Friday, July 31, 2009

iPhone 3.0.1 - Why You Should Update ASAP

iPhone users can thank two researches Collin Mulliner (a Ph.D. student at the Technical University of Berlin) and Charlie Miller (Security Researcher) who presented at a Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas that they could take control over an iPhone merely by sending a SMS message. It was described by CNET as a serious memory corruption bug in the way the iPhone handles SMS messages.

Although there are no reported incidents of users phones being affected by this security issue, I would recommend all iPhone users upgrade as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it will take a little less than an hour including the backup time, much less if you don't have much data on your iPhone. Before you upgrade, make sure you have the lastest version of iTunes.

I upgraded several phones this evening on both my Windows PCs and Macs without any issues. Thanks to my friend Jose A. who alerted me of this release via text message. I am now subscribed to the Apple Dev Team's Twitter account @iPhone_Dev so that I can monitor these types of issues.


Thursday, July 30, 2009

Picasa for Mac Sizzles, much better than iPhoto




I finally installed Picasa for the Mac Version 3.0.6 today and it absolutely sizzles! It is much better than Apple iPhoto for cleaning up pictures. I've been using the Windows version for a number of years and finally decided it was time to switch!

I especially like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature for Basic Fixes or photo touch up and the Crop feature.

If you haven't tried it yet, here's the link.

Google Picasa MAC version
http://picasa.google.com/mac/

Google Picasa Windows version
http://picasa.google.com/index.html#

Also, I usually select the option to have Picasa search my entire hard drive for photos. However, be careful with that feature since Picasa will possibly find every joke email attachments that people sent you and who knows what else. You might have to do some clean-up after it is installed.