The buzz revolves around speculations and rumours that Apple may be releasing a new version of OS X to developers at this year’s WWDC. The discovery of a symlink in WebKit nightlies, as well as TUAW’s report today about 10.6, fuel the fire, and our combined desire and curiosity to see what Cupertino can come up with is strong. Except for Leopard, other versions of OS X came at about a year difference, so the timing would not be too surprising. What is surprising are some of the details of “Snow Leopard”¹:

• No new major features
• Intel-only
• Pure Cocoa

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1. Not yet an Apple official codename [↩]

I get asked by a lot of my switcher friends what alternatives to iTunes exist for the Mac. While I personally don’t mind iTunes at all, I understand that some people are thrown off by Apple’s handling of software on Windows in general. So, I have decided to take a look at some of the other music players available for the Mac so that I could come up with a decent answer the next time around. I am looking at basic music playback and Internet radio support, not iPod management or video capabilities necessarily.

The applications under the microscope are Whamb, VLC, ToolPlayer and Cog. The review is quite focused, so for a full feature list, look at the software’s site (linked in every case) or download any of these applications — after all, they are free — and give them a spin. Then come back and tell me about your experience.

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From a Computer World article detailing the reasons a CTO switched back to Windows after a stint on the Mac:

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If you keep informed of the movements that are going on in the computer security world, you would know that this week Vancouver was host to the CanSecWest Security Conference. Last year, CSW organizers had “Hack a Mac”, whereby owning their testlab Mac made it yours – plus a nice cash prize.

To take things further, this year the contest was extended to one representative of each of the major platforms: a MacBook Air, a Vista and an Ubuntu Linux. The MBA was first to fall, and while I tried to keep off comments about it… I can’t.

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I’m seeing a lot of comments about Apple’s decision to silently install Safari on Windows as an update to iTunes. The move has been declared as almost malware-like, considering the practice. And this hurts Apple more than they realise.

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A few interesting titbits from today’s news - Apple, GPL, JP Morgan controversies, beer is the secret to success.

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January is upon us, a new month of a new year. And there will be a few new things going on that are worth looking forward to:

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Leopard has 300 new features.

Vista SP1 has 300 hotfixes.

‘Nuff said =)

A recent acquisition of mine was an ADC Student Membership. For US$99 a year you get things shipped to your door¹, free OS updates and a one-time massive hardware discount. I mean massive. The kind that makes all other discounts pale by comparison. Over $500 for a fully-loaded Pro device, for example.

The membership price is sufficient to cover the price of Mac OS X Leopard, however, so everything else is just a very, very sweet bonus on top of that. Can’t wait for my copy to ship, sometime not soon enough.

Thanks to Monospaced for the info.

1. Developer Kit updates mostly [↩]

The iPhone SDK is a clever ploy. We’ve been crying and wanting one for all this time, and now Steve finally gave it to us. And we must all rejoice, though a few caveats are worth remembering.
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