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It’s been a while. I have no excuse. Except, my Mac works. I have not spent one minute (well maybe one) worrying about viruses, spyware or ANY of the usual WinTel crap. I have saved, I figger, in 10 weeks, at least 20 hours of time, not including crashes which means multiples of days. Last night, in a hotel in Vancouver, I doubled checked my stealthiness, and all is good. I have been to no less than 2 dozen networks in the last couple of weeks, and I have never needed to configure to them. I have saved at least...

Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 brings productivity to desktops, turnkey power to servers Users usually don’t expect much from OSes. They’re the foundation for prefabricated or build-it-yourself solutions, but none is a rich solution, a self-contained platform out of the box. If you want a complete productivity platform, you can nickel and dime your way there with Windows, hammer and saw your way there with Linux … or hit the ground running with OS X. Unlike any OS X before it or any competing desktop OS, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) (Overview, Articles, Company) sends users’ productivity skyrocketing before one...

May 09, 2005 7:00 pm ETMacCentral Dashboard: Widget (In)Security By Dori Smith A new Web page documents an issue with Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger's new Dashboard feature that, left unchecked, could potentially be exploited by malware developers, according to the page's author. The exploit is described and demonstrated on a page called Zaptastic: Blueprint for a widget of mass destruction. Going by the nom de plume of Stephan.com, the author has described how Safari 2.0's default preference settings could lead users to unwittingly download and install a Dashboard widget. There's a common misconception that auto-install of widgets means...

Some people just aren't frightened by the prospect of big felines on the loose. Hundreds of Mac users in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan certainly didn't seem to be, while they stood patiently in line and watched a man in a cat suit dance to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger," promoting the debut of Apple's new operating system. The scene was repeated at Apple Stores from coast to coast at 6 p.m. local time for the worldwide unveiling of Tiger, the latest update to OS X. In New York, people had queued up in an ever-renewing line for...

Tiger on Track for Mid-April Release Mac OS X 10.4, also known as "Tiger," is proceeding on schedule, as Apple has dropped the prerelease tag from the latest build of the operating system, indicating that it has moved to final candidate stage. It is understood that Build 8A425 was distributed both internally and to selected key developers last Tuesday, and unless major new issues are discovered it will be the last significant milestone before the product goes gold master. The build includes only two significant glitches, concerning Japanese language support in some Carbon-based applications, and issues with some Nvidia GeForce...

Whether you believe the claims at some rumor sites that Tiger has gone Golden Master or not, it's a sure thing that the publicity engines will be turned up real high shortly in advance of its release. There will be rolling out parties and other events at Apple dealers, and lots of early experiences to chew over. At same time, you might wonder why all the fuss about a computer operating system. Isn't Panther good enough? Actually, I still know folks who haven't migrated beyond Jaguar, or even Mac OS 9. They do not regard an OS as a life-altering...