The home of Mac info for New Zealanders, mac-nz serves daily Mac, iPhone and related news from the world of Apple Inc.
Connections, CS5 & Flash
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Connection issues plague Time Capsule, Airport Extreme: Users of Apple's latest Airport Extreme Base Station and Time Capsule hardware, released in October 2009, have reported instability and significant reductions in speed when using the routers at the 5GHz wireless band.
AppleInsider notes a thread on the Apple Discussions features a number of users who claim issues with the hardware. In posts dating back to November and stretching into this February, users say they have experienced much slower speeds on the 5GHz band, regardless of proximity to the base station.
Steve Jobs participates in biography: For the first time ever, Steve Jobs will participate with an author who is writing a biography of the tech titan, according to The New York Times.
Many books have been written about Jobs, but none have carried the "authorised" distinction. But the Apple co-founder is now set to participate with author Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine.
The book is still in early planning stages, but Jobs has already invited Isaacson to tour his childhood home. The biography will reportedly span Jobs' entire life, reports AppleInsider.
Adobe CS5 and Flash: The fifth major release of Adobe's Creative Suite package (CS5) for graphic, video and web design professionals will see Photoshop for Mac emerge as a 64-bit application while several of suite's other component applications adopt Flash tie-ins aimed at keeping content developers reliant on the company's embattled multimedia platform.
Slated for shipment this autumn (Northern spring), CS5 for Mac will be spearheaded by a version of the market-leading Photoshop graphics editor that's been rewritten in Apple's 64-bit object-oriented Cocoa framework, finally bringing it up to spec with its Windows cousin, which made the jump to 64-bit back in 2008 as part of Creative Suite 4.0 (CS4).
Meanwhile, with Adobe reportedly beefing up Flash in CS5 to increase reliance on the embattled platform, the software company has been accused of (and has denied) deliberately blocking the W3C standards group's attempts to greenlight HTML5.
After the software developer allegedly froze development by filing a formal but secret objection to the web standard, Adobe's Larry Masinter has denied the attempt pinned on himself and gone so far as to absolve the company from any deliberate plans to sabotage HTML5 in order to keep Flash relevant.
Japan wants explanation of false iTunes billing: Apple officials are being summoned by the Japanese government this week in order to answer questions about billing at the iTunes Store. People are being charged for downloads they never made, states an official from Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency, who also notes that incidents have been on the rise since fall 2009. There are at least 95 known cases in Japan so far, spanning five credit card companies.
