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Introducing the Macworld Mac Security Superguide
But things are changing. As the Mac grows in popularity, it becomes a bigger target for hackers and the authors of virus programs. And of course, some of the biggest privacy and security risks a Mac user will face won’t be on the Mac itself. They’ll happen when personal data moves over the big, wide world of the Internet, where criminals are actually lurking, trying to steal data, identities, and—of course—money.
That’s why we created the brand-new Macworld Mac Security Superguide. In one handy 84-page volume, we’ve collected everything you need to know to keep yourself safe and secure, from the data on your hard drive to the data you send over the Internet. We show you how to protect your home network and avoid infection with nasty viruses.
The book—available as a $9.95 PDF download (with no digital rights management of any kind—just read it using Adobe Reader or Apple’s Preview application!), or a $12.95 PDF on CD-ROM, or a beautiful $19.95 full-color, handy pocket-sized paperback book—gives you tips about the most important single item in any user’s security arsenal: your own brain. That’s right—the biggest security holes in the world come from human behavior, not computer programs. Skills like choosing good passwords and learning how to avoid giving data to fake Web sites set up by scammers will serve you well, and this book will help you start down that safe and secure path.
Sure, it’s scary out there. And yes, as a Mac user you are fundamentally safer than your Windows brethren. But you know what? Being safer than someone else doesn’t mean you’re invincible. You still need to protect yourself. Let this book be your guide.
Want to see more before you shell out for this book? We’ve created a downloadable sample (1.2MB) that includes the book’s complete table of contents as well as sample pages.
Also available in our Superguide series are the Mac Basics Superguide Leopard Edition, Mac OS X Hints, Total Leopard, the Macworld Digital Photography Superguide, and the Digital Music and Video Superguide. We think they’re really great books, and we think you will, too.
Click here to get more information about how to buy the book.
Join us for National Novel Writing Month
This coming Saturday, November 1, marks the first day of National Novel Writing Month. It’s a fantastic event where regular people are encouraged to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.
If you always wished you could find the time to write a novel, maybe November is the right month to finally make that dream a reality.
In order to encourage Macworld readers to unlock their creativity, we’ve published several articles on topics related to NaNoWriMo. Today you’ll find articles from three Macworld contributors who have participated in the event and met the 50,000-word goal several times. In “Write a novel in 30 days”, Nathan Alderman gives you a tour of some of the best Mac tools for helping you organize and write your novel, as well as track your progress. Alderman also contributes a blog entry, “Advice from a noveling veteran,” with some sensible tips about how to make it to 50,000 words. (One of his suggestions—blogging your novel—seems pretty crazy. But the fact is, reading Nathan’s progress was an inspiration to me, and knowing that a few people were reading mine as I wrote it was a great spur to keep me writing.)
Our own Dan Moren contributes “Surviving 30 days of noveling,” his own pep talk about how he’s managed to write several novels during Novembers past, including his admission that he’s written entire novels using an old copy of AppleWorks.
Steve Jobs holds court
It’s not often that Steve Jobs appears on an Apple financial-results phone call. But there he was on Tuesday, appearing as a surprise “special guest” as Apple unveiled its fourth-quarter earnings. And he held court, making some scripted pronouncements, parrying with questioning analysts, and offering enough vague tidbits to whip Apple Kremlinologists into a frenzy.
Read more ...A visit with Guy Kawasaki
So for a whole bunch of reasons far too random to detail here, I ended up sitting in a restaurant attached to a Bay Area ice rink last week, watching skaters slip and fall while chatting with longtime Apple evangelist and Mac columnist, and current venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki.
If you’ve never heard of Kawasaki, I’d like to explain, but as Inigo Montoya might say, there is too much. Let me sum up. He pioneered the concept of product evangelism, whipping up enthusiasm among users and developers for Apple’s products. Later he wrote columns for first MacUser and then Macworld for years (more on that in a bit). And now he’s got investments in a bunch of interesting companies.
One of the big topics of conversation during my sit-down with Guy—which happened in the late afternoon, so I can’t say I lunched or dined with him, though (full disclosure) he did buy me a Coke—was his web site venture, Alltop. Alltop basically aggregates the latest and greatest news on various topics (hundreds at last count) on a single page. So, for example, if you happened to be interested in the Mac, mac.alltop.com will provide you with a slew of links. iPhone fans similarly can see the latest on iphone.alltop.com. (Yes, Macworld and its sites appear on both of those pages, which are handpicked by the Alltop staff.) Pick another topic, be it beer or gardening, and you’ll see links for those topics, too.
I asked Guy the typical question a tech-savvy person would have about Alltop, which is: in a world full of RSS feeds, why would anyone use it? But of course, not everyone uses RSS. If you’re tech savvy enough to set up an RSS reader and fill it with your favorite sites, congratulations. But if you’re not—or, more to the point, if your mom or dad isn’t—the Alltop collections are pretty easy to bookmark and browse. (And if you’re someone like me, who is clever enough to use an RSS reader but who gets so distracted that you often find thousands of unread items, you might appreciate Alltop for its strict limits: only five links per site, period.)
Apple makes two great iPhone moves
The past few days have seen Apple make two incredibly positive strides when it comes to iPhone development. If you haven’t heard, last weekend the company limited App Store reviews to those who had downloaded the product in question. And Wednesday the company announced that the blanket secrecy agreement on iPhone development was being lifted.
Last week I wrote an article critical of Apple’s App Store filtering policies. So it’s only fair that I respond to these two positive moves by Apple with some praise: Thank you, Apple, for making both of these changes and responding to the concerns of your third-party iPhone developers.
When I posted the article last week, several people contacted me, wondering why I hadn’t also discussed the iPhone Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and the problems with user reviews on the iTunes store. The short version is, I felt that it was better to focus my article on the (still unresolved) App Store filtering policies rather than digress into various gripes about what Apple’s doing with iPhone development.
Yet, in my BBEdit 9 scratchpad window this morning, I noticed these two paragraphs, which I cut from my previous piece while I was writing it:
NDA. All iPhone development is secret. Each developer has to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which prevents them from discussing the details of iPhone development in public. And so far as I can tell, Apple has not provided any private online discussion facility for iPhone developers, either on the Web or via e-mail. This frustrates developers, for whom the sharing of information is critical when you’re figuring out how to write software for a brand-new platform.
App Store commenting. A minor issue that developers have been complaining about, but they’re right on: The comment system on iTunes makes sense for music albums, but not for software. Anyone can write a review, even if they’ve never used the software. Developers have no way to follow up with bug complaints, nor reply to complaints that are inaccurate. Items flagged as incorrect or unhelpful are never removed. It’s a complete mess.
In the past few days, Apple has addressed both of these concerns. (If I had put them in my article, I could have even pretended to take credit for it! Tough break. I guess Dan Moren can take the credit instead.)
Sure, there might be some room for quibbling—my colleague Peter Cohen, for example, advocates for a reset of App Store reviews. And I think Apple still needs to let developers respond to user reviews. But the general direction here is incredibly positive.
And users will see the benefits, too. On the review front, there will be fewer junk reviews for users to sort through on the store, which might improve the buying process somewhat. On the NDA front, though, the news is huge. Developers can now share insights and sample code with one another in public, as Twitterrific developer Craig Hockenberry did within minutes of the NDA being lifted. Sharing this knowledge means that iPhone apps can be built faster and with fewer bugs, which will lead to more productive engineers and, one would hope, more innovative programs on the iPhone platform.
Yes, the last shoe still needs to drop—namely, some clarity from Apple about how iPhone apps are accepted or rejected, so that developers can invest development resources with confidence. But in the past few days, Apple has shown that it’s listening to the feedback it’s been receiving and is willing to change its policies accordingly. That’s an extremely encouraging sign for the iPhone platform.
Don't drive iPhone developers away, Apple
One of the presenters at the recent C4 Mac developers conference made a point about Apple that is incredibly relevant to how the company is viewed, especially by the media and rabid Apple fans. To paraphrase his statement, in dealing with Apple, one should never assume that the company is being malicious when its behavior can be just as easily explained by incompetence.
These days, there are a lot of iPhone developers—and users—who are suddenly rooting for incompetence. Because when it comes to the entire machinery of the App Store, something is terribly wrong. It’s not something you may even notice today if you’re an average iPhone user. But in the end, if things don’t change, what’s happening right now may seriously weaken the iPhone as a platform and enable Apple’s competitors to get the upper hand when it comes to dominating the smartphone market.
To say that those responsible for the administration of the App Store are actually incompetent is pure hyperbole. Setting up the App Store has been a gargantuan task. I know people enjoy assuming that complicated tasks are actually quite simple, but let’s be real here. In a very short period of time, Apple had to roll out a complete third-party development environment for programmers (while still trying to get all the screws tightened on the iPhone 2.0 software—and look how well that turned out). It had to set up a new infrastructure for selling software via iTunes and get all the legal documents and payment methods worked out. And for some very good reasons, Apple created an application-approval process.
That’s a lot of stuff in a very short period of time. This year has been a tough one for Apple, and in many different venues we’ve seen the company struggle with its success and its rapid growth. Apple can only do so much, and with the App Store and iPhone development, it may have bit off more than it could chew. But what was it to do? Macworld was certainly at the head of the line of pundits and developers who were banging their drums, demanding that Apple open the iPhone up to third-party development as soon as possible. Apple certainly felt that pressure—as well as the opportunity to really transform the iPhone and iPod touch through a third-party development system.
iPods, antigravity, and Apple's bottom line
You’ve got to hand it to Apple—the company has actually convinced most of the human race that at any given Apple product-launch event, it’s entirely possible that the world will be changed irrevocably by the time Steve Jobs strides off the stage to applause.
Yes, every so often an Apple product announcement is so groundbreaking and dramatic that it changes the industry around it. That certainly happened in the fall of 2001, when Jobs unveiled the iPod. And it may well have done so again in January 2007, when the company announced the iPhone. But as disappointing as it is to Apple fans and members of the media who love being the first ones to hear about the Next Big Thing, most of the time the company’s announcements are about tending its garden, moving its product lines forward and improving its bottom line. That’s the kind of announcement we heard from Apple on September 9, when the company rolled out a new line of iPods.
Meat and potatoes
So if you were expecting a groundbreaking, dramatic new product from Apple on Sept. 9, you were undoubtedly disappointed. After all, this new round of announcements was all about slight tweaks to functionality, improved storage capacity, and lower prices. But even the most innocuous fall introduction of new iPods serves an extremely vital purpose: they usher in the most important three-month period of Apple’s year.
Driven by the iPod, Apple’s earnings during the holiday quarter — the first quarter of Apple's fiscal year, as shown in the charts below — are the company’s strongest. Apple sells more than twice as many iPods during that quarter than it does in any other. And those iPods generate massive piles of cash for Apple, making it the company’s most profitable quarter as well. Rolling out new iPods with new colors and whizzy new features helps whip up desire and excitement about the new products, which Apple hopes will lead to millions of iPod boxes being wrapped in colorful paper and given as gifts throughout the land come December.
Introducing the Digital Music & Video Superguide
I was there when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod. And when the event was over, the assembled members of the press were divided into two camps: one group didn’t know quite what to make of Apple entering the esoteric world of digital music players, a field with questionable prospects and no dominant products. The other group of us had already grasped what digital music was all about. In fact, we had already begun converting our CD collections into MP3 files.
In the intervening years, Apple has brought digital audio and video into the mainstream, not just through the massive success of the iPod, but via the iTunes Store, the iPhone, and the Apple TV. These are all cutting-edge technologies, and that means that they can be complicated. While Apple’s products are more intuitive than most, many features can’t be mastered simply by reading the flimsy getting-started guides that Apple includes with its products.
This book—available as a $12.95 PDF download (with no digital rights management of any kind—just read it using Adobe Reader or Apple’s Preview application!), or a $15 PDF on CD-ROM, or a beautiful $24.99 full-color, bound paperback book—contains detailed instructions on how to import music from CDs, cassettes, and LPs without compromising sound quality. You’ll learn how to bring order to your digital collection with iTunes’ space-saving features, including smart playlists that sift through your massive library and ferret out the files you want to carry with you. Discover the best ways to create harmony between your Mac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV with tips on syncing your content. And convert video on your hard drive or DVDs into iPod- and iPhone-compatible formats. Our experts also dispense vital troubleshooting advice and recommend their favorite accessories to help you streamline your digital media experience.
Want to see more before you shell out for this book? We’ve created a downloadable sample that includes the book’s complete table of contents as well as sample pages.
Also available in our Superguide series are the MacBasics Superguide Leopard Edition, Mac OS X Hints, Total Leopard, and the Macworld Digital Photography Superguide. We think they’re really great books, and we hope you do, too.
(If you've ALREADY bought our old "iPod and iTunes Superguide" book in PDF form, we have a special upgrade offer for you. Check your e-mail in the next day or so for information about how to get a discount when buying this book. If you don't see it, drop us a line at ebooks at macworld dot com and we'll look up your old order and send you the code.)
Click here to get more information about how to buy the book.
When Apple's reach exceeds its grasp
The huge success of the iPod and the incredible media hoopla surrounding the iPhone have transformed the way the world looks at Apple. In five years, it has gone from being the company that makes weird non-Windows computers to the company that makes all kinds of cool products—including great, non-Windows computers. The public perception of Apple is that it's a technology juggernaut with immense power at its disposal as it steamrolls over everyone else in the technology industry while creating one industry-busting product after another.
There’s just one problem with that image: It’s not true. In the past year, we’ve seen numerous examples of how Apple’s reach can dramatically exceed its grasp.
Size is relative
Obviously, Apple is no longer the little two-guys-in-a-garage operation that started out in 1976. These days it regularly generates more than $7 billion in revenue every quarter; in its last quarter, it reported a $1.1 billion profit. Clearly, Apple’s board of directors isn’t rifling through the company’s couch cushions searching for spare change.
But compare Apple to Microsoft and you’ll see just how relatively small Apple still is. Between April and June of 2008, Microsoft turned a $4.3 billion profit on $15.8 billion in revenue—that's more than twice as much revenue as Apple and nearly four times as much profit. And Microsoft employs 91,000 people worldwide, compared to Apple’s 21,000.
iPhone apps: When 2.0 means 1.0
In the last week, Apple has released a major update to the iPhone, including a second generation of the iPhone hardware and a new version of the operating system that runs both the iPhone and the iPod touch.
Yet for all this talk of second-generation hardware and updated software, one of the most important components of the new iPhone is definitely still at version 1.0.
With the release of the updated iPhone software, Apple flung open the doors of its new App Store. On its first day, the App store was populated with more than 500 programs, and that number is growing rapidly.
Think about that: 500 programs, all of them at version 1.0. On a device that had never before supported software written outside of Apple. It’s exciting, seeing the birth of a brand new software ecosystem. But it’s also scary. If people were worried about the first-generation iPhone hardware and software (many vowed they wouldn’t buy an iPhone until the second version arrived, for fear of buying a buggy 1.0 product), how should they feel about more than 500 programs on a brand-new platform, all at version 1.0?
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