I just published this whitepaper for our affiliate mobile application development business, Codex Development. Here's a few pages of the text. For the entire whitepaper as a PDF, download it for free at http://www.codexdev.com/research.

On the early morning of Monday, January 4th, 2010, we corrected an error on our hosting junk mail filter which would increase the likelihood of a legitimate message being marked as junk mail.

The bug did not mean that all legitimate email was labelled as junk mail. However, it did increase the likelihood if the message also matched other rules which indicated that it "may" be junk mail.

No doubt that since the release of Snow Leopard a couple weeks ago, you've read a lot about the "Snow Leopard" experience. It's definitely faster, more responsive, and pretty compatible with everything out there, so it seems that Apple has a winner of an OS, especially for the consumers. Good for Apple.

So what about about what's good for us, the professional Mac admins and IT guys who help run businesses that run on Macs? Snow Leopard is great news for consumers, but it's another OS to deploy for us and that's hardly worth jumping up and down for.

What we're interested in is something to make our jobs easier, to simplify our infrastructure, and make our clients or businesses run smoother. That's why we're interested in Snow Leopard Server. Unlike the client, Snow Leopard Server has numerous significant and real improvements - not just to the UI, but also to core functionality. So let's go over it in detail and in depth.

Installation

Installation of OS X Snow Leopard is of course, more complicated than the client version, so please, for those of you untrained in OS X Server installs, don't think that we're saying that anyone can do it. No matter what level of simplicity Apple brings to the UI, a server install will always require planning, forethought, and experience. For those of you who are experienced, you'll find Snow Leopard server one of the easiest installations of OS X Server you've seen. Options for network configuration, services, and directory options are available as they are in the Leopard installation, but are more clearly laid out.

That seems like a strange title for one of my blog posts, especially for a tech company that doesn't have any business in Africa. Let me explain.

As we recently announced in our online newsletter, we're sponsoring Adam Mazo, filmmaker of "Reconciliations Reach," a film about Rwandans struggle with reconciliation a generation after genocide. Tech Superpowers is providing Adam and his team with essential video editing gear for his documentary once he arrives back in the states after a month-long trip to Rwanda.

Read our announcement about the collaboration.

Adam's recently posted a new blog post on the film's website with updates from his journey:

A new week, a new Apple rumour (I'm going with the UK spelling here since I'm in London). This one is about the fabled Apple Tablet, which is basically the same rehashed rumour about the Apple netbook that surfaced earlier this year.

In this version, China Times has an article (translated here) about the upcoming plans for Apple to release such a device in October.

eWeek interviewed me yesterday to find out my opinion on if these rumours were possibly going to come true.

My opinion? This rumour smells about right. Why? Because of a convergence of a number of factors: user demand, technology, and developer energy. The point where these things converge is where Apple plays best.

For years after the release of Retrospect 6, we Mac users were waiting for the new version. Originally anticipated to be Retrospect 7 and/or Retrospect X, we read about the trials and tribulations of the EMC acquisition and reorganizations, hoping and praying that the Mac version of the Retrospect wouldn't be canned altogether. The Windows world got that much more ahead on the backup game, with offsite capabilities, backup pruning, government-level encryption, and transport compression becoming common features in all backup software.

Then, a funny thing happened: Mac users just gave up on hoping for a new version. We used alternatives like Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and BRU to try to fill in where Retrospect fell flat – frequently Frankensteining backup systems to get 100% reliability. We learned to live with Retrospect's OS 9 legacy interface quirks and just bit the bullet and checked backups frequently and meticulously to get them working right.

So when Retrospect 8 finally was released earlier this year, I took my time getting to it. Not because I didn't need it, but simply because I was too busy checking all of my client's Retrospect 6 logs and reports via ARD to get around to it. EMC had simply beat my enthusiasm for what used to be a great product out of me.

That enthusiasm is back.

In a previous blog post from last year - Why you should care about the iPhone SDK, I talk about Xcode - Apple's secret weapon. You can read the previous article, typed up when iPhone 2.0 was released in 2008, to find out why I think the iPhone SDK is defining the future of Apple and the Mac platform.

Today's post is about tracking how that secret weapon is starting to energize. This is what I wrote in 2008, just about a year ago:

Uh, so Apple sells around 9 million Macs a year and now, around the same iPhones. Think of every Mac as not a Mac, but as a piece of equipment that runs programs running in Xcode.

Apple will sell close to 10 million iPhones in 18 months. Add to that all the iPod touches that they sell - millions.

Suddenly, in a matter of a year, the rate of growth of Xcode-enabled devices has doubled. Doubled - think about that. The conclusion is obvious: Apple's foray into the mobile space will result in double the number of programmers familiar with the fundamental coding environment for the Mac.

This weekend, Apple sold over 1 million iPhone 3GS units. In April, Apple released total numbers of iPhone and iPod touch users on a quarterly financial call: 37 million units, and that was before the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 was released. And then there's those pesky rumours about an Apple Netbook...

eWeek's been covering all of the latest iPhone and Palm Pre news over the last couple weeks - there's been a lot to cover, including the release of the Palm Pre, Palm's newest smart phone, aimed squarely at the Apple iPhone's target market; and the release of Apple's own iPhone 3GS, which sold over a million handsets on opening weekend.

Nathan Eddy of eWeek has quoted me on a couple of his articles.

For months, I've been griping about the iPhone's complete lack of features for syncing the iPhone wirelessly (either via Wifi or 3G) with Apple's own iCal server, part of 10.5 "Leopard" Server.

While I've covered many of the possible hacks to make this work in my blog post from January of this year - none of them were, ahem, optimal (i.e. reliable).

With the release of iPhone 3.0, Apple slid in a very essential bit of functionality for iCal server users: CalDAV support. CalDAV is important, because it's the open standard upon which iCal server's calendar data travels - so if the iPhone "speaks" CalDAV, then it can speak to iCal Server. (As a side note, a lot of people have noticed that the iPhone will also speak with Google Calendar this way as well)

And speak it does.

I was queried yesterday by Nathan Eddy of eWeek about Apple's recent security patches. It's interesting that he was inquiring about these particular security patches, as they seemed quite run of the mill. The specific security fixes that he was inquiring about referred to Apple's Quicktime and iTunes programs.

Here's what I said in the article:

Michael Oh, founder of the Apple-specific, Boston-based company Tech Superpowers, said based on the support page for the QuickTime update, all of the vulnerabilities related to the idea that it is theoretically possible for a user to click on a URL, encoded in a certain way, and it may crash QuickTime or be used to execute a code.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a large threat for the average user, but it’s a common attack vector used by a lot of hackers sending out spam, so it’s a pretty common type of thing you see out there,” he said. He pointed out there are theoretical hacks that can happen on any number of platforms, and singled out Apple’s diligence in security issues.

“Apple has a pretty serious stance on security and addressing these issues,” he said. “They are very good at pushing these updates down to users—Apple simply sees those vulnerabilities, addresses them behind the scenes and then releases the updates."

Oh said the stuff that really gets mainstream media attention, such as viruses or Trojans, tends to be things that have a mechanism to propagate wildly—as the term "virus" suggests. “It’s important to mention that none of the vulnerabilities have any sort of mechanism to propagate like that,” he said. “That’s a really critical thing you should look at with a security patch."

When looking at security vulnerabilities - particularly ones that have been fixes, there are two critical things to look at: (1) how bad is the problem and what could a hacker have possibly done and (2) how quickly would the security issue be spread?