference call with investors, and will finally put an end to the current round of rumor-mongering.

Perhaps, with new high tech heat dissipation and power management, we even see an end to unfortunate incidents of crotch burn and be allowed to call our portable computers laptops once again.

October 14th is a Tuesday, traditionally the day that the Apple Store goes off-line for “maintenance”, while the world looks on with baited breath in anticipation of what will have changed when it comes back up… This year, it’s also the date everyone is expecting a long overdue refresh for the venerable Macbook Pro, which (aside from a few speed bumps) hasn’t really changed much since it was introduced in January 2006, excepting the move to Core 2 Duo processors in November 2006…

My overworked rev.a macbook is about to get it’s third keyboard and topcase, with only the screen and webcam remaining from the original machine I brought home from the store. I can’t complain, it has worked between 6 and 12 hours every single day for the entire 2 years I’ve owned it. But, it’s time to upgrade, and I will be in the queue for whatever new “game changing machine” Apple gives us in 2 weeks time.

Although I’m not holding my breath, what I’d really like to see on October 14th is a truly portable machine. All my Christmases will have come at once if it comes in the much rumored 9” tablet form-factor with multi-touch. With a heavy dose of realism, I suppose I might have to make do with a next generation 12” Powerbook, hopefully with at least 5 hours battery life with wifi on. With Blu-ray. And 3G. And GPS. And a touch screen. Err… might as well throw out the keyboard too :-)

Okay, you’ve got me. Apple have been taunting me with rumors of a tablet for years. I’ll try not to cry if they don’t deliver again this year.

With SquirrelFish in line to make Safari 4.0 the fastest browser ever (assuming you count with the same number of fingers as Apple), I’ve been dying to get my hands on a supercharged Webkit nightly and get an early taste of running javascript heavy web applications in a next generation browser… at least until Google Chrome (Windows only *grumble* unless you count Chromium) upped the ante with its blazingly fast V8 Javascript engine, and took the all wind out of my sails.

However, I’m absolutely delighted to see that most of the other important browser developers have risen to the challenge. With low-power netbooks selling as fast as manufacturers can make them, it’s no secret that the demand for cloud computing is only going to rise. And for web applications to provide a good user experience on a low-power machine, a reliable super-tuned javascript engine is an absolute must. So, where are the major browsers at in the race for the most fastester javascript engine evar?

1. Google V8

Since V8 is running javascript in pure native machine code, obviously nothing can be any faster than that, until the V8 developers optimize the compiled code to squeeze a bit more performance out the CPU. Before long, Google will be able to save you from running a pesky operating system that hogs all your cpu and run Chrome on the bare metal. Even with all this room for improvement, V8 is still the most fastester javascript engine evar.

2. Tracemonkey

Long before the V8 announcements from Google, the folks working on Firefox have implemented an interesting trace trees byte code optimizer for their spidermonkey engine.

Looking at the benchmarks on Andreas Gal’s blog, it’s good to see that in Andreas’ own words: “No matter which metric you choose to apply, Firefox now has the [most] fastest[er] javascript engine in the world [evar]”.

3. SquirrelFish Extreme

Not to be left out in the cold, the brainy chaps working on Webkit (which was already the most fastester javasript engine evar before all this pesky V8 business) have implemented a whole raft of the optimizations they promised us in the original SquirrelFish announcement to bring us SquirrelFish Extreme, by far the most fastester javascript engine in the world evar!!

Damn. Now I’m dying to get my hands on a supercharged Webkit nightly all over again!?!?

A couple (nick and Danielle) wins the “NYC Cupcakes Decorating Championships and Ignite NYC” with their Iphone App Cupcakes. For more pictures check out their webpage.

Even though Google hasn’t been giving Mac users as much love as they could have done, since they made their bid for world domination only 2 short weeks ago. Today, at least, everyone is catching on that a Safari compatible Google Gears was released for webkit a few days ago. You’ll need either 10.4.11+ or 10.5.3+ along with Safari 3.1.1 or newer to be able to use it.

To install, visit this page with your webkit based browser, click the Install Gears button, and agree to Google’s terms to download the installer. Safari will open the disk image it has downloaded for you, and start the installer. Once you’re done, restart Safari, and all that yummy offline goodness is yours for the taking!

Incase you’re not yet making the most of Gears, it really shines when it comes to keeping data in the cloud so that you can access it from any of your computers, and more importantly when you still want access to that data if you are offline for a while. Now that we have a Webkit compatible Gears release, we can access Zoho Writer docs from Safari on the plane, and resynchronize with the cloud from the hotel at the other end! All without having Firefox sucking the life out of my battery at 15% CPU usage when idle…

Today, I’m going to sing the praises of the Apple’s rather wonderful Airport Express, the road-warriors best friend. And particularly some of the holes it has helped dig me out of as I travel the world with my fiance. I still have the original with no 802.11n capability, because it has survived 2 laps of the planet and given me no trouble. If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it!

In order to support our lifestyle of moving to a new continent every few months whenever our tourist visas expire, we both need to maintain fairly steady internet access to keep our businesses running. That means at least two laptops with internet access at any given time, and often I’d like to have my Aspire One, my Sharp Zaurus and my iPod Touch online too. And preferably on the same subnet, without having to disconnect something else first.

The obvious use for a Airport Express is to use it as a concentrator for all the other devices. Often, a hotel might hand me a single ethernet cable when I check in, or a house I’m renting comes with a single port cable modem — instead of plugging in just my Macbook, the Airport express becomes a shared wireless access point for all of our devices. And even on the occasions where it has taken some cursing and tinkering to have the Express co-operate with some of the peculiar hardware I’ve hooked it up to, it’s nice to know that if I can get my Macbook to connect to a network, it’s a pretty safe bet that I can get the Express to connect too. Eventually.

A little more complicated than that, is when we’re in an airport lounge, or in a building with municipal wifi that forces me to buy a password into the router and sign in through a browser to enable access. If we’re both waiting together, then it’s very straight forward to connect our laptops with an ethernet cable, and sign one of them into the lounge wifi which in turn configures network sharing over ethernet to put the other one online too. I’ve found that manually setting one machine to share from 10.0.2.1 and the other to connect using 10.0.2.2 (with wifi turned off!) avoids half an hour of fiddling with DHCP to have the machines automatically recognise each other.

But even that is not too helpful if I need to sync files between my Aspire One and my Macbook, since even if I buy two passwords, the machines might not be able to see each other anyway. The solution in this case is to have one Mac log into the wifi network, and then configure internet sharing over ethernet just as above. But this time, the ethernet cable then goes into the Airport Express, where it is turned into a wifi access point for the other devices to use. If you do decide to do this, be sure to check the Terms & Conditions of the network provider allow you to indirectly attach a router to their service!!

A few short days after posting a Scott McCloud penned comic to the Google blog, yesterday saw a Windows only beta release of the shiny new Google Chrome browser. Since it is based largely on code from Apple’s Webkit and Mozilla’s Firefox it’s a great shame not to also see a simultaneous release for Linux and OS X.

Chrome comes with V8, an innovative new Javascript compiler, which generates machine code that will run directly on the CPU without an interpreter. It certainly looks like it will give even SquirrelFish a sound thrashing when it comes to being the fastest browser in the world.

Seemingly intent on taking over the world, Google Chrome appears to be more like an operating system than a mere browser. It’s designed to manage memory and processes, contains a permissions system, and is integrated with Google Gears so that authorized processes can interact with the filesystem. Maybe there will be no final release that needs an operating system stealing valuable cycles from Chrome, and it will run directly on your hardware instead of inside Windows or Linux?

After if Google Mail, Google Docs and the rest of the google apps follow Google Reader with a working offline mode, maybe we can all get by living inside Google Chrome a browser for all our computing needs?

We sure are lucky that Google isn’t Evil. Phew.

[Via CuppaDev]

I was glad to hear that Steve Jobs is almost as disappointed with Mobile Me as I was. My municipal wifi connection slowed to a crawl during the final weeks of my stay in Bangkok (so much so, that it was like being back in 1992 all over again!), to the point where Mail.app lost track of whether the queue of 20 emails in my Outbox needed to be retried for the infinitieth time, or else moved to the Sent folder… or maybe just given up on entirely and thrown away so that I wouldn’t have any evidence of misbehavior. I’ve used AppleMail as my main window into the world of electronic mail for about 4 years now, and although it has some flaws I’m mostly satisfied with it.

On the other hand, while Mail was caught up in a paroxysm over how to resend everything in an infinite loop, I decided to see whether I could live in Mobile Me for a day or two. Yeah, I know… but I was desperate, okay? I lasted 3 days, and then decided to forgoe mail altogether until I had a broadband connection again.

Let me count the reasons why…

1. Push?

At least I know now why my iPod Touch has started bleeping at me every few minutes now. And why Blackberry owners always seem so distracted. I agree that Apple should have provided the push service that they advertised, but seriously: What is so great about being interrupted all the frackin’ time? Unless I hide it underneath the cushions of my sofa, my iPod even keeps me awake at night now!

2. Rules?

Like most people, I’m subscribed to a few mailing lists. Oh alright, I’m subscribed to metric butt-load of mailing lists — but, that’s okay, because I’ve set filtering rules up to move them out of my Inbox as soon as they land. That way I can actually spot the emails that are addressed directly to me when I access the Inbox folder. Actually, no. Mobile Me may very well synchronize all those rules between my Desktop machines, but within a couple of hours of trying to use Mobile Me as the hub of my email system, my Inbox is totally swamped by mailing list messages.

3. HTML?

While I’m confessing my mailing list addiction, I might as well admit that most of them are for compiler tools, programming languages, and the Free Software Foundation. And, like it or not, the bulk of those messages are talking about snippets of code. Which is great, because I like code. And I especially like talking about it on mailing lists with other people that like code. Except in Mobile Me, which refuses to display anything at all in a monospaced font — all the indentation is totally screwed up by any of the proportional fonts I’m allowed to use when composing a reply. At least, last time I looked it wasn’t there. And the helpful lady behind the instant chat support couldn’t find it either. But, when I went to double check, the service was down again. Sigh.

4. Headers?

So, everyone knows that the whole of Mobile Me is up and down like an express elevator to hell, but that’s fine because you’d have to be pretty stupid to give it out as your main email address. I just have my main email host forward copies of everything to my me.com address, so I can have the convenience of a gorgeous Ajaxy web client on the days when it is working, but go back to my regular email host on the days when it isn’t. Only, there is no means to set my From or Reply-To headers to anything other than a me.com (or mac.com) address. That means anytime I send an email from Mobile Me, the reply will always come back to Mobile Me. If it’s up that day.

5. Encryption?

I realize that no one has this in a web mail client yet. But I sort a hoped Apple might hit one out of the park here. In these days of TLS and google gears, there’s absolutely no technical reason why I couldn’t have Safari pass an email through a client side program that asks for my GPG pass phrase and adds a signature or encrypts the whole thing before uploading it back to the server for posting.

6. Threading?

It might be that I used mutt and gnus for email before I switched to a Mac that led me to rely on full conversation threading in my email, and I still feel a bit disappointed with Mail.app for having such a half-cocked implementation. I can’t say that I was expecting any revelations from Mobile Me Mail, but all the grown up shave message threading…

7. Buggy!

Sometimes, Mobile Me Mail goes a little crazy. I’ve only been paying attention for a few days, but I couldn’t fail to notice that forms sometimes scroll a bit too far, or email doesn’t get filed in my Sent box reliable, or, or, or… Which, I suppose is just nit-picking compared to the huge gaping flaws in the design that make it nigh-useless as a reliable email hub. But maybe, just maybe, I’d put up with the other shortcomings if it ran smooth as silk and looked totally fabulous?

Who am I kidding! There’s gonna have to be a serious rethink in how Apple has positioned Mobile Me Mail before anyone can take it seriously as real email client. It’s just a toy at the moment: Fun to play with for a day or two, but not useful for serious work in the real world. It just doesn’t bring enough to the table to be genuinely useful.

Maybe Mobile Meager has gas from all the sprouts?

Am I really asking for the moon on a stick?

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