Darwin's Theories - macintosh tag

Apple Mac OS 10.4 minor security glitch

Wed, 11 May 2005 12:00:00 GMT

When you move the mouse into the "hot corner" to activate Screen Lock, there is a brief interval (maybe only a second) during which if you move the mouse out of the hot corner, the screen is unlocked!!!
This is idiotic. As I have said many times, Apple should abolish the use of "hot corners" to enable screen lock, and use their own standard GUI guidelines of providing a single PUSH BUTTON to be clicked on in the mouse in order to activate screen lock.
This could go in the Apple menu, along with Sleep/Restart/Shutdown. Or it could be a Preference to "Show in Menubar" (like for Clock and Displays). Or it could even be a program you start from the Dock (but supported, not the old kludge of drag the Screen lock internal DLL into the dock).
But it must be clear, unambiguous, and irrevocable; once it's pressed you should not be able to do ANYTHING until you have entered the password.

Tiger v. Tiger: Apple does a Bad Bunny to Java

Mon, 02 May 2005 12:00:00 GMT

Apple's much-heralded Tiger, offically called Mac OS X 10.4, contains many nice advances, including Dashboard, Automator, and more. But concurrent with Tiger's release, Apple appears to have gone out of their way to break Sun's venerable old "Write Once, Run Anywhere" mantra. Not only are they a good six months behind the industry in releasing Sun's Tiger, known as Java Standard Edition 1.5 (aka "Java 5"). They also solemnly refuse to release Java 1.5 for even their current OS, Mac OS 10.3. Presumably this is to pressure people to buy 10.4. That's their choice, but Java developers are left with a rather unpleasant conundrum: either give up on all the nice features of Java's Tiger, or give up on compatibility with Apple's Tiger.
The fact is that many people would have upgraded without pressure like this. I bought 10.4 today, the first full day it was on sale in stores in Toronto, and several hours before I found that the Java was not backwards compatible. But now I'm going to think twice before upgrading again. By the time of the next upgrade, OpenBSD (my favorite free OS because of its security stance and record) may have good enough desktop support for Mac laptops that I can "switch" completely - to free software.
There's no good in Apple's decision for developers or end users. After a bad choice like this, I think Apple will find that theirs is the Paper Tiger.

Apple's Keynote Keeps Up

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 12:00:00 GMT

Catch my OReillyNet review of Keynote, Apple's new Presentation Software for Mac OS X.

Mac Security Article

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 12:00:00 GMT

My article on Mac Security appears on O'ReillyNet.

CNN agrees with me: Mac OS X is Good

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 12:00:00 GMT

CNN's technology writer Brian Clark agrees that OS X is UNIX for the masses.