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The Apple Blog

TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.


Set Up a Mac Server with MAMPYesterday

For those of you who have dabbled with website design and development, you may be interested to know that OS X is bundled by default with the Apache web server. This allows you to easily develop websites on your own computer without the need to invest in a domain name or hosting package. However, the standard Apache system in Leopard is fairly limiting for those wanting to delve deeper into web based development languages such as PHP and database technology.

Fortunately, there is a remarkably simple way to set up a fully featured server on your Mac: MAMP. We previously mentioned MAMP when it was conceived way back in 2005, but this post will explain in a little more detail exactly how simple it is to install, configure and start using your MAMP installation.

The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These are the four main constituents you need to design and develop a full featured website or application on your Mac.
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New iTunes Pricing and DRM Removal QuestionsJanuary 7

Like many users, I’m pleased that the labels are finally allowing Apple to sell music free of DRM copy protection. Given that the labels have allowed this for many other vendors (Amazon, Wal-Mart, Zune Store, etc.) I think they’ve been flirting with collusion on the iTunes store for a while anyway. 

What I’m happiest about is the higher quality — which I don’t think Apple would have needed permission for  – since Apple’s FairPlay DRM was pretty transparent anyway. Of my nearly 8,000 songs, about 200 of them are iTunes, most belonging to my daughter. The DRM has simply never been an issue since they play on every Mac and iPod device we have. I’m not even sure I’ll upgrade them, but a lot of that has to do with price, as we’ll see.

What I’m most curious about are the details and consequences of this deal as it pertains not just to Apple, but also the competion. Here are some questions I have…
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When The Cracked and The Cracker Meet: An iPhone TaleJanuary 7

Imagine sitting down to talk with the guy who just broke into your apartment and stole your TV. You might ask him, “Why did you steal my TV?” and he might answer “Because I wanted it.” or “Because I wanted to sell it.” In the real world, a thief’s motivations are generally not very complicated. On the internet, though, those who crack or otherwise pirate software usually aren’t after money, since they generally give away the fruits of their labour. Since that’s the case, a conversation between thief and victim might prove a little more useful.

And it did, for iPhone developer James Bossert, who together with his wife, Constance, developed the Whack’em All game, which is based on the concept of the popular carnival Whack A Mole game. According to an article at TorrentFreak, James took matters in to his own hands when he noticed one day that his user base had spiked, gaining over 400 users in one day, compared to the usual ten. Excited, he looked into the purchasing numbers via Apple, only to find out he’d only sold 12 copies, which was pretty much par for the course.

Mitigating a Missing Mobile Safari Security FeatureJanuary 2

In the event you were too distracted by the festivities associated with the ringing in of the new year and missed the news: the internets are broken (again).

To be more specific, what has actually happened is a portion of the trust system that is the foundation of secure transactions on public IP networks has been found to be deficient, mostly due to laziness of services such as Verisign and RapidSSL and lack of knowledge/skill on the part of site owners.

The key to this deficiency lies in how SSL certificates are “signed” (a way of proving their validity). This post is not about the intricacies of public key infrastructure (PKI), so the takeaway is that certificates signed with a hash algorithm called “MD5″ really cannot be trusted anymore and those that are signed with the “SHA-1″ hash algorithm can be trusted (at least to the extent you trust the site you are visiting or the issuer of the certificate). If you are a site owner, make sure your current SSL certs use SHA-1 and insist that your certificate provider/authority (CA) does not use MD5 anymore.

Getting the Most Out of Leopard’s Quick Look FeatureJanuary 2

I imagine most people using OS 10.5 have become acquainted with Quick Look, which is one of my favorite Leopard features. Quick Look’s basic function, as its name suggests, is as a quick and convenient way to take a peek at what’s in a file without actually opening the file, switching Finder views or opening the file’s corresponding application.

A quick recap for folks who may have gotten their first Mac for Christmas or recently upgraded to Leopard and not yet discovered Quick Look, just highlight the desired file’s icon in the Finder and press the Spacebar.

If the file is a text document, you’ll see a preview something like this. If it’s not big enough, click an arrow button at the bottom of the Quick Look window and it will zoom to full screen display.

If it’s an image file, the preview will appear like this with another icon beside the full screen zoom toggle icon that you can click if you want to add the picture to your iPhoto photo collection. Quick Look can preview all popular graphics formats such as JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, Camera RAW, and Photoshop, as well as PDF.
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