Apple Day – Apple, iPod, iPad, iPhone, iTouch, iMac, iBook

Apple has sold 5 million iPhones, according to 9 to 5 Mac, an Apple rumor site. At the iPhone’s launch, Steve Jobs set a public goal of selling 10 million iPhones — next year. With the iPhone only on sale for six months, that means Apple’s already selling its sleek smartphones at 2008 speed.

For “Youth without Youth,” his first film in ten years, Francis Ford Coppola returned to self-funded, low-budget filmmaking and to longtime collaborator and Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch. It took six months for Murch and crew to edit the film, and they depended on Final Cut Studio throughout the six-month editing process. “In the final stages of editing the film, we were working with the ultimate resolution of the film,” says Murch. “So really, the final film, other than the color correction, came out of our editing rooms on Final Cut Pro—in this case Final Cut literally was the final cut.”

agent_blue writes “The Army is integrating Macs into their IT network to thwart hack attempts. The Mac platform, they argue, is more secure because there are fewer attacks against OS X than Windows-based systems. ‘Military procurement has long been driven by cost and availability of additional software–two measures where Macintosh computers have typically come up short against Windows-based PCs. Then there have been subtle but important barriers: For instance, Macintosh computers have long been incompatible with a security keycard-reading system known as Common Access Cards system, or CAC, which is heavily used by the military. The Army’s Apple program, created [in 2005], is working to change that.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rdmreader writes “RDM has a point by point disassembly of the security vulnerability story phenomenon. We regularly see these, comparing various vulnerability lists for different operating systems. ZDNet’s George Ou, for example, condemns Linux and Mac OS X by tallying up reported flaws and comparing them against Microsoft’s. What he doesn’t note is that his source, Secunia, only lists what vendors and researchers report. Results selectively include or exclude component software seemingly at random, and backhandedly claims its data is evidence of what it now tells journalists they shouldn’t report. Is Secunia presenting slanted information with the expectation it will be misused?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Run completely on Macs, Charity Checks is a giving program that lets you make contributions to any charity while your gift recipient chooses the cause. With Charity Checks everyone comes out a winner.

Their clients have exciting new products we’ll want to use; cutting-edge stories we need to hear. Who better to spread the word than LaunchSquad. One of the world’s fastest growing PR firms, LaunchSquad wants to excite people about the new ideas and technologies offered by the companies they represent. And they depend on their Macs to get the story out, supplementing traditional PR tools with audio, video and other Web 2.0 techniques. We’re “building stories about our clients using new communications channels such as blogs and podcasts,” says founding member Jason Throckmorton. “And we couldn’t do it without our Macs.”

You get an email confirming your registration for a Final Cut Studio seminar. Next step: adding the event to your iCal schedule. Since you’re using Mac OS X Leopard, you don’t even have to leave Mail or open iCal. That’s because Leopard introduces a new technology called Data Detectors that lets your Mac recognize dates, email addresses, physical addresses, and other similar data. In this case, Mail can take advantage of Data Detectors to create a new iCal event for you. Find out how by reading the Pro Tip of the Week.

A number of readers are sending in the news that the Mac rumors site Think Secret will be shutting down, as part of the (secret) settlement of a lawsuit Apple filed in 2005. Apple had claimed that the blog, published since 1998 by college student Nick Ciarelli, had revealed Apple’s trade secrets. The only other detail of the settlement that has been revealed is that Think Secret was not forced to reveal any sources.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“John McDermott’s workflow once consisted of handing off rolls of Kodachrome to a courier and waiting to see which images appeared in Newsweek,” writes Derrick Story (digitalmedia.oreilly). But now Aperture has transformed McDermott’s workflow. “It’s basically brought everything under one roof for me,” the assignment photographer tells Story in the latest Inside Aperture podcast. Aperture allows him to “download, edit, caption, and correct images” in the post-production tool McDermott describes as “a really elegant solution, and a simple one.”

“Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace,” writes Sara Rimer (New York Times). Due to MIT OpenCourseWare, the “global classroom” that delivers more than 1800 courses via the MIT website, Lewin receives fan mail from students all over the world. “Professor Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. ’Teaching is my life,‘ he said.” Like to sit in on a physics course taught by Professor Lewin? You can download free video podcasts of his lectures on iTunes.

DrJenny writes “C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple’s iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music — they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads. The article goes into details on how Apple’s home-grown ALAC lossless encoding relates to FLAC, DRM, and the iPod ecosystem.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes “A ZDNet blog reports stats from Secunia showing OSX averaged 20.25 vulnerabilities per month while XP & Vista combined averaged 3.67/month. Is this report card’s implication accurate, or is this a symptom of one company turning a blind eye while the other concentrates on timely bugfixes? ‘While Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren’t present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it’s something I am glad I don’t use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surf private. To keep you safe when you visit sites on a borrowed or public computer, Safari offers an option called Private Browsing. When it’s activated, Safari stops adding the sites you visited to History, removes items you’ve downloaded from the Downloads window, eliminates personal data from AutoFill, and doesn’t add your search terms to the pop-up menu in the Google search box. How can you take advantage of Private Browsing? Find out by watching our Quick Tip of the Week.

Seth Weintraub (computerworld) reports that a survey conducted by Canalys for Symbian “shows that iPhone sales are second only to Blackberry in North America. That means that iPhone has passed Windows Mobile, Palm and Linux in sales in North America.”

The editors at tech.com.uk report that Google Zeitgeist 2007, the “list of the most popular search terms it processed in” 2007 “has just been made public and, as expected, is topped by everybody’s favourite gadget, Apple’s iPhone. The iconic device was the fastest-rising search term both globally and in the US, which is where most of Google’s stats are drawn from.”