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With Macs getting more popular and Apple recently announcing that 50% of people buying from an Apple Store are buying their first Mac, there’s great opportunity for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) over whether the Mac OS is a safer platform than Windows. I have lost count of the number of people who cannot believe Macs aren’t plagued with spyware and viruses.

To me, that sounds like a great opportunity for companies to prey on that FUD and sell overpriced products that cannot compensate for bad human behavior such as opening email attachments and visiting “dodgy” websites (e.g. porn, piracy, gambling and serial-number providing ones).

Yes, the Mac’s inbuilt firewall is crap but does that mean we need to spend loads on a third party software firewall? Maybe, if you are often out and about and therefore not being protected by an encrypted wireless network, but otherwise a hardware firewall such as a router is what you should be using anyway.

Do we really need to spend money protecting from Mac viruses and spyware when there are none? We have a couple of trojan horses out there, but remembering to only download from reputable sites and not running as admin will protect us from them.

This subject has sprung to my mind because of the release of SubRosaSoft’s FileDefense. Maybe we need this type of product but with their website linking to “relevant press articles” such as CNet’s “OS X security just not there yet” and the Washington Post’s “Anti-Virus On A Mac?” I get the strong impression they are just feeding on people’s FUD.

Your thoughts?

Mac OS X Leopard has hundreds of features. Some of these go by unnoticed, even when mentioned in the full list on Apple.com. One of these features is the Spotlight calculator. If you a type simple problem into Spotlight the first result will be the answer. Same thing goes with words. If you type a word into Spotlight the first result is the definition, then you can click the definition to open it in Dictionary.app.

This is very useful to solve a problem quickly, and you don’t have to open any applications!

Skitch, coming soon by the Plasq team, is an amazing screenshot tool for Mac OSX. With an easy uploading tool that uploads the images to your own page in a snap. Skitch is currently in a private, invite only, beta. But there are tons of invites flying around and it is very easy to catch one.

Skitch sits in the menu bar (and/or dock if you prefer) and when you click it it seems to stretch right out of the menu bar. On the left, you can choose your tool. And on the right you can pick a color or choose to take a screenshot. You can even use your iSight to take a self portrait. Want to use your own image? Then you can drop an image to the Skitch window to edit and upload.

Once you have chosen an image to use you can use any of the tools to add text or lines and drawings to your image. Then when you are finally done adding stuff you can save to history, which saves it to a Skitch folder in the Skitch format, drag it anywhere, which saves it as a standard image file, or webpost, which quickly uploads it to your very own myskitch page.

For more info on Skitch, visit the official site. 

Good news for all you guitar-playin’ rockers out there. Guitar Hero 3 is due out for the Mac on December 10th.

As you would expect, it is Aspyr that is releasing the game.

System requirements are as follows:

• Operating System: 10.4.10 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard)
• CPU Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo
• CPU Speed: 2 GHz
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Hard Disk Space: 5.1 GB + 1 GB Swap File
• Video Card (ATI): Radeon X1600
• Video Card (NVidia): Geforce 7300
• Video Memory (VRam): 128 MB
• Media Required: DVD-ROM
• Macintosh mouse and keyboard
• Official Guitar Hero X-Plorer Guitar Controller

Complete requirements and details can be found here (scroll down the page).
What’s the price? No word on that yet either.

The guitar will be a USB device that you can plug directly into your mac.

I’ve got to say, of all the games coming out for the xmas season, this is the one game that has really caught my attention. With Aspyr porting it to the Mac, this is one title I would seriously consider picking up. Hook the ‘ol MacBook up to the widescreen HDTV and play away!

For complete details from Aspyr, click here. 

I love Macs and have been trying to get all my family onto them but what puts a couple of them off is the fact that they cannot buy a cheap brand-new Mac.

So, rather than buy the cheapest MacBook for £699 ($1,400) they have decided to buy a cheap PC laptop for £200 ($400).

What can I say to that? Yes, the re-sale value of Macs is good and they would probably be able to get back a good proportion of the £699 spent on a MacBook but they cannot afford £699.

Although I can put forward the argument that for £200 what they’ll get is crappy Vista Home Basic and a relatively poor processor this falls on deaf ears because they can argue:

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I really like Quick Look but one of its failings is that when you press the Space Bar to Quick Look at a folder, all you get is a big folder icon. Now, that’s not much use, is it?

Well, there are two free plugins that you can add into a QuickLook folder in your Library folder and when you then restart your Finder you’ll get the additional functionality of being able to see what files are within a folder or a zipped file.

A few weeks ago, Apple released some new online advertisements based on the familiar Mac and PC ads. This new advertisement consists of a banner on the top with a carnival style banner that says, “Don’t Give up on Vista”, in dimmed letters. On the side stand John Hodgman (PC) and Justin Long (Mac). PC explains how this advertisement will help people switch to Vista and then he pushes the button. But then the only words that light up are, “GIVE UP”. So he simply pushes it again. Now it says,”GIVE UP ON VISTA”. Mac explains how that’s unfortunate and PC keeps smashing the button as the as the banner switches between “Give up in Vista” and “Give up”.

“Why is this ironic?”, You might ask. The thing that is ironic is that one of the many places you can find this ad is on the CNET.com Vista Guide. So while people are learning about Vista and possibly even considering “upgrading” to it they can view this ad that says “Give up on Vista. If you would like to view the ad you can head over to the CNET Vista Guide here.

Hadley Stern over at Apple Matters made this interesting post today in which he admits the Malcor hack of his site was a hoax… as part of a publicity stunt.

Says Hadley: “I made a mistake of judging the inpact of this hoax. Apple Matters runs on the incredibly perfect platform Expression Engine and is hosted by Engine hosting, which is a fantastic company. When I was first approached me about the hoax I thought it was a little harmless fun. I am literally shaking right now because I did not fully understand the impact of this, so lesson learnt. Again, Apple Matters, running on expression engine was in no way hacked. It was a joke publicity stunt that I thought would be funny to attract attention.”

Read the entire post here.

Update: Read this blog post from ExpressionEngine and EngineHosting regarding the hoax. (A few of the sites ‘affected’ in this host used ExpressionEngine CMS and EngineHosting which were both in no way a part of this hoax.)

Steve Jobs was recently selected #1 as the most powerful businessman according to Fortune Magazine. Really? I was actually taken aback when I read this because I didn’t believe it… But this article does raise some good points.

Perhaps the most notable accomplishment in my opinion is the evolution and implementation of iTunes. He convinced the music industry, television and hollywood to let him show them how to get their music, shows and movies out to the world digitally via the iTunes Store.

However, I’m still not certain Jobs should be at the top of the list.

Click here to view the 25 most powerful people in business. Quite an interesting list.

What’s your opinion? Leave your comment and let me know!

The new Leopard Finder automatically shows all the images on your machine using the Smart folder “All Images”.

Now, doesn’t that sound just lovely? Well, it does unless there are images on your machine that you really don’t want friends or family seeing. I’m sure you have immediately thought of an example and I bet that what you’re thinking of rhymes with corn!

Well, there is a solution that is something you probably should do with sensitive data anyway - put these files into an encrypted disk image.

Let’s work with an example - I’ll use Smurfs, which obviously I’d be really embarrassed if my wife saw on my machine while she scrolled through Cover Flow. Let’s put these little beauties into an encrypted disk image!

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