Announcements

Adobe Systems has announced a beta release of Flash player 10.2 for all supported platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) that includes a new "Stage Video" feature that promises high-performance video playback which uses "just over 0 percent CPU usage," according to a news release issued today.

Adobe has been developing GPU acceleration in recent builds of Flash player, and the Stage Video feature in the 10.2 release now offloads the whole video rendering pipeline to the GPU, so not only is H.264 decoded in hardware, but other adjustments such as color conversion and … Read more

Apple is advertising an "exciting announcement" for iTunes that the company claims will make tomorrow a day you will never forget. The intriguing ad says that the news will be revealed at 7 a.m. PT on Tuesday, November 16.

Until now, there has been no consensus on which features will come next for iTunes. Some industry insiders have speculated that Apple will announce a cloud-based music management system--perhaps related to new data centers it's building in North Carolina--but others suspect that Apple will announce a subscription-based streaming service.

Apple's acquisition of the Lala streaming service … Read more

As we expected, Apple today released OS X 10.6.5 for Mac users to install. The update improves a number of features, including graphics drivers, aspects of the printing system, OpenType font management, and a number of networking details.

The update is rather large at between 500MB and 700MB via software update, depending on the system being updated. It should also show up in standalone Combo and Delta updaters (expect these to be much larger in size than the update via Software Update) on the Apple Support Downloads page soon.

The specifically updated features according to the installer include … Read more

The new MacBook Air systems that were released in the past month continue to push the boundary of features packed into a thin enclosure, and the systems are getting many positive reviews as being the future of portable computing.

Despite the many positive aspects of the systems, as with any new release there will be some issues that will develop and need to be ironed out. One of these problems has been the computer's display repeatedly fading from dark to light after waking from sleep. Currently the fix for this has been to either restart the system or force … Read more

A new Trojan horse malware that affects Mac OS X has been uncovered by Macintosh Security site SecureMac. The Trojan is called "trojan.osx.boonana.a" and is being disguised as a video and distributed through social-networking sites like Facebook.

The Trojan horse appears as a link on people's Facebook pages that may have the text "Is this you in this video?" in the link. When the link is clicked, the Trojan will run a Java applet that will download other files to the computer and run an installer automatically.

The Trojan will run in … Read more

Following Apple's announcements for the new MacBook Air models and features of OS X Lion and iLife, Apple has issued a few updates for current systems. The first is an update for the new 2010 model MacBook Air systems that were released today, and the second is an update to Java for Snow Leopard installations.

The MacBook Air update fixes graphical issues in which the system may become unresponsive during the playback of movie trailers in iMovie, and also addresses an issue in which the system would hang after waking from sleep when attached to an external display. The … Read more

OS X 10.7 "Lion" is the eighth major release of OS X, and comes with a new philosophical approach to the Mac. Apple has been using OS X for the "Mac OS" as well as the underlying OS for the AppleTV as well as the iOS on iPhones and the iPad, and is now looking to bring some of the innovations in the iOS back to the Mac OS to enhance the Mac experience.

The first is multitouch gestures, a feature that has been progressively implemented into OS X with Apple's multitouch trackpad, Magic mouse, and Magic trackpad input devices. While many might imagine a touch-screen option for notebooks, Apple is not going to go in that direction, indicating user fatigue as the main problem with that approach, but also that it is just cumbersome for most users. Instead, Apple will be concentrating on the horizontal approach to gestures and inputs that we have seen in the multitouch trackpads, and is leaving the onscreen gestures to mobile devices.

The second feature is the implementation of the Mac App Store on OS X. This is available as a standalone application that you can put in your Dock, which will open and show a view into the store similar to the iTunes store. It will allow you to better discover new applications as well as offer easy one-click purchasing and installation of applications. When applications are purchased, they will immediately show in the Dock along with a progress bar indicating the download and installation progress for that application. When the progress bar is done, the application can be launched immediately.

While Apple is advertising the new App Store for Lion, the program will be available for Snow Leopard within 90 days, so stay tuned. Apple has a developer kit to hopefully get other applications into the store besides its iLife and iWork suites, and we expect that like the current App Store for the iOS, it will populate rather quickly.… Read more

Update: The event is now over, but the video can still be replayed from Apple's event page.

Today at 10 a.m. Apple will be hosting a presentation on the company's next efforts for the Mac OS as well as upcoming and future models of the Macintosh. This morning a number of media outlets are receiving word from Apple that the event will be streamed live from Apple's Web site.

CNET will be covering the event on our live blog, and currently there is no link on the Apple Web site for the media event, but the … Read more

Apple has released a couple of firmware updates for the system management controller (SMC) in the 2007-2008 MacBook and MacBook Pro systems. These are the systems that were available before the aluminum "unibody" systems were released.

The update addresses problems that prevented the systems from charging with the newer power adaptors with the "L-shaped" magsafe connector.

The downloads are about 880KB in size, and should be available through Software Update for relevant systems, but can also be downloaded from the following Web pages.

MacBook Pro SMC Firmware Update 1.4

MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.4… Read more