By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

One of the sources I looked at that had information about the upcoming release of OS X 10.8 was from Josh Lowensohn who reminds us of some of the new toys we will find. I do hope that the way OS X handles web pages in memory is improved as I am sick to death of the wait while Safari refreshes unchanged pages and I am left staring at a white browser screen. The backup facility could also do with some improvement. Lion was the first version of OS X that I found I had to restart every week to bring it back from its narcosis. With all the others before, I might leave OS X for a month or more.

The update to OS X will be handled pretty much the same as it was with Lion and will be available on the Mac App Store for download when it is released. However, it is not going to work on some Macs and this time, Karen Haslam reports on Macworld, if the store identifies it as an unsupported machine, that is the end of things (as far as the online store is concerned). The article has a list of supported Macs and the cut-off for some types is 2007 or 2008 with the Mac mini shown as 2009. My sympathies there. My source for this item was MacDaily News.

This is therefore a time for maintenance. Do not kid yourself: that smoothly running computer may have all manner of problems under the surface that a shiny new OS X will be sure to bring out. Hardware too: the stress of a new OS has been known to cause failures, coincidentally. Leave nothing to chance. If you contact me or anyone else asking for help and have no backup, my next words may be "goodbye". Prepare for the worst and that should give a margin of safety.

In most cases of course nothing will go wrong, but I am not into making predictions, even about my own computers, especially as the iMac is currently in the shop for a replacement hard disk.

Maintenance software is needed. I will be running Disk Warrior as a matter of course this weekend and at least once more before the new OS X arrives, while PixiBebo has suggestions for three free Mac optimizing tools that might be a good place to start. However with these or the Mac Disk Utility, if anything is found, be ready for a stronger tool.

With Apple's Q3 report for 2012 coming on 24 July, the doubts from pundits have already set in and the usual pre-report hand-wringing is beginning Tiernan Ray reports. My take on this is that by spreading doubt, the share price is depressed and after the figures are released and it rises, some may be able to make a few cents. We might also note that the professional analysts -- the so-called Wall Street experts -- are more often than not wrong about Apple, so one wonders are they not good at the job, or is this deliberate?

It has taken a while and customers had to wait until the case between Apple and Proview had been settled, but Apple has announced this week that the New iPad will be on sale in China this Friday. The press release has no local prices and all are shown in US Dollars. As the prices are identical to those shown in the US store, I have my doubts. We will find out. As the current iPad 2 is shown as RMB 2988 (which is $474) I am dubious of the prices given in the press release.

On that Proview case, Phil Muncaster on the Register has an odd story that suggests Tim Cook himself paid the $60 million settlement, or at least when he declined the payout on shares earlier in the year, this may have been part of the reason. Responsibility? If true we would like to see other execs do the same (Ballmer?).

A while back Apple introduced an EasyPay system to its stores in the US, UK and Holland: order and buy on the iPhone, then walk into the shop and pick the purchase up. I rather like going into a store and playing with the merchandise: all part of the fun. But I guess some people are more important and their TIME is precious. It is reported this week on ifoAppleStore that the system is to be expanded to Apple Stores in Australia this week.

The article speculates on why the system is only available in some countries, but I can tell you why it is not in Thailand: there aren't any Apple stores here, nor are there likely to be with the cosy relationship that exists with the extra tier of the distributors. A local user was recently bemoaning this lack of direct contact with Apple personnel as the service at some iStudio stores is falling and all you get if you ask for some things is "no have", a shrug and the staff member walks away. That is if you can get them to stop chatting to each other. I mentioned on Monday that Apple was withdrawing its products from the EPEAYT certification scheme and now Katie Marsal reports on AppleInsider, San Francisco city is not going to buy any more products from Apple.

Many who read the Cassandra columns will know I am rather a fan of Art, with several apps that display, create or link to Art. As well as Japanese Art, I am rather fond of modern artists like Damien Hirst whose digital work I have bought on [S]edition and of David Hockney whose birthday was this week. On Huffington Post there is a short article with a slideshow of some work, including a print drawn on the iPad, but don't look at the works just for that.

You just cannot keep some performers out of the ring. It is reported on Huffington Post that Mike Daisey, the liar who built a performance round suspect materials that were mainly made up -- artistic licence and all that -- and made theater-goers (and a lot of the headline-hunting press) feel that Apple was doing it all wrong in China, is back. And he is back with The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs again but this time it is a revised version. Ah, that's all right then.

I see on iTunes that among the updates available to me on Wednesday morning is a new version of Twitter (4.3). New features include, expanded Tweets (this is being rolled out gradually), push notifications for Tweets, Ambient notifications so new stories are shown in the status bar, improved support for password entries when there are authorisation problems, tappable avatars that take you directly to users' profiles, and improvements to auto-complete, and Hungarian language support, plus more.

Also updated are WhatsApp Messenger with changes to profile photos and wallpaper settings; the lovely Photo Editor by Aviary with photo-straightening and some other fixes (they tell us Sharing is coming soon). And Vogue.

And rumours of a 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display were boosted this week when benchmarks appeared for an unreleased model, according to Electronista.

Half and Half

A while back it was found that Google was cheating and taking user data from the Safari browser: an accident they claimed. Others beg to differ, but the FTC doesn't care and has fined Google $22.5 million for the breach, Sam Oliver reports on AppleInsider.

I am in half and half opinion mode here as more information about the decision in the UK concerning Apple and Samsung has come to light this week and Jason Gilbert on Huffington Post -- as well as many others, serious and sarcastic -- have reported the words of the judge when dismissing Apple's case: "shoppers would never confuse the two tablets because -- and these are the judge's words here -- Samsung tablets "are not as cool." We of course knew that but there may be enough similarities to confuse some. We do remember that Judge Lucy Koh held the two up in her courtroom in the US and asked the Samsung lawyers to decide which was which: they could not until they got much closer.

Other Matters

ON Seeking Alpha, Kofi Bofah has a lengthy analysis of the state of things was they are currently and what brought the company to its dire situation. In short, the iPhone. The iPhone and executives who thought it was doomed: asleep at the wheel, he calls it. Then there was the Microsoft courtship, when it seemed Ballmer was going to elope with Elop, himself a former Redmond man. Unexpectedly the dowry of Windows 8 is not being offered: is that to hasten the death and make it easy pickings for Redmond, itself in a buying mood despite having to write down over $6 billion and has bought Perceptive Pixel a company that makes giant wall displays, like those used on CNN's Magic Wall, Eric Kim of CNN Money reports. This may give "going to the wall" another meaning.

With no support from Microsoft and none likely from the Finnish government may we expect a major announcement from Nokia in the next month or two? My original link to this was from MacDaily News.

As a later comment, Don Reisinger reports that Nokia shares have now fallen to a 16-year low with more to come. Don Reisinger also reports that the new RIM CEO is saying that he is not happy with the situation there. There is a fair analysis of the current situation, but I am not sure if a comment like that means he is going to stay and fight, or take the money and run.

Despite the above, we read in an item by Alex Williams that RIM is to invest $100 million in a developer community. He rightly asks if this is too late.

Sony announced that it is developing a new type of high-definition wearable video camera which answers the demand for premium point-of-view and action sports filming devices. The Sony blog post has information and images.

Telecity who are operators of large data centres in Europe, now have three locations in Dublin.

Local Items

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.