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Half Off for WWDC Week, Just in Time for Summer.

Second Build of Mac OS X 10.6.8 Seeded to Developers

Last night, Apple seeded the second build of Mac OS X 10.6.8 to developers. The new build, weighing at around 1 GB, carries number 10K524 and it’s available now for download in the Mac Dev Center. According to people familiar with the new release, focus areas mentioned in the seed notes are still AirPort, Graphics Drivers, Mac App Store, Networking, QuickTime and VPN.

The first build of 10.6.8 was seeded last week on May 13, coming as a surprise for those who thought Mac OS X 10.6.7 would be the last Snow Leopard update. Apple is expected to unveil the final version of 10.7 Lion at the WWDC in June with a public release this summer, leading many to believe 10.6.8 will be the last maintenance update for machines running Snow Leopard.

Apple Reaches Deal with Sony Over Cloud Music

As work on the rumored cloud music service nears finalization for an official WWDC announcement, Bloomberg reported last night Apple has reached a deal with Sony Music Entertainment, following reports that the company managed to sign the Warner Music Group and EMI. This leaves Universal, the biggest label of all four in the United States, out of the equation, but according to the rumors Apple’s Eddy Cue is actively focused on closing all the remaining paperwork with music labels by next week.

Apple has reached licensing accords with Sony Corp. (6758)’s music division, EMI Group and Warner Music Group, the people said. Universal Music Group, the largest recording company, is close to a deal, another person said. The company also would need to reach agreements with music publishers, which control different rights than the labels.

Apple’s cloud music service is said to be part of a major MobileMe revamp the company has been working on for the past two years, which will include several new functionalities and a new price point with basic features offered for free. As for the music service, it’s unclear whether Apple will adopt an upload system like Google and Amazon or a subscription-based delivery with songs coming from the iTunes Store, but a patent surfaced yesterday seems to suggest Apple’s implementation will go as far as allowing users to upload their own songs, and stream others they don’t own from a larger “content source” like the iTunes Store.

A Fantastical Giveaway

Your calendar application might be great at mitigating and managing various calendars, but entering new dates and creating events at a moment’s notice should be practical and easy. Digitally, it’s often difficult to remove the abstraction of pull down menus, date pickers, alarms, and event notes when you simply want to note a few meetings and your kid’s soccer game. I don’t like to fidget with my calendar software, and I don’t need it open all day. Fantastical does a couple of great things, such as allowing me to remove iCal from my Object Dock so I can quickly glance at the date, and it makes entering events painless since input is derived from plain English. Just tell Fantastical that you’ll be attending a two hour meeting at four o’clock on Sunday, and without any menu-selecting Fantastical will schedule that all important briefing. The interface is terrific, sporting an iOS-like popover with a fine attention to showing you matters most without cluttering your desktop. Fantastical is always ready when I need it to be, and I don’t need to open some gargantuan calendar app just to enter a few events. Between this and the recent OmniFocus update (a quick plug since these two apps work excellently in conjunction), you’ve got yourself a slick app handcrafted to help you schedule and manage your various activities. Fantastical is currently $14.99 on the Mac App Store, but we’re going to be giving away two copies to a couple of lucky calendar-needy MacStorians past the break.

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Ars Investigates Recent Mac Malware→

Ars Investigates Recent Mac Malware

MAC Defender has changed everything,” one Apple Store Genius, who requested to remain anonymous (we’ll call him Lenny) told Ars. “We probably get 3 or 4 people with this per day. Most of them only got as far as installing the program and haven’t entered their credit card details.”

Lenny went on. “This always sparks a debate at the bar on whether antivirus software is necessary on the Mac. This is difficult, as the store sells several antivirus products implying that Apple supports the idea, but as many customers point out, the sales guys aren’t shy in making the claims for Mac OS X’s security. Internally, Apple’s [IT] department mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company machines.

Following the controversy that sparkled after the large diffusion of MAC Defender (covered here) that rose (again) the inevitable question as to whether being scared of malware on a Mac is nothing but crying wolf, Ars Technica takes a step back and tries to analyze the situation interviewing Apple employees, Geniuses, and various representatives of antivirus / security companies. Whilst it’s kind of obvious that antivirus makers will always recommend their products because you have to keep your machine secure, the takeaway from support specialists is interesting: there’s no need to panic, but people are undoubtedly coming over asking for help with this recent malware.

Of course, the peculiar nature of Mac Defender (it’s a “scanning software” that asks for your credit card details, and it’s downloaded through a malicious script from certain websites and Google Image Search) raises another issue: users are installing the software by manually going through an installer and giving it their passwords – this shouldn’t happen. Anyone who’s a little skilled in computing should know that stuff you didn’t want to download shouldn’t be granted permission to run in the first place. And MAC Defender comes as a whole installer. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s really about crying wolf (though some people like to run overly sensationalistic headlines), as much as it’s about the fact that this malware ultimately exists. Fact.

Ars has an interesting read, and our friends at TUAW have a pretty handy guide detailing the removal of MAC Defender. The best tip, however, is still the same: don’t execute programs and documents you don’t know.

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DropDAV 2.0 Launches, Goes Paid at $5 Per Month

If you’re a heavy user of the iWork suite for iPad or the recently released OmniOutliner and have been looking for a way to easily keep documents in “sync” across machines, you’ve probably already heard of DropDAV. By providing a WebDAV interface to your existing Dropbox account, DropDAV allows you to export documents using iOS apps’ “save to WebDAV” function, and have your docs conveniently saved on the desktop. Because DropDAV simply gives Dropbox the capability of becoming a WeDAV server, you’re not really “syncing” documents when you use Pages or Number for iPad –rather, as these apps already use WebDAV, you’re given the option to at least save to Dropbox. That’s something.

The first version of DropDAV, launched a few months ago, became so popular that the developers had to rethink the service from the ground-up and rewrite the whole engine to support the latest WebDAV standards, offer more speed and reliability, and find a pricing model that would keep operations going. DropDAV 1.0, in fact, was free if you were connecting to a free 2 GB Dropbox account, and asked you to pay only if you had a paid Dropbox account. With version 2.0, officially announced two days ago, gone is the freemium model and the differentiation between free and paid Dropbox accounts: DropDAV now has a 14-day free trial, and after that it’s $5 per month. Simple. The developers explain they’ve completely rebuilt DropDAV to be faster, more compliant to standards and less prone to server-side errors; by integrating with the powerful Dropbox API, DropDAV still allows you to virtually export to WebDAV from any app that supports the protocol, and have documents actually offloaded to Dropbox. It works really, really well and, from what I can tell after a quick test (I’m a subscriber), it’s seriously faster and improved. From a technical standpoint, the devs write:

We identified inconsistencies in the way PHP and the OAuth Pear plugin worked with UTF-8 strings. We created a taxonomy of WebDAV clients, sorting out which ones behaved similarly. We integrated in support for WebDAV locking to comply with the Class 2 specifications.

In the end, we bridged our legacy implementations of WebDAV’s hairier functions (written in PHP) with the native UTF-8 support and better Dropbox client in Python. We settled on an implementation that includes extensible request parsing in PHP, communication with Dropbox in Python, then extensible response formatting back in PHP. It’s a lot cleaner than it sounds, and it works really, really well for the entire UTF-8 character set and XML Special characters.

Class 2 support is still a work in progress. In truth, it’s somewhat of a hack in that Dropbox doesn’t support locking, so we could only create the illusion of locking for our WebDAV clients. We think we’ve done that well enough to roll out and will continue improving it to eventually pass the Litmus test in the coming weeks.

If you haven’t checked out DropDAV already, here’s your chance to start a free trial and connect the service to your Dropbox. It works great with the iWork suite, The Omni Group’s apps and a variety of file managers for OS X and iOS (such as iFiles), and it’s probably the best shot you have if you don’t want to go insane with Pages and exporting files in iTunes.

Apple “iTV” Prototype Shows Up on eBay

As noted by MacRumors, a prototype “iTV” of the device that eventually shipped as the first-generation Apple TV is now available on eBay for a “Buy Now” price of $350. The device, resembling the original Apple TV with only an Apple logo on top but lacking the “TV” branding, is still functional and also managed to receive Apple TV software updates throughout the years, in spite of its internal and not-for-release nature that would suggest the device is not capable of running the latest software. However, the iTV is apparently working correctly and showing the 3.0 software update from 2007. The seller on eBay claims the pictures are the best description he can provide, and admittedly the device seems in good conditions.

The photos also show the device booted up and displaying the stock photo screensaver, although it is not connected to the Internet and the item’s description indicates that it has not been fully tested for functionality.

The iTV also has a couple of labels on its back, depicting the DVT (device verification test) status and the “Apple Development Team” that originally owned it and somehow gave it to someone else. Overall, the device looks like a genuine hardware verification unit that eventually shipped with a different logo, but still retains all the functionalities of the original Apple TV. Check it out here before it’s too late.

Dual-Mode Verizon iPhone 4S to be Released With AT&T Version

Verizon has been a leaky faucet lately, with our first real bit of insight into Apple’s strategy coming in April where CFO Fran Shammo spoke about a global iPhone hitting shelves at the same time as their competitors. The idea of a dual-mode phone was “reiterated” again by Shammo at Reteurs’ technology summits: to be clear, the idea that Verizon would launch a dual-mode, GSM/CDMA capable model alongside AT&T would give it equal footing when customers decide on a carrier. Shammo offered further clarity that the iPhone probably won’t be an LTE device, noting, ”It’s a bigger issue for Apple than it is for us.” Apple is focused on providing an iPhone that works globally at the moment, rather than focusing on LTE technologies. Verizon themselves aren’t concerned about the lack of LTE on the next iPhone, given that they already have a slew of Android devices that offer their functionality if consumers desire it.

Along with iPhone plans, Shammo also said family plans would get shared data plans after the switch to tiered pricing. An end to unlimited on-device data plans was still on track for the summer, but he said it was sure Verizon would have “mega-plans” where a certain number of devices had a larger pool of data.

If you’re planning on getting an unlimited plan under Verizon, your switch from AT&T to the big red may not matter once Verizon adopts tiered pricing. Likely to be competitive with AT&T who’re currently offering 2GB of data for $25 a month, Verizon may also offer customers buying multiple phones a discount, and that mega-plans may offer incentives such as the ability to ‘borrow’ plans from other 3G devices (read: free tethering).

The next iPhone is rumored to be on track for an improved camera, bigger display, and an A5 processor. Apple should currently be in the process of ramping down iPhone 4 shipments (expecting to ship 2 million less in Q2) as the new batch of next generation iPhones are scheduled to begin production in August. The next iPhone will also likely feature an 8 MP Sony camera, as well as sporting a new design with relocated flash. All of us are going to be incredibly anxious as it’s unlikely Apple will launch a new iPhone in June or July, but I’m guessing September is looking like it’ll be bigger than we expected.

[Reuters via Electronista]

Could Aperture Be Coming to iOS?

This would be a photographers dream come true wouldn’t it? Even if you prefer Adobe’s Lightroom to Apple’s Aperture, I’d love to have the iPad play a larger role in field editing for photographers. The Photos app included on the iPad isn’t exactly prime for professional work (it’s great for displaying and browsing the end result), but Aperture on the iPad would give photographers an intuitive touch interface to edit photos in a library that’s perhaps separate from Photo’s library. Patently Apple reports that Aperture could well be on its way towards touchscreen devices such as the iPad (and maybe that touchscreen iMac we’ve heard about).

It’s the latter that’s interesting in light of Apple’s latest patent revelation that Aperture is coming to touch displays including handhelds like the iPad. It may even come to future desktops and laptops that offer touch displays, according to Apple. An advanced graphics pen would be great for fast photo touch-ups and appreciated by photographers using Aperture on-the-go.

The patent covers various means of interacting with Aperture, from touch input to pen input, and the descriptions of various GUI elements that can provide authors with an easy toolset at the ready for image editing. The authors are intrigued with the idea that Apple may be moving towards various forms of alternate input, such a smart light pen, that could aid future Apple device owners in precision editing.

[via Patently Apple]