Category Archives: Apple

Android, Apple, iPhone, Microsoft

Microsoft Office 365 lands in US iPhone App Store

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Office Mobile is only available for iPhone, iPad users can use Office Web Apps for now, Microsoft said

Microsoft released a version of its office suite for iPhones in the U.S. that is only available for Office 365 subscribers.

Microsoft released the Microsoft Office Mobile suite for iPhones Friday. The software is compatible with iPhone 4, 4S and 5, and the iPod Touch (5th generation) and requires iOS 6.1 or later, according to the iTunes release notes.

Mobile Office allows users to access, view and edit Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint documents, according to the release notes. Because charts, animations and SmartArt graphics and shapes are supported, documents look like their originals, Microsoft said, adding that formatting and content remain intact when edits are made.

iPhone users can access Office documents that are stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro and Sharepoint.

“Office Mobile is cloud-connected. The documents you’ve recently viewed on your computer are readily available on your phone in the recent documents panel,” Microsoft said. It is also possible to view and edit documents attached to email settings.

Documents can also be edited offline. Changes will be saved online when the device reconnects with the network, Microsoft said.

When opening a Word document from SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro on an iPhone, “it automatically resumes at the place where you left off reading, even if you last viewed the document on your PC or tablet.”

While the app is free, an Office 365 subscription is required to use it, Microsoft said. The subscription version, called Office 365 Home Premium, costs US$99.99 per household annually. The app will also work with a 365 trial account, Microsoft said, adding that using the Office Mobile app for Windows Phone does not require a subscription.

The app is only available in the U.S. for now. “Office Mobile for iPhone will be available in 29 languages covering 135 markets.A The international rollout will occur over approximately 4-5 days,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

The app is not available in an optimized version for the iPad. “Like all iPhone apps, Office Mobile can work on iPad, either small or ‘2X’ scaled up, but you’ll have a more satisfying experience using Office Web Apps,” Microsoft said.

Office for iPad is reportedly scheduled for release in October 2014.

 

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Apple, Microsoft, Tech

Microsoft’s beef with Apple over SkyDrive for iOS is justified

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Apple and Microsoft must have missed sniping at each other, because this is petty.

It’s been a while since Apple and Microsoft took cheap shots at each other. I guess they got bored. One news outlet reports Apple is being difficult about approving the newest version of SkyDrive for iOS.

The Next Web reports that the two are at loggerheads over a new version of SkyDrive, which has a paid storage option because Microsoft doesn’t pay Apple a 30% cut of subscription revenue generated by paid storage services.

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A main sticking point is that Microsoft does not want to pay Apple the 30% cut, which runs in perpetuity regardless of whether users continue to use an iOS device or not, because the billing is done through their Apple account.

So if a user signed up for the enhanced-capacity drive on their iOS device and then moved to a non-iOS phone (say, a Windows Phone), Apple would still collect 30% of their fee for storage even though they aren’t using the iOS device any more. Microsoft is understandably not keen on this.

The problem is not limited to just SkyDrive. AllThingsD reports that this fee is also applied to Office 365 subscriptions sold through Microsoft Office for iOS, which Microsoft has all but acknowledged will be launched sometime next year.

A spokesperson for Microsoft responded to a query with this comment:

“Similar to the experiences of some other companies, we are experiencing a delay in approval of our updated SkyDrive for iOS. We are in contact with Apple regarding the matter and hope to come to a resolution. We will provide additional information as it becomes available.”

Apple, as usual, isn’t talking.

This problem could easily spread to other apps. Third-party developers that use SkyDrive would also be hit with the 30% fee, and they aren’t going to like that perpetual fee, either.

How this plays out will be very interesting. Microsoft could practice what it preaches and offer policies for the Windows Store similar to what it wants from Apple. This would be a key point of differentiation and potentially competitive.

If Apple continues to play hardball and extends the same courtesy to DropBox and other cloud storage apps, Apple could be the one shut out and shunned. Will it happen? Who knows? Tim Cook does not strike me as unreasonable, and now that this is out and in the media, the pressure may come down on Apple.

Now the real test for Microsoft will be how it behaves when the shoe is on the other foot.

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Apple, iPad

Tablet smackdown: iPad vs Surface RT in the enterprise

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IPads are already making their way into businesses via bring-your-own-device efforts with Microsoft Surface RT tablets hoping to follow suit as employees lobby for their favorite devices. But which one makes more sense from an IT perspective?

Read Network World’s other tech arguments.

The two products are roughly similar in price ($500), run touch-centric operating systems, are highly portable and weigh about a pound and a half.

The two most significant differences are that Surface RT comes with both a keyboard and a version of Microsoft Office – Office 2013 Home & Student 2013 RT – which expand the potential corporate utility of the devices.

Third-party keyboards are available for iPads as are third-party versions of Office-compatible productivity suites but they represent more work for IT. A rumor says Microsoft is working on a client that will allow accessing Office from an iPad through Microsoft’s service Office 365.

Office on Surface RT has its limitations. It lacks Outlook but includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and the Surface RT version requires a business license in order to be used for work. Still, having it installed out of the box is a leg up and gives workers the opportunity to tap into the productivity suite. The keyboard is a big plus.

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When it comes to numbers of applications iPad has far more than Surface RT, and neither one has the number of business applications that support traditional Windows operating systems. Surface RT is a Windows operating system that can’t run traditional Windows apps except for the Office suite specifically crafted for the platform.

Instead, Surface RT has its own class of applications called Windows Store apps, mainly because they can only be bought from the Window Store. They are tailored for touch tablets and must be vetted by Microsoft before they get into the store’s inventory.

They can be developed using XAML, with code-behind in C++, C#, or Visual Basic, and Microsoft has a provision for sideloading custom business apps to Surface RT without submitting them first to Microsoft. Even so, that’s a lot of work to get apps natively on the devices.

Both iPads and Surfaces support virtual desktops, which goes a long way toward making traditional apps available on them. Hosted virtual desktops (HVD) can be costly, Gartner says in a report called “Bring Your Own Device: New Opportunities, New Challenges”. Its research found that “shifting to an HVD model increases the onetime costs per device by more than $600.” Plus proper licensing of iPads for business use is complicated, the report says.

Managing Surface RT is possible via Windows cloud-based management Intune and Exchange ActiveSync for messaging. IPad also supports Exchange ActiveSync. Third-party mobile device management platforms can configure and update iPads as well as monitor compliance with corporate policies. They can also wipe or lock lost and stolen machines. OS X server can do all this as well.

Surface RT comes with security features iPad doesn’t. These include both hardware-based secure boot that checks that the system hasn’t been tampered with and also trusted boot that fires up anti-malware before anything else. That way malware can’t disable the anti-malware before it gets the chance to do its job. The same hardware security module can act as a smartcard for authentication, and Surface RT has full disk encryption.

The iPad has disk encryption but lacks the secure boot features of Surface RT. Its secure boot chain is based on read-only memory and its hardware security module doesn’t do double duty as a smartcard.

NOTE: There is another version of Surface that runs on x86 processors and supports any application that Windows 7 supports. It’s not available until next year, but is actually a tablet-sized full Windows laptop with all the touch capabilities of Surface RT.

That device would beat iPad hands-down if it cost the same, but it is likely to cost hundreds of dollars more than Surface RT.

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Apple, iPad, Microsoft, Tech

5 Things Microsoft Surface Must Do to Beat the iPad

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5 Things Microsoft Surface Must Do to Beat the iPad
The Windows ship is leaking in a dozen places, pierced beneath the waterline by very pointy iPads. Where the Mac never really made a dent in Microsoft’s PC hegemony, the iPad is doing so: it’s being handed to children as a first computer, appearing in schools, and running point-of-sale systems for small businesses. If you consider the iPad a PC, then Apple’s the No. 1 PC maker, according to research firm Canalys.

That makes the iPad public enemy number one for Microsoft if it intends to maintain its PC leadership, and the new Surface tablet is Microsoft’s primary weapon. Surface comes in two versions. The Windows RT version matches the iPad on price, but has relatively few apps; all the same, this will be the model at which most consumers look. The more-expensive Windows 8 “Surface Pro” version will run existing business software.

I hate calling things a “such-and-such killer,” but Microsoft needs to at least slow the iPad penetration of iPads in business and claim a part of the consumer market. How can the company do that? Here are five paths to take.

Developers, developers, developers. Windows RT has fewer than 3,000 apps. The iPad has 250,000. Microsoft needs to beg, borrow, or steal to pump up the app count for RT. Fortunately, the company has plenty of experience with this – it’s managed to nurture more than 100,000 apps for Windows Phone even with that platform stuck in single-digit market share. Bring that experience to bear with the Surface and apps should ramp up nicely.

Bring Xbox to Windows RT. XBox is Microsoft’s most beloved consumer brand. And unlike the PS Vita and Nintendo DS, the Surface has enough horsepower to run pretty good approximations of Xbox games. Microsoft needs to bring as much of the Xbox experience as possible to the Surface. Once again, the company has done a pretty good job of this with Windows Phone, and it can do an even better job with the more powerful hardware here.

Reclaim Ground With Small Businesses. Small businesses are increasingly moving to iPad-based point-of-sale, order-taking and management systems. This major disruption has been brought on by Square and its ilk, and it’s cannibalizing the stodgy old world of retail business systems. Square’s Jack Dorsey has hinted at a Windows Phone app coming, but Square isn’t the be-all and end-all of small business systems. Microsoft needs to seize the day with custom Surface packages with hardware and software priced competitively to iPad solutions for different small business categories such as retail, real estate, and transportation.

Be Enterprise’s Best Friend. IT managers love a good relationship, and Apple has been cozying up to formerly PC-only shops, explaining to them how they can replace virus-prone, heavy PCs with light, secure iPads. Microsoft still has the infrastructure to take this back. Make sure that Surface RT can be managed with the same tools as enterprise Windows 8 installations, and then promote it as something that has all of the advantages of the iPad with more familiarity for Windows-friendly IT departments. If Microsoft wants to lean on SkyDrive, it needs to be enterprise-ready and secure enough for financial and legal firms.
Make Other Tablets Look Like Toys. Microsoft Office is the Surface’s greatest strength. It must integrate perfectly with the Office used on desktops, both from a user perspective (with even complex formatting intact, and features like version-tracking working properly) and from an infrastructure perspective (working with secure servers, domains, and policies.) Microsoft Office is, for better or worse, the backbone of American commerce. If Microsoft can make the Surface look like the only truly serious tablet, then it has a solid chance.

 

 

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Apple

10 Tips and Tricks for iOS 6

Learn how a few special secret buried in iOS 6, as well as a couple of the most important features of Apple’s new operating system.

Maybe you’ve installed Apple’s iOS 6, the newest operating system for iPhones, iPad, and iPod touch, but do you know about all the tricks that are inside and how to use them?

Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 6, may have sparked a fury of Internet hate for the new Maps app, and I certainly won’t wag my finger at anyone who misses Google’s engine behind the Maps app, but plenty more goodies are tucked away in iOS 6 that you shouldn’t miss.

Here are ten of the best features and how to use them.
1. Swipe up to reply to incoming calls with a text message. Maybe you heard that when a call comes in, you can now reply with a text message instead of just declining the call. But these options don’t appear automatically. You have to swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal them.

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2. Customize your text replies to declined calls. The feature that lets you turn down phone calls but reply with text message allows you to use a canned message for added convenience. A few options appear when you swipe up, as mentioned in the first tip. To change what they pre-written texts say, go to

Settings > Phone > Reply with Message.

You can now customize your one-touch replies.

3. Learn how to work the Do Not Disturb option. A new feature called Do Not Disturb appears in the settings, but it’s nothing more than an on/off switch. Where can you set the hours for quiet time, or make it so that calls from emergency contacts come through? Oddly, these choices fall under the Notifications area. Go to

Settings > Notifications > Do Not Disturb.

The Scheduled button lets you define the hours when you don’t want to be disturbed. The Allow Calls From button just below it launches a new screen where you can exclude people from your do-not-disturb list.

4. Attach photos and videos to email in the Mail app. Formerly, using the mail app was occasionally a pain. You’d compose a message, remember that you wanted to send the recipient a photo, too, and realized you couldn’t actually attach anything to the draft. Now you can. In an email draft, press a hold anywhere in the body. In landscape mode (holding the phone horizontally), list of options will appear, including one to insert a photo or video. If you’re in portrait or vertical mode, just press the arrow button that appears until you see the right choice.

5. Read in full-screen mode. News articles, blogs, and other text-heavy pages, when viewed on an iPhone especially, cause squinting and more pinching, zooming, panning than most people feel comfortable doing. When Safari detects a text-heavy page in iOS 6, it supplies a button called Reader at the top right of the URL bar, which reformats the page in a full-screen and easier-to-read layout. You’ll also notice a “share out” or “send to” button (curved arrow) in Safari with a lot of great option beneath it also worth exploring. They’re mostly not new to iOS 6, but they do appear in a newly designed interface.

6. Pass your iPad or iPhone to friends without worrying they’ll get nosy. I admit that I’ve hesitated in the past before passing my mobile devices around to friends to let them look at photos or something that made me giggle on Facebook. The larger the group of friends, the more suspicious I am that someone might take liberties with my device when I’m not looking. The same is true, I’m sure, for parents who let their kids play with their iPhone or iPad. Guided Access, new to iOS 6, lets you lock down your device so that only the app you open can be used, and no other functionality works until you enter a unique four-digit passcode. It’s a little tricky to find and set up.

First, go to

Settings > General > Accessibility > Guided Access.

Toggle the switch to on and set a passcode. When you want to use Guided Access, just open the app of choice, and triple tap the home button. Be sure to hit the start button at the top right. But wait, there’s more (see the next tip).

7. Disable buttons in apps (in Guided Access). When you enable Guided Access in an app—which locks users from going into any other app or areas of the phone—you can also disable parts of the screen. For example, if you turn on Guided Access in the Photos app, you can also use your finger to circle parts of the screen you want to disable, such as the top row of buttons so that one can look through your other albums. Just be sure to hit the Start button in the top right corner before handing over your device!

8. Share Photo Stream. Apple’s syncing service, iCloud, handles images with speed and good responsiveness. But it was never easy to share your pictures until iOS 6 came along. To share your Photo Stream images, go to the Camera app and press Photo Stream. Then hit the plus button in the upper left, which will open a screen where you can fill information about how to share your Photo Stream, whether with a select few individuals, or by making it public on your iCloud account.

9. Learn what the new Privacy button means (and use it). A new Privacy button under Settings comes with little explanation. Tap it, and you might not know what information it’s even telling you because there are no instructions or explainers. Here’s what it does: Privacy shows you apps that can talk to other apps, and whether they are. For example, my Twitter app talks to my Flipboard app. I enabled that integration, and I’m okay with it. But if I didn’t remember allowing it, or wanted to shut it off, I can do so in the Privacy area with one quick motion. This feature gives you very good ability to quick ability to turn off any app-to-app sharing that you don’t want and you might have forgotten existed. So if you don’t want Facebook to know where you are, check the Location Services section of your Privacy buttons, and you can flip the switch off lickety-split.

10. Customize native Facebook alerts. A big new feature in iOS 6 was the direct folding in of Facebook functionality, meaning you can share to Facebook a picture from your Camera app or a link from Safari without ever opening the Facebook app itself. It works similar to the baked-in Twitter functionality that was new to iOS 5. What many users may overlook, however, is the ability to customize your Facebook chat and message alerts, separate from the Facebook app as well. They’re found under

Settings > Facebook > Settings.

Of course, you can also add Facebook alerts to your Notification Center, but that feature isn’t new (it’s under Settings > Notifications, and then scroll down until you find Facebook in your list of apps).

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Top 5 cities for big data jobs

San Francisco tops Modis list, followed by McLean, Va., Boston, St. Louis and Toronto

Corporate data stores are growing exponentially, nearly every tech vendor is positioning their products to help handle the influx of data, and IT departments are scrambling to find the right people to collect, analyze and interpret data in a way that’s meaningful to the business. On the employment front, the big data deluge is creating a hiring boom across North America. Modis, an IT staffing firm, identified five cities in particular where big data is driving job growth.

San Francisco tops the Modis list, followed by McLean, Va., Boston, St. Louis and Toronto. The roles that companies in these cities are fighting to fill include data scientist, data analyst, business intelligence professional and data modeling/data modeler.

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Business intelligence and data analysis have been core enterprise disciplines for a long time, but they’re becoming more important to businesses as data volumes rise, says Laura Kelley, a Modis vice president in Houston. “We’re in a new era in terms of how large the databases are, the amount of data we’re collecting, and how we’re using it. It’s much more strategic than it’s ever been.”

Big data professionals can be particularly difficult to find since many roles require a complicated blend of business, analytic, statistical and computer skills — which is not something a candidate acquires overnight. In addition, “clients are looking for people with a certain level of experience, who have worked in a big data environment. There aren’t a lot of them in the market,” Kelley says.

 

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Looking at recruiting trends across its offices, Modis finds there’s not one industry that’s doing the most big-data hiring. Rather, the cities have in common a concentration of large enterprises across myriad industries.

San Francisco, for instance, is home to large companies in the retail, insurance, healthcare, and e-commerce sectors.

McLean, Va., has both a strong commercial sector and government presence. “There are many data center operations in this area, both commercial and government related, that require talent to support the high volume of that data,” Modis explains in its report. “In addition, there is no larger consumer of IT products and services in the world than the US federal government.”

Banking and bio/pharmaceutical industries helped put Boston on the big data hiring map. “Both industries deal with large amounts of data that are detailed and complex in nature. That data then needs to be analyzed and placed in reports, dashboards and spreadsheets by data scientist and analysts,” Modis writes.

In St. Louis, universities and healthcare companies lead the big data hiring boom, followed by pharmaceutical and bioresearch firms that need to fill data analyst and scientist roles.

Lastly, in Toronto, financial institutions are fueling a need for business intelligence pros who can help organizations get a more precise and complete picture of the business and customers, Modis finds.

In the big picture, companies often have to compromise and prioritize their wish list — technical expertise, industry experience or quantitative statistical analysis skills, for experience — to find available big-data candidates.

“What is this person going to be doing? Do you need the technical skills? Or is the quantitative/statistical expertise more important? Is this person going to be doing data modeling or making business decisions?” Kelley says. “In an ideal world, companies want all of it. But it’s not an ideal world.”

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Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Tech

Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault?

Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault?
Although Fibre Channel is seeing single-digit growth rates, Ethernet for storage is exploding

Computerworld – Fibre Channel, the high-speed data transport protocol for storage area networks (SAN), is under increasing pressure as data centers move toward Ethernet for all data network traffic and SAS for hardware interconnects.

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By no means is Fibre Channel down and out. In fact, recent figures indicate it’s still showing low single-digit, year-over-year growth. The protocol is currently used in $50 billion worth of equipment around the world, according to research firm Gartner.

Because corporate data centers are slow to change out technology, the Fibre Channel networking market will likely continue to show sluggish growth for the next five to 10 years. After that, Ethernet looks to be the protocol of the future.

“The counter winds against Ethernet is that there’s a lot of politics and a lot of religion around Fibre Channel,” said Forrester analyst Andrew Reichmann. “[But] Ethernet can do most everything Fibre Channel can do. Ethernet is cheaper, more ubiquitous.”

And it allows IT managers to find the best fit for specific application workloads, he said. “As those decisions move more toward a workload-centric approach, the one that makes the most sense is Ethernet. For example, it makes more sense to put your [virtual machine] infrastructure on iSCSI or NFS [network file system] because there’s very little difference in the performance you get compared to Fibre Channel.”

Slowing the move to Ethernet — for now — are the usual IT turf battles. Storage networks and hardware are purchased by the storage team, which controls that portion of the overall IT budget. Moving to an all-Ethernet infrastructure means giving that budget away to the networking group, according to Reichmann.

On top of that, some storage administrators simply don’t believe Ethernet is robust enough for data storage traffic. They’ve always used Fibre Channel and see it as the fastest, most reliable way to move data between servers and back-end storage.

“All those factors make it hard to move away from Fibre Channel,” Reichmann said.

Market research firm IDC predicts Fibre Channel will remain at the core of many data centers (supporting mission-critical mainframe and Unix-based applications), while most future IT asset deployments will leverage 10GbE (and later 40GbE) for the underlying storage interconnect. This transition will lead eventually to market revenue losses for Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBA) and switch products.

As the Fibre Channel market shrinks, IDC predicts “rapid and sustained revenue growth” for 10GbE storage interconnect hardware such as converged network adapters (CNA), 10GbE network interface cards (NIC) and switches. (A CNA is simply a network interface card that allows access to both SANs and more common LAN networks by offering multiple protocols such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and straight Ethernet.)

SAS and Fibre Channel drives

Although Fibre Channel switch revenues have remained relatively flat over the past two years, according to Gartner, Fibre Channel disk drive sales have plummeted. Vendors are expected to stop shipping them within five years.

“We’re forecasting SAS will replacing Fibre Channel because it provides more flexibility and it lowers engineering costs,” said Gartner analyst Stan Zaffos.

High-performance applications such as relational databases will be supported by SANs made up of 5% solid-state drives and 95% SAS drives, according to Forrester’s Reichmann. SAS, or serial-attached SCSI drives, are dual-ported for resilience and are just as fast as their Fibre Channel counterparts.

Unlike Fibre Channel, SAS shares a common backplane with cheap, high-capacity serial ATA (SATA) drives, so they’re interchangeable and can be mixed among drive trays. It also allows for simpler data migration in a tiered storage infrastructure.
IP storage is a buyer’s market

Gartner recently released figures showing that over the past two years, shipments of Fibre Channel HBAs and switches have remained relatively flat, while 10GbE unit shipments have soared. According to Gartner, shipments of 10GbE NICs rose from 259,000 in 2009 to more than 1.4 million last year. And it’s a buyer’s market, with prices falling through the floor due to fierce competition between seven principle vendors, including Intel, Broadcom, QLogic and Emulex.

“Prices for 10GbE hardware is going into the Dumpster. The market has to stabilize around three vendors before we see something from the revenue side,” said Sergis Mushell, an analyst at Gartner.

According to Mushell, single-port 10GbE NICs sell for $43 to $60 dollars; a year ago they went for $100. Dual-ported 10GbE NICs now go for about $300. And CNA cards sell for between $700 and $1,000.

In comparison, a 4Gbps Fibre Channel HBA sells for $337, while an 8Gbps HBA ranges between $1,000 and about $1,900 on sites such as Pricegrabber.com.

In the first quarter of 2010, Fibre Channel switch revenue totaled $1.59 billion; a year later it hit $1.66 billion; and in the third quarter of 2011, it was $1.58 billion. (Those figures includes both 4Gbps and 8Gbps modular and fixed switches.)

Sales of Fibre Channel HBAs — network interface cards that are required for servers and storage arrays alike — have also struggled. In the first quarter of 2010, HBA revenue totaled $781 million. While it rose to $855 million in the first quarter of 2011, it dropped back to $811 million by the third quarter of the year.

According to IDC, as the economic recession abated in 2010, IT shops began server upgrades that had been deferred, with an increased use of server and storage virtualization. To manage those virtualized infrastructures, IT managers sought out a set of standard elements: x86 processors for computing, PCI for system buses, Ethernet for networking and SAS for hard drive and SSD interfaces.

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Apple, Microsoft, Tech

Microsoft a decade ahead of Apple on security, We’re not so sure

In a recent interview, Kaspersky Lab founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky claimed that Apple is “10 years” behind Microsoft on security, as evidenced by the recent malware attacks affecting Mac OS X

There’s been a lot of chatter lately that the recent Flashback and Flashfake malware infestations plaguing Apple’s Max OS X are a sign that the Mac is not nearly as secure as Apple and its devout fans would like you to believe.
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Eugene Kaspersky, however, founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab—a leading producer of security software—claims things are much worse. He says that Apple is in a potentially dire position and must change its approach to patches and updates, much in the same way Microsoft did year ago to more quickly and efficiently address vulnerabilities in Windows.

In a recent interview with CBR Online, Kaspersky said,

“I think they are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security. For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms.”

Of course it’s possible to develop malware for OSX. Malware could be developed for any OS. As far as malware exploiting vulnerabilities, is that what’s been happening on Windows systems for ages?

Before we go on, we should point out what we believe to be a serious flaw in that statement. When Kaspersky says “there is no big difference between Mac and Windows,” that may be true on some level because they are both consumer operating systems, but the underlying technologies in OS X and Windows are fundamentally different. OS X is based on UNIX, which is decades more mature than Windows. And with that maturity also comes strong security.

Kaspersky goes on to say, “They will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago. They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software.”

This may or may not be the case. Kaspersky asserts that the success of Flashback / Flashfake will result in more malware being released for OS X. We’re not so sure. Most malware producers are in it to make a quick buck, not for notoriety. And the success of one piece of malware, doesn’t guarantee more will follow. Flashback / Flashfake may be getting some attention now, but targeting the Mac just doesn’t make as much financial sense as targeting Windows.

The fact of the matter is, even with relatively strong Mac sales, Windows-based systems far outsell the Mac and malware producers are always going to more aggressively target the largest install base. At least that’s our opinion. What say you?

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Apple tops $600 billion in market value

Stock price surges briefly to $649 per share

Apple stock price surged over the $600 mark today, about a month after shooting past $500. For a time, the company’s total market capitalization was more than $600 billion.

The stock price rose to $644 in the morning, and then fell back to $629 by midday. Only one other company has reached the $600 billion value: Microsoft on Dec. 30, 1999, was valued at $619 billion. Today, its value is $260 billion, according to an Associated Press story.

It’s all the more noticeable because stocks on the main exchanges fell yet again in response to poor U.S. job numbers last week, and continued concerns over the European debt crisis.

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BACKGROUND: Apple to issue dividends, repurchase shares from $98B cash balance

SCUTTLEBUTT: iPhone 5 rumor rollup for the week ending April 6

Apple’s stock price has climbed 59% this year. A range of analysts have said the stock has been under-valued by the market, despite the company’s high revenues and huge profits created by the introduction of its iOS-based mobile products.

The question is how high will the stock price, and the company’s value, go? Last week, a stock analyst with Topeka Capital Markets, Brian White, attracted headlines by setting a target price of over $800 per share, and a goal of $1,001, which would bring Apple close to being a $1 trillion company. White argued that the start of iPhone sales on China’s biggest mobile carrier, China Mobile, and the launch of an Apple TV set, would expand Apple’s revenues and profits.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster also raised his price target for Apple’s stock, but not as high as White: Munster’s target lifted to $718 from $670, and others expect the price to at least top $700. Munster was quoted as saying his previous forecast underestimated Apple’s “expected growth rates for the smartphone and tablet markets.”

Some have speculated that the stock price surge was triggered by Apple’s recent announcement that it will use some of its nearly $100 billion in cash to pay a dividend and buy back some shares. But Dirk Schmidt, writing at the Asymco blog, cites data that show the price began ticking upward faster in late 2011, and then even faster starting in February 2012, well before the mid-March dividend news.

According to one account, today’s first intra-day trade over $600 came 22 trading days after the first $500 trade. That pace is faster than the 32 trading days needed to rise from $400 to $500.

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Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tech

Essential browser tools for Web developers

Essential browser tools for Web developers
What the professionals use and recommend to their colleagues

Computerworld – Out of the thousands of cool add-ons out there for Firefox, Chrome and other popular Web browsers, only a select few make it onto the desktops of professional Web developers and designers. Which are the most useful for the day-to-day work of designing and developing websites?

Browser tools for Web devs

Code inspection, editing and debugging
Design assistance
Enhancing performance
Handy utilities
Boosting SEO
Collaboration

 

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Computerworld asked more than 20 professionals from across the country what they recommend to their colleagues and why. While they stuck mostly with free browser extensions, they couldn’t resist throwing in a few highly useful tools and services that are accessed via a browser rather than being true add-ons.

Here’s their hot list, where you’ll find some old favorites and, we hope, discover some new tools for your arsenal.
Code inspection, editing and debugging

These three tools make the job of viewing website code and prototyping page changes fast and easy. No need to touch the live code until you’re ready to commit to changes.

What it does: Inspects, edits and debugs website code within your browser.

Who recommends it:
• Matt Mayernick, vice president of Web development, Hudson Horizons in Saddle Brook, N.J.
• Josh Singer, president, Web312 in Chicago
• Richard Kesey, president and founder, Razor IT in Syracuse, N.Y.
• Ryan Burney, lead Web developer, 3 Roads Media in Greenwood Village, Col.

Why it’s cool: Probably the best known of all the tools listed here, “Firebug is the greatest add-on ever created,” Mayernick says. It’s not just the fact that Firebug lets developers inspect website code and elements, but how it helps with debugging that makes the tool great. “If I am writing JavaScript that’s changing the background color in a row, Firebug will show what’s happening to the CSS code in real time,” he says.
Firebug
Firebug displays the page’s HTML code in the lower left window and its CSS data in the lower right. Click to view larger image.

Firebug inspects the code by presenting the HTML and the CSS code in two side-by-side windows. “Firebug is indispensable. What’s cool is you can turn styles on or off or add styles on the fly. It lets me make changes live on the page without having to save or reload the files,” says Burney.

“It’s great for finding JavaScript errors,” adds Kesey. “When you click on an Ajax link, it reads out what the action is and gives you the response in an https: format so you can see what the headers were and what’s happening behind the scenes.”
Web Developer
Author: Chris Pederick
Browsers supported: Chrome, Firefox
Price: Free
Where to get it: Install Web Developer for Chrome or Web Developer for Firefox

What it does: Provides a toolkit for viewing, editing and debugging websites.

Who recommends it:
• Darrell Armstead, mobile developer, DeepBlue in Atlanta
• Jen Kramer, senior interface developer, 4Web in Keene, N.H.

Why it’s cool: “I love Web Developer because of the control it gives me over any site. It gives me the ability to strip a site down to its core, and lets me modify and tweak things to get it looking and working the way I want it to,” Armstead says. But that’s not all he likes: “I love the Outline Block Level Elements feature because it gives me a visual representation of how a site is built on the front end.”
Web Developer add-on
Web Developer displays the style sheets associated with a page and lets you edit them to quickly see how changes will look before actually making any changes to the website’s code. (Credit: Jen Kramer)
Click to view larger image.

Kramer chimes in: “What I like about it is the ability to look at CSS. It shows all of the style sheets available on the page, and I can edit those on the fly and see how it looks in the browser,” she says. “That’s particularly helpful to me because I work with content management systems. It allows me to style what’s being sent to the browser.

“Firebug has something similar, but I find it more difficult to use. It’s much harder to get a style sheet out of Firebug and into Joomla,” Kramer adds. For me, Web Developer works better.”
Google Chrome Developer Tools
Author: Google
Browser supported: Chrome
Price: Free
Where to get it: Included with the Chrome browser. Right-click on any Web page in Chrome and choose “Inspect Element,” or choose View –> Developer –> Developer Tools from the menu.

What it does: Provides tools for inspecting, editing and debugging website code.

Who recommends it:
• Jason Hipwell, managing director, Clikzy Creative in Alexandria, Va.
• Shaun Rajewski, lead developer at Web Studios in Erie, Pa.
• Ryan Burney, 3 Roads Media

Why it’s cool: Developer Tools is Google’s answer to Firebug for Firefox, but there’s no add-on to download: Google built it right into the Chrome browser.

“It is my favorite ‘extension’ because of its intuitive design, with HTML on the left, CSS on the right,” says Hipwell. “Inspect Element will highlight elements on a page as you hover over them, which makes it easy to find the div tag I am looking for. It gives me the ability to see changes on a live site, but those changes exist only on my local computer, making it a perfect testing environment. Its simplicity is really what makes the tool so effective.”
Chrome Developer Tools
Using Chrome Developer Tools, Clikzy’s Jason Hipwell has replaced the Computerworld logo with his own in just a few clicks. (Credit: Clikzy Creative) Click to view larger image.

Rajewski is also a big fan. “Developer Tools allows you to see the final output of what is rendered to [the] screen, and has the ability to highlight individual elements, view the elements’ CSS tags and inherited tags, and make ‘live’ changes to the code to see what it looks like in the browser without making file changes,” he says.

“One nice thing about Chrome’s Developer Tools is that it will give you the dimensions of things,” says Burney. Click on the image URL and up pops the image with the associated link, image dimensions and file type displayed. That’s something Firebug doesn’t do, he says. “Being able to know at a glance the dimensions of an object, that’s a big time saver.”

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