Apple’s WWDC 2009 is underway and it opened with the keynote speech which featured some new Apple stuff. Below is a roundup of the notable items.

WWDC 2009 - Image courtesy of Apple

New MacBook Pro Lineup

I don’t think anyone saw this coming. At least not for this event. Apple just revamped it’s MacBook Pro line. Releasing an all new 15 inch MacBook Pro which now sports a similar battery to the 17 inch. Promising battery life of up to 7 hours. Another notable thing is the swapping out of the express slot with a SD card reader.

Another thing is that the MacBook Aluminum is now rebranded as the 13 inch MacBook Pro. It shares similar specs to it’s 15″ brother. The 13 inch model also now comes with a FW800 port.

What’s also outrageous (in a good way) is that the MacBook Pros prices have been reduced significantly. The 13″ starts at $1199 while the 15″ starts at $1699.

The white polycarbonate MacBook now remains as the only MacBook model available.

MacBook Air updated

Apple also updated MacBook Air models. The new entry level MacBook Air sports a 1.86 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor with a 120GB Hard drive while the higher end model has a 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and a 128GB Solid State Drive. The 1.86 Ghz’s price starts at $1,499 while the 2.13 Ghz is priced at $1,799. Making both of them easily the most bang-for-buck MacBook Airs yet.

Snow Leopard

A preview of Snow Leopard was demoed during the keynote. What can I say except that I’m really excited to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Apple is also making it available to exisitng Leopard users for a low low $29 for a single user license and $49 for a Family Pack. Beat that Windows!

There are a lot of great features that come with Snow Leopard, such as a rewritten Finder, Expose controls via the dock and the new Quicktime X.

However with all of these refinements I think the most important of which is Exchange support. Sure, not all will agree but I think it’s the most important feature because it now allows Macs to really compete and penetrate the corporate market. Companies rely on Microsoft Exchange for their corporate communication needs and now the Mac can play with them. That means IT companies can now adopt Macs for some if not all of their users. That will significantly help improve market share for Apple.

iPhone 3G S and iPhone 3.0 OS

The iPhone and the iPhone 3.0 OS were the most anticipated announcements of the keynote. Apple previewed the new OS which I must say is getting better all the time. I can’t believe people are actually clapping and shouting with the announcement of the copy and past feature and MMS. It’s something that people have been really clamoring for. However true to Apple form, they won’t do something unless they can do it right. I think their version of copy and paste is good and will work really well with the iPhone interface.

The 3.0 software boasts of a 100 new features. I mentioned copy and paste, other notable features are spotlight search, new Safari, landscape version of the keyboard, better parental controls, the ability to record and send audio, voice control app, etc.

What I really liked was the “Find My iPhone” feature. This is available to iPhone users who are Mobile Me subscribers as well. In the event that you lose your iPhone, you can login to Mobile Me and send your iPhone a message. It will also tell you where your iPhone is. If in fact it has been stolen and not just misplaced, you can send it a command to erase all of your data. Some people are saying that there might be a privacy issue and that people can use it to track you without your knowledge, but this technology has already been embedded in most phones sold in the US which have built-in GPS chips to help authorities track people in case of emergencies. So this is not something that’s exclusive to the iPhone.

Some very cool demos were shown during the keynote albeit there were some malfunctions or mishaps that occured. I love medical app from AirStrip CC which allows doctors to monitor patients with a remote sensor. It feeds the iPhone the relevant data of the patient and can alert doctors when certain parameters are reached. I’ve always been a proponent of better technologies for health and medical services. This looks to really be a promising one.

All in all the WWDC keynore was great. Steve didn’t make an appearance though but it’s ok. It shows that Apple can exist and put on a good show even if he’s not there. It would have been better though but the other guys at Apple still did a good job.

I was helping setup a new MacBook for a friend of mine today. During the setup process OS X asked her to create an account and to assign a password to it. Everything went well and we were able to setup the Mac in no time at all.

However, when we were updating the OS and the computer asked for a password, it would not work. It kept saying that the password was wrong. Uh-Oh….

Good thing that there’s a reset utility found in the installation disc that ships with your Mac. For the times that you forgot your account password, you can use this utility to reset the account password. It’s fairly simple.

1. Boot up with your install disc by restarting your Mac and holding the “C” key on your keyboard until the Mac boots up using the install disc.

2. There’s a Utilities menu found that will appear during the install prompt. Select that and choose Reset Password. Select the startup hard disc volume of your Mac. Choose your original account and enter a new password. Hit save and it’s good to go. *Important! Don’t choose System Administrator (root).

For the original Apple support article, click here. Make sure to also check out this article that will help you solve Keychain issues that will come up as a result of the password reset.

[via TG Daily]

Apple is poised to release it’s latest version of OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard. While it won’t have any new whiz-bang features, it will still be a major upgrade as it focus greatly on performance improvements.

Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system which in theory will support up to 16TB or RAM. The OS will also take advantage of two new technologies, Grand Central and Open CL who will make significant improvements in speed and performance.

This is not to say that the technologies will make apps that much faster out of the box. Significant speed improvements will be seen as developers optimize their codes for Snow Leopard.

While there will be no new features to be included in Snow Leopard, the significant performance improvement may be a compelling reason to upgrade. Especially for pro users who can’t get enough speed and performance.

Read the complete article here.

Most new switchers to Mac that I know ask me this question, “How do I defrag on a Mac?”.

Defrag on a Mac is known as optimization. Files on your hard drive can become fragmented over time. Due to the way OS X is built, there’s little need to optimize your HD. As such it hasn’t been really a practice for Mac users to do this. However if you’re really OC about these things, you can use apps such as Onyx to help you with your maintenance.

Here’s a good read from Apple’s support site regarding optimization.

Funny story.. My cousin calls me up a few nights ago. He was frantic. He said his business partner screwed up their MacBook. They couldn’t login to the MacBook because it wouldn’t accept the password. They kept trying and trying but to no avail. So he asked me if I could just try to recover their files and reinstall OS X. I said, bring the Mac over and let’s see.

So he brought the Mac today. I was set to have an afternoon filled with recovering data and reinstalling apps. So I looked at his Mac and it was booted all the way to the login screen. I thought to myself, let’s try just hitting the return key and see if works. It did! Somehow his business partner must have reset the password to an empty one.

The lesson to be learned here is never to play with your Mac drunk. Apparently his partner was drunk when he was playing with his Mac. So the entire afternoon my cousin never heard the end of it from me.

Anyway… Just so that this post is not a total loss, I’m including a link from the Apple support section. This is where you’ll find info on recovering, resetting admin and user passwords. Just in case you forgot your password and need to reset. But before you reset, just try the empty password thing that I did. Who knows that might just do the trick.

Mac OS X v10.5 Accounts, Passwords and Security page.

Heads up to Leopard users. Apple released the latest update, 10.5.3. Get it via Software Update or through the standalone updater.

Quoting Apple’s support page

The Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update is recommended for Mac OS X 10.5, 10.5.1, and 10.5.2 Leopard. It includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. For detailed information about security updates, please visit this website. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is packed with over 300 new features, installs easily, and works with the software and accessories you already have.

For the complete details check out this support page.

Here’s an interesting article from LifeHacker that talks about obscure functions of your Mac (OS X Leopard). These are things that you forgot that you can do with your Mac.

From saying phrases out loud, launching an application via Spotlight all the way to doubling as an external drive. These are just some things that your Mac can do but it may have skipped your mind or you didn’t know it could do.

Most of these are simple things that may or may not impact your Mac life greatly. Still, they’re fun to know and it will show how much of a Mac geek you are.

My favorite among the 10, believe it or not is the text to speech. There’s just tons of phrases that you can try to make your Mac speak. The great thing is that the speech feature of OS X Leopard is quite good that it’s almost like a live person talking.

The most useful though is the “looking up in the dictionary” function. Now I have little excuse not to learn those big words.

So check out the article here. Post some comments below for some things about Mac functions you’d like to share.

This is one app that really makes the iPhone/iPod Touch all the more enticing. Touchpad Pro allows you to control your computer via your iPhone or iPod Touch. Using VNC technology, your iPhone/iPod Touch can connect to your computer and act as a remote screen. You’re really seeing a version of your screen.

Here are some of the features of Touchpad Pro

1. Supports iPhone & iPod Touch

2. Connects with Windows, Mac, and anything running a VNC server

3. Control your computer’s mouse and keyboard wirelessly using your iPhone / iPod Touch

4. View your computer’s screen on your iPhone / iPod Touch using ScreenView

5. Natural Touchpad interface for mouse controls

6. Supports multi-display, high resolution desktops

7. Remote Control provides access to numeric keypad, arrow keys, and function keys

8. Fine-grained control of media player using Touchpad Media Server

Setting this up on a Mac is fairly easy. Leopard has a VNC server so you don’t really need to install 3rd party software. Just follow these steps and you’re set. Windows users have it a little more complicated. Hey, that’s Windows right?!?

Check out Touchpad Pro here.

The version of Preview that comes with Leopard has some great new features, especially the PDF capabilities. Tiger’s Preview only offered basic PDF capabilities. You could annotate and do other things with it. One way to workaround this was to get Adobe’s Acrobat Professional which is pretty expensive if you really don’t use it a lot or for business.

There’s a great article on MacWorld written by Kirk McElhearn. He gives 8 hidden Preview capabilities that will make you love Preview.

Here’s 8 reasons according to Kirk

1. Annotate PDFs
2. Delete and/or Rearrange PDF pages
3. Merge PDFs
4. Crop and Resize Images
5. Quickly Mask Parts of your images
6. Adjust Image Colors and more
7. Print Multiple Images per page
8. Add keywords to your images and PDFs

Most of these features aren’t found in previous versions of Preview and could have only been done by a much more expensive Adobe Acrobat Professional. With this addition it’s certainly makes a more compelling reason to just use Preview. This is what most people will need and not much more of the other things that Adobe Acrobat is offering. Best of all Preview is free with Leopard.

PC World’s Gregg Keizer writes in his column that users of Leopard are five times more likely to say that they’re “very satisfied” with the OS than users of Windows Vista. This is according to a research done by ChangeWave Research.

Quoting from the article

In a February survey of 2,200 U.S. corporate computer users, 53% of those using Mac OS X 10.5 reported that they were very satisfied with their operating system. Of those using Windows XP or Windows Vista, however, 40% of the former and only 8% of the latter said they were very satisfied.

Apple is certainly making headway. First with the consumer market which it has stamped it’s name on. If you’re a consumer and looking for a computer, chances are Apple is the best fit for you. However this is also starting to become true for the corporate market. With Vista’s not so stellar performance, Leopard is looking better and better to enterprises.

Add to the fact that with a Mac you can install both operating systems and it will feel like you’re getting two computers for the price of one.

I’ve also seen more and more businesses use Macs. Although this is still confined to small to medium scale ones, not unless you’re in a creative agency then the default platform would be Apple.

As time goes by we should be seeing more Macs in the workplace.

Read the complete PC World article here.