“Inside sources” claim Apple has set December 13th as the official launch date for the upcoming Mac App Store. Mac App Store submissions started rolling into Apple around the 3rd of November. So the store it self should be fairly well stocked at the time of launch.

I love the idea of the Mac App Store simply for the fact that it will be so convenient to discover new apps. There is no doubt that all apps available for OS X will not be in the app store, but I believe it will still benefit the majority of OS X users.

The Mac App Store has another benefit as well, updates! All apps installed via the app store will also be able to receive updates directly through the app store. This centralized update hub should definitely help to keep everyone up to date with the freshest software release.

Apple to sell iLife, iWork apps individually

We’re not surprised by this but we sure are glad to see it out so soon!

All you netbook owners, current or prospective, may exhale your sigh of relief.
The support for Atom is acquired by actually injecting a different kernel into OS X itself, so, your talking a pretty serious hack. Rest assured, most hacks can be fine tuned to make it much easier and or automated.
We can thank the hacker teateam for this gem. He can be found on the InsanelyMac Forums

So here’s to hoping Apple leaves the door open to Atom users in 10.6.3 and showing us how great of a company they really can be.

The day is upon us and Snow Leopard has made it’s debut. You may notice however, that it’s not all that different.  Well it is, but its hard to notice at first. To help you get the most out of the great new features that Snow Leopard offers.

• The Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take advantage of all the modern technologies in Mac OS X, including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch.
• Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors.
• Exposé is refined and more convenient. It’s now integrated in the Dock, so you can just click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one.
• Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you — enough for about 1,750 more songs3 or a few thousand more photos.
• OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.

Macrumors recently received what appears to be legitimate pictures of the retail packaging for OS X Snow Leopard. (click on the pic to see the rest of the pics and read the full story at Macrumors.com)

Probably. Not only will the native 64-bit coding speed up day to day use, but we also have two other great improvements coming in Snow Leopard that will be sure to speed up your Mac. The implementation of Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL will help to utilize every ounce of power that your Mac has. If 10.6 were to include only one of these great advancements, we probably wouldn’t notice a difference, but with all three working together you can be sure that OS X 10.6 will feel faster under your fingers then OS X 10.5.

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For the longest time multicore macs have unfortunately been held back by old and un-optimized code that was designed for single core CPUs. If you have any sort of system monitoring device on your computer you may notice that your mac is often using 100% of one core and 0% of the other. The release of Snow Leopard and the inclusion of GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) hopes to change all of that.

More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
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All year long your mac has been collecting bits of everything everywhere. Temp files here and pref files there. Chances are you don’t need the half of them anymore. Here are 3 great ways to speed up your mac!

• Free up drive space on your startup disk. OS X uses the free space on your startup disk as virtual memory. So when you pack every last mp3 on that drive there remains no room for the virtual memory, thus performance decreases. As a general rule, it’s best to have 10% of your drive free at its fullest. For freeing up extra space I use Xslimmer and it does a pretty good job of slimming out all the unnecessary bits of code and language in your apps. Depending on the number of apps you have you can save upwards of 15GBs. This slimming of the apps speeds up launch time as well.

• Repair your permissions. You hear this all the time, basically because it does wonders and you should do it! After downloading this and installing that and then deleting that some things get a little bit confused as to how its supposed to exactly function. Repair the permissions basically makes sure that everything is being pointed in the right direction.

• Check you login items. If you have multiple apps launching as you log in you may want to disable a few as they tend to slow the whole launch process a bit. You can view which items launch at login by going to: System Preferences<Accounts<login items Here you can view and enable/disable apps from launching at startup.

Happy computing. (Oh, By the way, did you know I launched a new site? Check it out! alphaapp.com)

A recent article from AppleInsider is claiming that sometime this year (Late Spring/Early Fall) we will see some hardware updates to the iPhone. One of the updates being video support. They say their source is a very reliable one when it comes to Apple hardware.

Also, Engadget recently picked up on some goodies in iPhone OS 3.0. They have some screen shots for the new and upcoming OS that shows the option for video uploads to mobileme. Put these two stories together and it sounds pretty convincing that the iPhone will be getting video capabilities.

Now all we need is copy and paste….oh wait, that’s coming too!

This is a documentation of my project to mod a Powermac G4 into a hackintosh.
Very little effort went into the research of compatibility. I was shopping on a budget and I knew if they didn’t fit I could just get a cheap pc case.
So, $470 dollars later my tigerdirect shopping cart is full of mostly everything I need.

• Thermaltake Pure-Power 430-Watt power supply. – $39.99
• 250GB SATA 3.5″ HDD from Seagate. – $49.99
• 4 Gig of OCZ SLI-Ready PC6400  800MHz DDR2 RAM – $19.99
• Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 wolfdale @2..8GHz and a 1600MHz FSB – $119.99
• LG 22xDVD-R and  16x DL-DVD Burner – $29.99
• Gigabyte EP43-UD3l Motherboard.w/ 1600MHz FSB. – $84.99
• XFX Ultra-Silent GeForce 9400GTw/ 512MB DDR2 RAM – $49.99
• I also got a NetGear WiFi Card and a Wireless Logitech Keyboard/Mouse set- $19.96/$34.99

As of now I have been able to install the new Hard Drive, DVD Burner, and Power Supply into the G4.

Read on for pics,. Read the rest of this entry »

Details are still sketchy, however, it looks as though OS 10.6 will have dramatically improved spelling features.

OS X will now be able to automatically correct spelling mistakes. This feature is fully customizable and can also be turned on and off at your discretion. Another exciting feature to grace OS X 10.6 is the inclusion of language abbreviation. For example, typing MOSX could be automatically translated to Macintosh OS X.
While neither one of these are exactly ground breaking, they will be much appreciated by many.

Via Macx.cn