While being a long-time member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, Steve Jobs-led Apple Inc. still has yet to reveal its true leaning at the on-gong format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Analysts, however, have a good reason to believe that everything will become known come Macworld Expo 2008.

More details after the jump!

Back in October 2005, Apple filed a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office about "System and method for computing a desktop picture." Last Thursday, details of the said creation were published for the first time with credits going to employees Ralph Brunner, Imran Chaudhri, and Mark Zimmer.

Accordingly, the Mac OS X operating system will be enhanced with the addition of active desktop pictures, or desktop backgrounds that can include motion graphics. These, then, will alter themselves depending on user actions or the time of the day. The technique will reduce requirements for both VRAM and RAM because static picture files will no longer be used.

Apple went on to explain that since the pictures are being computed quickly by a GPU, they now can be made to move on demand. Part of its patent reads,

This includes movement, for example, when logging in, logging out, and transitioning to and from a screen saver, providing a seamless experience. It can also include slow movement, such as seen when a soft tree shadow is cast, with the gentle rustling of leaves in the breeze, or slow movement over time, or concerted movement to mark the passing of time (e.g., a noticeable change to pattern or color every hour).

The "active desktop" patent has many potential uses based on the way Apple described it. Some of the other features include computation of several gradations over time hence mimicking the changes in the color of the sky. As if all of these are not enough, Apple also hinted that users can further enhance the experience using an editing tool.

As will be appreciated by those of skill in the art, the foregoing examples are provided as just a few examples of the many types of events that may be used to trigger a change in the desktop picture, and are not intended to be an exhaustive list. It will be appreciated that various other types of events may be used to trigger a change in the desktop picture and are within the scope of the present invention.

The Parallels website announced that Mac users can try the latest build of their Parallels Desktop software. Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta2 (Build 3094) is now available for download, and they are also offering a holiday special that you might want to check out.

A lot of features and enhancements are introduced in this beta, including USB 2.0 support, a full-feature virtual CD/DVD drive, and improved Coherence mode. It also provides better Boot Camp support, but it's important to note that Beta1 (build 3036) users must boot natively into Boot Camp and uninstall Parallels Tools for Boot Camp prior to running it in Beta2.

Beta2 also includes a bundled copy of Parallels Transporter Beta2. Please note that Beta1 users must upgrade their Transporter package on their Windows source machine before using Parallels Transporter in Beta2. You may end up with a system crash or experience possible loss of data if you fail to do so.

New users need to get a trial key to use the software, but if you're a current Parallels Desktop for Mac user, you can use your existing activation key to install this update.

 

The glass-made Apple Store located on 5th Avenue in Manhattan has been aptly dubbed as "The Cube" because of its structure. The pet name might have stucked very well to the mind of Apple higher ups and brought back memories.

Why? Because there are talks and speculations that Apple Cube is being resurrected. Not that site in Manhattan, take note but the real Apple Cube Power Mac G4. Based from these purported patent images, the new design addressed several issues its predecessor faced. It will have two removable sides for the easy access and upgrade of components such as hard drive, memory and PC cards.

The overheating problem was also not forgotten, ergo, the innovative heat sink mechanism. Here, you can opt to insert a separate cooling fan but you can also work without it in some cases.

Apple Cube was originally released in July 2000 and sold only around 150, 000 units.

 

As a user and supporter of EV-DO, I have watched with great anticipation as the technology has moved slowly towards maturity over the past few years.

With Verizon and Sprint signed on as EV-DO supporters and both companies well on their way to completing nationwide EV-DO networks of their own, the question is no longer if EV-DO will be the most widespread wireless broadband technology in the US, but if there will be any other technologies coming to compete with, complement or replace EV-DO any time soon?

The most recent sign that EV-DO has come of age is the USB modem released by Franklin that will bring Internet connectivity to a while new class of devices.

Tablet PCs, lightweight laptops, some PDAs, and many of the recently released UPMCs and other ultra tiny portables that run XP, but yet are too small to sport PCMCIA slots or other wireless equipment, are being given the unexpected opportunity to get online using their USB ports.

Known as the CDU 550 USB modem, this tiny device will only be available for use on the Sprint wireless network. The package comes complete with the modem itself, a carrying case, Y-shaped USB cable, an owners manual, and a Windows setup CD. Once you get your CDU 550 in hand, you'll need to do an ESN swap to move your active Sprint wireless account from your EV-DO wireless card to the new modem. The new USB modem works with all Macs (with a few caveats), but it cannot be used to create a network using the Kyocera KR1 EV-DO router under its current firmware.

Then all you have to do is use the Sprint connection manager (included on the setup CD) to activate your account and tweak your settings. The average speeds for an EV-DO network are from 500Kbps to 800Kbps when downloading and 80Kbps to 180Kbps in the other direction. I would imagine that the lack of an external antenna port on the tiny modem could potentially limit its speed a bit, but since it is the only available EV-DO option for Sprint customers with machines that have express slots alone, I guess they won't mind.

Apple's new Mac Pro will have a new AirPort card. For those who aren't familiar with it, the AirPort is a wireless networking card. There's already been an AirPort and an AirPort Extreme. The new card is the "AirPort Express."

Dang it! I keep typing "Airport" instead of "AirPort" ... what the heck is up with naming GadGets and ProgRams with CaPital LetTers StuCk in the MidDle of words! Anyway, back to the AirPort Express.

What will this mean for Apple users?
Apple has chosen to go with Broadcom's 802.11a/g BCM4311 chip for the new AirPort Express. This might be a sign that Apple's gearing up to start supporting the 802.11a WiFi standard. You see, 802.11a operates at around 5GHz, and some people report that the WWDC had a 5.8GHz network up during the keynote. But not everybody likes the faster 802.11a because even though 802.11a is faster, it's not compatible with the already popular 802.11b and 802.11g.

Will Apple use the faster 802.11n?
Not yet. The IEEE (the global Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has scheduled the 802.11n WiFi standard to come out sometime in the middle of 2007. While many believe that Apple will be among the first to try it out, you all just have to learn to wait.

If 802.11a is faster, why doesn't everyone want Apple to fully switch to it?
Both b and g work at 2.4GHz, and this is also the frequency of many cordless phones, so you interference messing up your WiFi. The 802.11a works at around 5GHz so there's no problem with interference, and it also sends and receives more data (usually five times faster than 802.11b).

So if 802.11a is faster, shouldn't it be common sense to adopt it? Not really. For those who are not familiar with the ways of WiFi communication, 802.11b was the standard before 802.11a and 802.11g (we know; it's weird that the version after "b" is called "a," but that's how they did it). The 802.11a is not backwards compatible with the already popular 802.11b, although a lot of new technology has come out that smoothes over the compatibility problems.

The new AirPort Express has Broadcom's 802.11a/g BCM4311 chip, and 802.11g is backwards compatible with the existing 802.11b/g setup that many people have.

This lucky person certainly did get a new Mac Pro. Not only was this brand new Mac Pro owner kind enough to share his experience with the world, he also ran his new machine through a gamut of benchmarks and real world application-based tests to prove its mettle. I think the fact that this guy took the time to provide us with usable information about the new Mac Pro makes his post different than the average all photography and no substance box openings that populate the web.

This particular machine has two 2.Ghz Dual Core processors (2 Xeon woodcrest processors- for a total of 4 logical processors), 1GB of ram, a 7300gt graphics accelerator, and a 250GB Seagate hard disk. As unbelievably powerful as that machine sounds, the specs for the test machine are not anywhere near the top of the line for the Mac Pro. Keep in mind that this test machine has but 1GB of ram. 1GB of ram, inside a machine that has the capacity for an astonishing 16GBs of ram total, is not a whole lot. In fact, 1GB is the minimum amount of ram that you should have when using a dual processor system as powerful as this one.

Geekbench provides an entire page full of test results that indicate the actual performance potential of this particular Mac Pro. The generous new Mac Pro owner also ran a Photoshop test, a timed compressor test, a Rosetta test and an encoding test. Of course, this extremely giving person also blessed us with a variety of near pornographic shots depicting the new machine in intimate detail. I must admit, when I look at the pictures of our lucky Mac Pro owner opening that box, my heart begins to race and my mind wanders off to think of the things that I could do if I had one.


Photoshop Test:
Test 1: 80% memory allocation, 20 history states = 3min 52secs

Test 2: 90% memory allocation, 1 history state = 3min 4secs

Test 3: (more a test of raw CPU) Radial blur 100, best quality on Eagle Image in test
Mac Pro= 29 secs
Quad G5 = 42 secs


Compressor:
source: 5min HDV 1080i60 clip (export from FCP timeline)
output: Compressor default 16:9 120min fast encode
results:
G5 2ghz 2.5gb ram: 34min
Mac Pro: 12min


Handbrake:
h.264 main profile
1000kbps Average Quality
2-pass encoding
128kbps AAC audio
Donnie Darko disc (not image on HD) 65fps average.

Geekbench:
297.9


Rosetta test:
194.8

I remember debating, about a decade ago, the sensitive issue of "x86 versus PowerPC performance" with my fellow nerds while dealing with dandruff.

So look at where we are now. I still have dandruff, but the Apple Mac Pro is getting a whopper of a processor that promises to send professional desktop consumers to high heaven on fluffy clouds of cheddar (for the Apple noobs, the "cheddar" joke refers to the "cheesegrater-like appearance" of the Mac Pro casing - look at the picture above).

The Mac Pros are getting 64-bit dual-core Xeon Woodcrest processors. With 4MB L2 cache (for the non-technical, that just means the processor has a lot of built-in space to do extra things). Top speed? 3GHz. For those Appletons not familiar with the Xeon, the Xeon series of microprocessors are Intel's server-class PC microprocessors. They are usually used for multiple-processor PCs. And now, for multiprocessor Macs, because Apple is putting two (that's 2) of those Xeon beauties in each Mac Pro.

This new Mac Pro definitely promises to be better than the G5. While this is more or less what was previously anticipated, the details about the cheesy insides are just yummy: it has room for four (that's 4) internal HDDs, although the basic Mac Pro will "only" have a 250GB HDD. And 1GB RAM. And the NVIDIA GeForce 256MB 7300GT. And a 16x SuperDrive. That sounds about right for a powerful office server.

Not good enough you say? Can't grate the cheese you say? Well, you can opt for up to 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of disk space (for noobs who don't know what a "TB" is, let me just say that one "TB" or terabyte is roughly one trillion bytes, one million megabytes, or one thousand GB). Now that's some serious cheese.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm now waiting for the Mac Pro to get the quad-core processor so I can calculate the meaning of life. And yes, I'm still dealing with dandruff.

WWDC is a conference for Apple developers that gives the company a chance to show them some love while disseminating important information about the next-gen hardware on Apple's launch horizon. There is no live stream coming from the event floor, so minute to minute coverage (complete with pictures) is all there is until Apple makes the footage available after the event.

Mannymix03, a member of our forums, has been kind enough to make up to the minute posts about the event to keep us all informed about the latest happenings at WWDC 2006. So far, so much information has come out of the event that it would be impossible to detail it all here. I will do my best to give you a brief rundown of the important finds that have been discovered thus far.
 
In his usual style, Steve Jobs kicks off the conference with his enthusiastic rundown of what Apple has in store for us in the near future. He began with his usual optimism by quoting record sales figures and mentioning the unprecedented level of penetration that the company is experiencing in the OS market.

After stroking the developers egos by detailing how much of their work Apple sold the previous year, Jobs goes on to discuss the move to utilize Intel chips and the upcoming move into the next generation of Intel chips known as Core 2 Duo. While all the information about new chips and the smart architecture of the new Mac Pro kept folks interested, the news that kept many on the edge of their seats was about Apple's upcoming OS.

After giving Microsoft some of the spotlight by highlighting the ways the Redmond-based giant has appropriated technology from Apple in the past, the details about the OS (Leopard) were released. Along with 64 bit compatibility at the UNIX layer, meaning you can run both 32 and 64 bit applications smoothly and without the aid of emulation, there was mention of a built in backup feature for the OS called Time machine that backs up "everything" in real time. This new feature is not as cut and dry as it seems however. Apparently, with Time machine you get a robust backup system that is capable of full system restores as well as an ala carte system that allows you to bring back just the files that you need.

When integrated with the Finder disk searcher, we are one step closer to having all of our information stored in a searchable database that is backed up in real time. So now you can search for, and find, a file even if you have already erased it! Wonderful! Even I couldn't lose data if I had a set up like this! One of the things that I found a bit surprising was the fact that every copy of the new OS will ship with Time Machine, Bootcamp, Photobooth and Front Row and Spaces. Each one of these modules provides functionality, like a virtual desktop (Spaces), photo editing and sharing (Photobooth), music, video and other media (Front Row), that is not included with other operating systems like Vista.

Spotlight, Core Animation and Universal Access are additional applications in the works at Apple. Spotlight allows you to search the drives of all of the Macs in your home from any one of them. Core Animation is a powerful program that allows you to deconstruct media into its various parts (video, music,ect) and manipulate it into a new creation. Universal Access is designed to allow all people, whether blind, or otherwise disabled, to use their new Mac with ease. With all the new software being developed and hardware changes galore happening at Apple, you'd think that they would be the ones with all the delays and shoddy releases instead of Microsoft!

Mail, Dashboard and iCal have also been updated and changed! Stationary, Notes and To Do's to mail have been integrated into the new email system that will come with the new OS. Dashboard has over 2500 widgets and with Dashcode users can easily create their own customized widgets. With Web Clip and Dashcode you can turn any part of a website into a widget that will update every day keeping you in the know with your favorites on the web. Then there's iChat and iPhoto, which are integrated and will offer multiple logins, invisibility, animated buddy icons, video recording and tabbed chats.

This is near information overload here so I suggest that you digest this as quickly as you can then can come back and get some more! The conference is more than three days long so you can be certain that Jobs and Co. will continue to hit us with surprises well into this week!

Finally, for those with short attention spans, here is a brief list of the key innovations that were revealed this morning:

• 64-bit
• Core animation
• Universal access
• Enhanced parental controls (who cares about that?)
• iCal
• The complete package
• mail
• Spotlight
• Dashboard
• Web Clip and Dashcode
• Announcing Xcode 3 at the afternoon session
• Spaces
• Time Machine
  

Keep an eye out for updates to follow. For those who got their appetites whet and are looking for ways to satisfy their "Apple" craving, check out the video of the conference's Keynote Address delivered by Apple top honcho, Steve Jobs.

A few days ago, Apple launched the $899 iMac without much fanfare. While we know that the inexpensive iMac is marketed for the education market, we can't help but think that we're looking at an affordable stripped down version of Apple's 17-inch consumer offering. But before we get too caught up with the idea of a really cheap Mac for consumers, AppleInsider has revealed some of the internal component changes that make the iMac grounded at $899.   

As a backgrounder, the education market-bound iMac replaces the now-defunct eMac line of computers that featured CRT displays. To cut down on costs, Apple had a 17-inch iMac Core duo undergo some internal transplant - substituting with lower cost components. As a result, about $400 were shaved off the $1299 consumer model. So, ATI Radeon X1600 is replaced by Intel's integrated GMA 950 graphics chip. The 160GB hard disk was forced to go on diet to reach the 80GB capacity. The ho-hum 24x Combo drive was also plugged into the system to replace the double layer SuperDrive.

Apple got rid of Bluetooth wireless technology by deciding not to install Bluetooth antennas inside the chassis. This just means that the education market would be forced to get an external USB Bluetooth module should the need arise. That's going to set back the education market a few more grand just to get the technology.

We wouldn't expect the educational iMac to have some sort of edge of the consumer model, but it appears that the former sports at least one I/O-related enhancement. It has a combination of analog/optical analog audio line, which is an added treat, as the consumer model only has analog-only line-in jack. Now, who's turning green with envy?

But then again there are some issues that Apple needs to work on. First off, the first batch of iMacs to roll off Apple's assembly line will "fail to sync properly with a television screen if they are booted from a Windows XP partition." This is because the iMac detects TVs as a VGA display. There's currently no workaround for this. Also, booting from (you guessed it) XP, the iMac registers itself as a portable computer. This means that it uses power settings that are usually reserved for laptops running on battery. As with the first issue, there's no solution to the problem as of yet. On another issue, Boot Camp will fail to install if the Apple Mighty Mouse is plugged into one of the USB ports at the rear of the computer. Better use another mouse to get the Boot Camp started.

And as if those weren't enough trouble, altering the iMac's brightness setting without adjusting other video settings will corrupt the PRAM. This could cause the computer to restart at a later date with a blank video screen. Users are advised to reset the iMac's PRAM, or better yet, don't mess with the brightness setting.