Yesterday, John Nack, the Adobe Systems program manager leading the effort, revealed some ideas of how Adobe envisions marrying its flagship image-editing software to tablet computers.

Adobe displayed two broad possibilities in mock-ups and a presentation at the Adobe Max conference: first, a direct editing application for tablets that’s operated with a multitouch user interface, and second, a companion application that would let a mobile device augment Photoshop running on an ordinary computer.

“We’re trying some different design directions, making stand-alone imaging tools for tablets, as well as companions to Creative Suite apps” such as Photoshop, Nack said in a blog post.
Galaxy Tab and iPad demos
Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch demonstrated some ideas last week at Adobe’s Max conference using first an Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab and then an Apple iPad.

In the first demonstration, he showed Photoshop’s content-aware fill technology that can add some smarts to the deletion of phone lines, ex-boyfriends, or other elements of an image. He used his finger to paint over an image of a grouse against a green field. After a few seconds of processing, the application filled in the area with more green grass.

In the second demonstration, he used an iPad application to mix colors with a virtual palette then, select them, then finger-paint on an image actually hosted on a copy of Photoshop running on a linked conventional computer.

“Back in the old days, people used to mix colors on a palette–a physical palette. We’re looking at whether we can bring that same type of experience to a tablet environment,” Lynch said. “What we’re working on is connecting your mobile devices to your personal computer over a network so that they can work in conjunction with each other,” Lynch said.

Upgrading Adobe
The expansion to tablets and smartphones is one of several measures under way to modernize Adobe, a software company firmly rooted in the era of personal computers. Among the signs of the new age dawning at Adobe:

• Changes to its Flash Player software: Adobe, with help from Google and some other non-Apple allies, is trying to spread it to mobile devices.

• Retooled publishing tools to let magazine makers reach the iPad and other tablets.

• Photoshop Express for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, and Photoshop Express, the Web-based editing tool and photo gallery. They’re pale reflections so far of the full-fledged program, but they’re under development.

• The embrace of HTML5 and associated Web technologies–even to the point of contributing code to the WebKit browser engine project. The move hedges Adobe’s Flash bet.

Many of those efforts have yet to prove their financial worth. Photoshop and the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite, though, is a cash cow, and it makes sense to extend it to the new era of computing devices. The mock-ups showed several ideas that extended beyond Lynch’s demos.

Photoshop mobile ideas
Many experts use Photoshop with dual monitors–one for the images being edited and one for the profusion of control panels. As shown in Adobe’s designs, the Photoshop companion application would be a different sort of extension, connected to the main Photoshop application through a wireless network connection.

On a phone, the application could serve as a touch-operated control panel. It could be used to select and configure tools, for example picking the Photoshop brush and then adjusting the brush size. The companion tool could be configured for different styles of work–design, painting, or photography, for example.

Another way to use the companion would be to show tutorials without cluttering the main Photoshop display. Here again, tapping on a relevant portion of the tutorial could control the Photoshop on the computer.

The possibilities get much richer with a tablet, of course.

Here, Adobe’s mock-ups showed an extended version of the control panel idea, with many more tools on display. But more significant is using a tablet as a direct editing extension, with the image itself being shown on the tablet.

In one example, a person could paint–with multitouch fingerpaints–directly on the image, with changes being reflected on the computer screen. Multitouch also could be useful for distorting an image–in the mock-ups, expanding a model’s nose to an unflattering bulbous shape.

It’s telling that so many of the mock-ups were of companion applications rather than standalone, full-fledged editing applications. It’s tough to do advanced editing on a small device controlled with blunt fingers, and it’s no surprise that many smartphone and tablet applications today are better at selecting a variety of preset adjustments than at free-form controls like Photoshop proper.

But it’s clear that the tablet and smartphone era is just beginning, too. Adobe’s early steps show just how seriously the new computing categories should be taken.

Source: Cnet News

The Inspiron Duo, which debuted at Intel’s developer conference in September, converts in a novel way between a Windows 7 Netbook and Windows 7 tablet. To convert to a Netbook, for example, the user opens the tablet, flips the screen, which then converts it to a traditional keyboard-equipped, clamshell Netbook design.

And, for a 10-inch device, it’s not underpowered, packing a dual-core Atom processor.

When the Inspiron Duo debuted, a Dell executive, on stage, couldn’t resist making a comparison to the Apple iPad, saying at the time that “Tablets…aren’t exactly conducive to productivity.” He then flipped the screen and converted it to Netbook mode, which, for a staid Intel developer conference, got some very audible oohs and aahs.

Source: CnetNews

The fundamental elements of e-ink and OLED displays are small enough that they won’t break if laid down on flexible backing. The problem, according to Janglin Chen of Taiwanese government-funded research lab ITRI, is the backing itself. The substrate the components are mounted onto has to have certain physical properties, especially during the manufacturing process. To date, the primary material on which displays have been layered has been glass, which meets the needs: it’s rigid, transparent, and reliable.

ITRI has found a way, though, to create a display backing material that is all these things during manufacture, but becomes flexible when the building is finished. It’s a polymer material that can be sprayed onto a glass backing and that maintains its properties (it doesn’t discolor, for example) while the rest of the display is being deposited and built up on top of it. When the displays are done, they can be peeled right off the glass.

In addition to the polymer substrate, ITRI also had to develop a “release material” that’s sprayed down on the glass before the polymer, so the final product can peel off without tearing or sticking. Think cooking oil and crepes.

The big advantage to this process, Chen says, is that existing fabrication plants can be used to make flexible panels. Aside from spraying on the chemicals to coat the glass with high-tech Pam and the polymer substrate, and the post-manufacture removal of the display from the glass, the process is the same as making a rigid display.

ITRI has signed at least one non-exclusive deal with a Taiwanese company that makes black-and-white e-readers, and Chen expects the first flexible panel using ITRI technology to be in a consumer product next year. Color displays based on OLED technology are likely after that. E-ink and OLEDs lend themselves well to working on flexible backing, Chen says. Traditional LCDs, which require separate lighting components and filters, do not. The sole existing color e-reader, the new Barnes and Noble Nook Color, uses traditional LCD technology. All current black-and-white e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle, use e-ink displays built up on traditional glass substrates.
The flexible technology isn’t limited to displays. ITRI’s technology can be used for touch panels (on top of displays, or separately) and for sensor technology. And, I assume, for solar cells, although that’s a somewhat challenging market.

I talked with Chen a bit about the market for flexible panels. It’s a science-fiction dream to have a foldable or rollable e-book or phone, but there’s more to the market than a little flexibility. Chen notes that removing the glass back-plane from a display makes it safer, more durable, and lighter than a traditional display. This is good for low-end products and for devices that end up in the hands of children. And while the ITRI process is not yet less expensive than current display-building technologies, the raw materials do cost less, as the backing glass is reused after every screen is made, instead of getting shipped with it.

But the real flexibility is what this could allow gadget designers to think up. “We’re trying to break the glass dimension and give it back to the designer,” Chen says.

Source: CnetNews

SCVNGR’s a social game based on geo-location that lets players link up with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The game’s simple — players check in to different spots, such as stores and public places, complete challenges and earn points. They get real-world rewards such as discounts on purchases.

In order to take its game world-wide, SCVNGR needed new technologies, so it enlisted the help of the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Places API. In addition, Google Ventures led a consortium to raise a second round of funding worth US$4 million for SCVNGR earlier this year.

Neither SCVNGR nor Google responded to requests for comment by press time.
SCVNGR’s Guts

The SCVNGR game is location-based. It uses global positioning systems (GPS) and databases of destinations to automatically serve up players’ locations.

Previously, SCVNGR reportedly used geolocation services from Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI, but that was focused on companies in the United States.

SCVNGR switched over to Google Places in order to go global.

Players create and complete challenges tied to their locations. They get points for completing their challenges, which they can redeem at about 12,000 locations for real products and gifts or discounts. They can also complete and build challenges.

SCVNGR’s default interface is in English, but content can be added in any language.

A free app for the iPhone and Android phones was released Tuesday with SCVNGR 3.5.

SCVNGR 3.5 has a new dashboard layout. It lets players comment on friends’ activities in real-time or give them an extra point for doing something. The “Social Map” feature lets players geolocate their friends. SCVNGR 3.5 has a new activity, Stream, which groups activities into visits to show players where their friends are and what they are doing.
The Power of Mobile Marketing

For a fee, enterprises and organizations get their locations placed in the game. SCVNGR’s website claims about 1,000 companies and organizations in 20 countries have signed on as customers. They include Princeton University and the Smithsonian Institute. Another is Journeys, which markets to teenagers.

SCVNGR isn’t alone in offering location-based services. Twitter added geolocation to its services and is offering up ads in the Tweet stream; Foursquare and Gowalla have been letting consumers track friends’ whereabouts and earn rewards for going to brick-and-mortar businesses for some time.

However, SCVNGR’s possibly the only one that’s going worldwide. One of the markets in which it plans to have a presence is China, although its ties with Google might hinder rather than help it there given the strained relations between China and Google.

“It might be very challenging for them to go into China, but hopefully they have a plan,” Laura DiDio, principal at ITIC, told TechNewsWorld. “Still, we don’t know if there’s anything in China right now that rivals SCVNGR.”

SCVNGR has raised about $5 million in all, with a consortium led by Google Ventures kicking in about $4 million in the second round in January.
Marketing Is a Dicey Business

However, competition may impede SCVNGR’s potential as a marketing tool.

“Games like this could become yet another marketing tool for business, but the question is, how many will the market sustain?” asked Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “This may not scale to many firms, but a few games could easily capture the imaginations of enough people to make the model viable for the most popular of them.”

Still, SCVNGR could make some decent money, at least in the short term.

“This is potentially a better way to engage people than many of the more traditional methods because it builds the marketing into what the user does instead of making it a distraction as most marketing programs do,” Enderle told TechNewsWorld. “So the engagement is potentially higher and the value to the advertiser is potentially greater as well.”

Further, it’s difficult to predict consumer demand.

“Kids may love this one, but it’s hard to guess what will go viral,” Enderle said.

Take “Farmville,” for example. It was highly popular at one time, but seems to have lost some mindshare.

General Motors today plans to bring the Chevy Volt to IBM’s Raleigh, N.C., offices to show off the electric car and celebrate its partnership with IBM’s software business in making the Volt.

With the Volt, GM aimed to not only break new ground in electric powertrains but it also decided to make a demonstrably high-tech car, complete with an Internet connection and smartphone-inspired in-car controls. To make that happen, software engineers took on one of the most sophisticated projects at GM, said Micky Bly, executive director of electrical systems, hybrids, electric vehicles and batteries at GM.

“We haven’t done a vehicle this complex in the history of GM,” Bly said on Friday. “The software–the control side–is what ties together (the mechanical components)…It’s really the heart and soul of how the car performs.”

The Volt, which GM has started manufacturing this fall, has a battery, motor to move the car, and gas engine to charge a generator. Making those mechanical components click are tens of millions of lines of code running on multiple controllers and processors embedded in the sedan.

The software coordinates the flow of energy and provides drivers feedback on how much charge is available, mileage, and when to charge–all critical to making drivers comfortable with electric-vehicle technology. Drivers can, for example, view charge status and schedule battery charging from a smartphone, thanks to a cellular network connection in the car.

The software also monitors the status of the individual 288 battery cells and modules as well as control the active cooling and heating system for the battery. This was important to ensuring the best energy efficiency and reliability, Bly said.

But the software engineering challenge was as much on the outside of the car as the inside, Bly said. The project was operating on a tight–and very public–deadline of 29 months and engineers needed an automated system, rather than just spreadsheets, for managing project requirements, software models, and changes.

Writing code is not really the challenge any more; it’s managing the thousands of moving pieces in a project and using that material, such as requirements, code, and models, for future projects, Bly said.

“We’re now at the point where software control strategies and controls are the gating factor of the vehicles we make. In the old days, it was sheet metal and other materials,” he said. “We’ve really transformed the DNA of a vehicle.”

GM used software from IBM’s Rational division which is designed for managing complex software development projects in manufacturing industries, such as automotive and aerospace. Those tools, along with others, allowed GM to model and simulate potential changes quickly, Bly said.

IBM bought Telelogic in 2007 to boost its presence in these types of industries which increasingly need to focus on the software in their goods, said Meg Selfe, vice president of complex embedded systems at IBM Rational.

“Bringing all this new innovation is a big feat. What was transformational was how they handled the complexity,” she said.

Source: CNET News

Despite a corporate restructuring, criticism that it’s failing to innovate in certain sectors, the departure of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and analysts downgrading its stock, Microsoft (MSFT) trumpeted a record first quarter yesterday. Overall revenue rose 25% to $16.2 billion and net income rose 51% to $5.4 billion compared to the same period last year. One the biggest movers? The Xbox 360. (The other big mover– its stock. Nearly flat for a decade, MSFT is up about 6% so far today.)

The Xbox 360 platform, which includes hardware, games, its Xbox LIVE online community, and accessories, are all considered part of the company’s Entertainment and Devices Division [EDD], which posted sales of $1.8 billion between July and September compared with $1.4 billion the same time last year. Microsoft credited that overall 27% division increase in large part to the console’s growing success.

Console sales spiked 38%, selling 2.8 million units and outselling the Nintendo Wii and Sony’s Playstation 3 in the U.S. for each of the last four months. In mid-June, the company introduced the redesigned Xbox 360 “S” console that is 17% smaller, houses significantly quieter, cooler and more power-efficient hardware, and offers built-in WiFi. The unexpected uptick comes at a time when Nintendo’s own financials have stumbled — the company, which dominated this console generation’s console sales until recently, reported a $24.7 million loss during the first half of the year, marking the first time in seven years that the gaming giant did not turn a profit.

Microsoft also pointed to Halo: Reach for robust sales. The first-person shooter experienced the biggest game launch ever, racking up $200 million in global sales on day one and banking $350 million in revenue for the company to date.

The success, particularly in EDD, is a good sign for the company that has arguably struggled to keep up with current trends like mobile and tablets. In May, division president Robbie Bach announced his retirement, effective this fall. Former division Chief Experience Officer and Chief Technology Officer J Allard, the guy behind the Xbox, Zune and the aborted Courier tablet, also announced his fall departure as well. Given the timing, it’s fair to say the success of EDD is due at least in some part to the direction and actions set in motion set by Bach. (Senior VP Don Mattrick of Interactive Entertainment and Senior VP Andy Lees of Mobile Communications began reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer as of July.)

Other bright spots for the company were attributed to the launch of Windows 7, which the company has said is the fastest selling operating system in history with more than 240 million licenses sold since its July launch and enterprise interest in the latest edition of Microsoft Office. The company did not disclose sales figures for Office.

Said Microsoft CFO Peter Klein in a statement: “Our ability to grow revenue while continuing to control costs allowed us to deliver another quarter of year-over-year margin expansion.”  The Xbox’s impressive staying power also shows that the company is not giving up on reaching into consumers’ homes, not just their offices and server rooms.

Source:  CNNTech

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the “Tianhe-1A” Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed “Jaguar,” cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place…out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it’s much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are 120 nodes in the system.

What makes the Chinese supercomputer so fast?
Dongarra: The Chinese designed their own interconnect. It’s not commodity. It’s based on chips, based on a router, based on a switch that they produce.

Is that in essence the secret sauce?
Dongarra: It’s similar to Cray. Cray’s contribution, besides the integration and software, is the interconnect network. They have a very fast interconnect that makes that machine perform very well. Though [the Chinese] project is based on U.S. processors, it uses a Chinese interconnect. That’s the interesting part. They’ve put something together that is roughly twice the bandwidth of an InfiniBand interconnect [which is used widely in the U.S.]

Will the Chinese system in fact take the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in November?
Dongarra: Yes. I saw the machine. I saw the output. It’s the real thing.

Why doesn’t Oak Ridge do what the Chinese are doing?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge doesn’t have the ability or technology to develop an interconnect or a router. We don’t make computers. We buy computers and use them. It’s not within our scope or mission to be in the computer design business.

What’s your advice?
Dongarra: You have to remember that you have to not only invest in the hardware. It’s like a race car. In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology. The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that’s an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It’s underfunded. We fund the hardware but we don’t fund the other components. The ecosystem tends to get out of balance because the hardware tends to run far ahead of what we can develop in terms of software. We have machines that have a tremendous level of parallelism. We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.

Who would do that?
Dongarra: The research is performed under the auspices of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

Is this a red flag for the U.S.?
Dongarra: Yes, this is a wake-up call. We need to realize that other countries are capable of doing this. We’re losing an advantage.

Source: Cnet News

Here’s the kicker, though: Agencies will continue running both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously “into the foreseeable future” to ensure interoperability, Kundra instructed.

Pressure to implement IPv6 is also coming from major networking vendors, who contend that we’re running out of IPv4 Internet addresses. The IEEE made the exact same claim 14 years ago but it seems the alarm was a bit premature at the time.
Has anything changed now? How is it that IPv4 addresses are still available, 14 years after the IEEE said they’d run out?

To answer these questions, TechNewsWorld spoke with Guy Snyder, secure communications program manager at ICSA Labs, an independent division of Verizon Business.

TNW: Apparently the deadline for having products tested for the USGv6 Testing Program, which certifies them for IPv6, has been ignored. Please elaborate.

Guy Snyder: The countdown to July 1 wasn’t totally ignored. There have been several vendors that have paid attention to that, there have been agencies that have paid attention to that, there have been several major and minor vendors that have had their products tested, and there are many others that have been preparing for it and their products aren’t quite ready.

TNW: In that case, why did Vivek Kundra have to come up with his memo?

Snyder: I think there was more on the government side of things because there still was, from my perspective, from his perspective, and from half of the vendors’ perspectives, not enough pressure and not enough teeth in this USGv6 program.

You hear from many vendors when things like this come out that the government has done this in the past and it doesn’t always follow through with things in general.

TNW: I saw the note saying there’s only 120 days left before IPv4 addresses run out. That’s accurate?

Snyder: I don’t want to say there’s only 120 days left because the first deadline for them coming up with the plan is just a plan, the first deadline for them to put their products in place is the end of 2012.

To do that they have to have products purchased long in advance, and to have products purchased in advance of that date, they have to have them tested before that. And, before that, the products have to be developed and ready for testing. So that’s the backlog and that explains the urgency.

TNW: Perhaps about 15 years ago the IEEE first warned that we were running out of IPv4 addresses and said that China and India, with their billions of people expected to come online, would desperately need more addresses. The IEEE urged everyone to switch over to IPv6.

Yet ICSA Labs now says we’ll run out of IPv4 addresses by when, March 2011? How can you be so sure?

Snyder: We can be sure because we are now so much closer to it and, before, it was more speculative. When the IETF and everybody said that before, it was true speculation, and now there’s numbers to back up where we’re going.

We know for a fact that there are only five percent of the IPv4 addresses left, and we know at what rate the numbers are going away and how many have gone away for the past six months.

Based on these statistics, we can look out into the future and say pretty much for sure these are going to go away within the next 10 to 12 months, at least by the end of next year, but most people are saying they’ll go away somewhere in the middle of spring or towards the end of next year.

TNW: Perhaps Network Address Translators and subdomains helped alleviate the problem?

Snyder: They could have, but it’s part of the issue and that could continue to be a reason why the date would extend out, but I sincerely doubt that will happen at this point.

At that time nobody had any numbers; we had a new technology and thought everybody would switch over to the new technology. We knew the Japanese were moving towards Ipv6, and the Chinese, but they didn’t move as quickly as we expected.

Source: TechNewsWorld

The disclosure comes just days after Canada’s privacy watchdog said Google had collected complete emails and accused Google of violating the rights of thousands of Canadians.

“If in fact laws were broken…then there’s some serious question of culpability and Google may need to face significant fines,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington DC-based privacy advocacy group.

Regulators in France, Germany and Spain, among others, have opened investigations into the matter.

A coalition of more than 30 state attorneys general in the United States also have launched a joint probe.

It remains unclear how many people may have been affected by the privacy breach.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is leading the multi-state investigation, said in a statement on Friday that Google’s disclosure about the types of data it collected “validates and heightens our significant concerns,” and noted that the investigation is continuing.

Google’s Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city’s streets, accidentally collected data from unsecured wireless networks used by residents in more than 30 countries, Google disclosed in May.

At the time, Google said the information was typically limited to “fragments” of unencrypted data because the cars were always moving and because the cars’ wireless equipment automatically changed channels about five times a second.

A Google spokesperson said the company had not examined the roughly 600 GB of data captured by the cars in any detail to avoid violating privacy.

The latest disclosure comes from information from regulators in various countries, who have examined the data collected by Google.

“It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords,” Google Vice President of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google’s blog on Friday.

Google also said in the blog post that it hoped to delete the data as soon as possible.

Google had deleted the data in countries where regulators had given it permission to do so, a spokeswoman said. Investigations in six countries including New Zealand and the Netherlands, were closed, the spokeswoman said. There were investigations ongoing in other countries, but Google could not delete the data until the investigations were closed.

TOUGHER PRIVACY PROTECTION

Google appointed Alma Whitten as director of privacy for engineering and product management as part of a campaign to bolster its privacy protections, including adding new internal procedures requiring engineering product managers to maintain a privacy design document that records how user data is handled.

Google also said it was enhancing its privacy training for engineers and other important groups within the company.

“We’re acutely aware that we failed badly here,” Eustace said in the blog post.

Google’s cars collected the WiFi data in more than 30 countries between 2006 and mid-2010 so that Google could amass data on WiFi hotspots that could help provide location-based services — a project unrelated to taking photos for Google Maps.

But Google apparently thought it was only collecting a limited type of WiFi data relating to the WiFi network’s name and router numbers.

The collection of the additional, so-called payload data was a simple mistake resulting from a piece of computer code that was accidentally included from an experimental project, Google said.

Google has said that its Street View cars no longer collect any type of wireless information.

The admission that emails and other types of data were collected means that the problem is much more serious than Google initially suggested, Rotenberg said.

Ahead of the Apple event we rounded up some rumors: Rumors about a MacBook Air refresh heated up just before Apple held its “Back to the Mac” media event. SSDs, upgradable RAM, more ports, and “amazing” boot times could be in store.

New 11.6″ MacBook Air starts at $999 with 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo: Apple introduced two new MacBook Airs with 13.3″ and 11.6″ screens, starting at $999. The laptops boast 30 hours of standby battery life and solid-state storage.

After the announcement, we got to play with one: Ars gets some hands-on time with the new MacBook Air models announced at Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event.

Then we explain why it has a “gimped” CPU: Many were disappointed with the CPUs Apple chose for its updated MacBook Air ultraportables. Given the design constraints, however, Apple had few other options.

Finally, we answered your burning questions about the 11.6″ MacBook Air: Ahead of our full Ars review (coming soon!), we decided to answer as many reader questions as we could about the 11.6″ MacBook Air. Come on in to get our first impressions about the display, heat, performance, and more.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: “Mac OS X meets the iPad”: Apple demoed a handful of features of the next major version of Mac OS X on Wednesday. CEO Steve Jobs highlighted how Apple engineers are bringing features developed for iOS “back to the Mac.”

Steve Jobs drops by Apple earnings call to take jabs at competition: Apple CEO Steve Jobs took time during the company’s quarterly earnings call to point out that many competitors in the mobile space “don’t get it.” Apple’s record numbers are one indication that Jobs’ strategy is paying off.

Apple announces iLife ’11, FaceTime for Mac: Apple announced new features for iPhoto, GarageBand, and iMovie, as well as FaceTime for Mac, which will allow Mac users to video chat with iPhone users.

FaceTime for Mac opens giant Apple ID security hole: FaceTime for Mac was released with an apparently lax attitude toward password security, so be careful who you call.

Source: Arstechnica