Chris Foresman

When Apple discussed the new features of the forthcoming iPhone OS 3.0, SVP of iPhone Software Engineering Scott Forstall said that the iPhone would be capable of streaming video and audio directly over HTTP. Apple also advertised HTTP streaming as a feature of QuickTime X, the update of its media architecture coming in Snow Leopard. What it failed to explain, at least publicly, is how this streaming would be accomplished. Fortunately, Apple submitted its proposed protocol last month to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the hopes that it will become a ubiquitous standard. Apple identified what it considers a few issues with standard streaming, which generally uses the Real Time Streaming Protocol originally developed by Netscape and Real in the late '90s. The biggest issue with RTSP is that the protocol or its necessary ports may be blocked by routers or firewall settings, preventing a device from accessing the stream. As the standard protocol for the Web, though, HTTP is... - Chris Foresman

Market research firm ChangeWave has released the results of its recent corporate IT spending surveys, which show increased interest in Macs—in fact, the highest ChangeWave has ever recorded. Small- and medium-sized businesses are also looking at Apple's smartphone—no doubt a halo effect brought on by huge increase in demand among general consumers. More enterprise IT operations plan to add new computers during the next quarter, increasing to about the same levels as ChangeWave recorded in May of last year. Apple is benefitting from the increased spending, as a full nine percent of those buying new computers plan to buy MacBook Pros, while another seven percent are planning to buy desktop Macs. That's roughly inline an 8-10 percent market share that Apple had been coming close to cracking in recent quarters, before the effects of the recession took its toll on Mac sales, and the highest percentage ChangeWave has ever recorded among corporate buyers. Click here to read the rest of this... - Chris Foresman

Yesterday's announcement of Google's Chrome OS plans were met with plenty of discussion about what it might mean for the future of computing. The OS is essentially a lightweight version of Linux designed to run the company's Chrome browser to access Google's (or other third-party) cloud computing services, such as Gtalk, Gmail, Google Docs, and more. While there are numerous benefits of using such cloud services—like data persistence across multiple machines—what happens when the servers that run those services run into trouble, burn down, or lose power? Unfortunately, it seems, there aren't any new answers since we examined this issue almost one year ago. In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues... - Chris Foresman

Apple will no longer include a default WebObjects deployment in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Server, even though it has been included by default since 10.4 launched over four years ago. However, developers argue that it's actually a good thing for the Java-based Web application framework—not a death knell. WebObjects is a Cocoa-like framework for building Web applications deployed using Java, originally developed by NeXT in the mid-90s. Apple inherited the technology when it bought NeXT in 1997, and originally sold licenses for a whopping $50,000—though it later dropped the price to $699 with the release of Mac OS X. Ever since Tiger, it has synced new releases of the WebObjects frameworks with OS releases and new versions of the Xcode development tools, and also included a default deployment of the frameworks and necessary server infrastructure on server versions of Mac OS X. Click here to read the rest of this article - Chris Foresman

Apple is likely to release a new iPod touch model this September that incorporates hardware improvements introduced with the iPhone 3GS. Because of this, it makes perfect sense that devices that report a product ID of "iPod3,1" are already popping up in application usage logs from Pinch Media. References to a product identified as "iPod3,1" were spotted earlier this year in the first iPhone OS 3.0 beta. Following Apple's convention, such a product ID would refer to a third-generation iPod touch, as earlier models were referred to as "iPod1,1" and "iPod2,1." Click here to read the rest of this article - Chris Foresman

constrained supplies both online and in Apple's retail stores. This is a good sign that demand for Apple's most popular laptop is higher than ever as the back-to-school buying season is starting to kick into high gear. Muster's analysis is based on tracking the lead times for online Apple Store orders for various Macs. He noted that the current estimated shipping delay for the higher-end, 2.53GHz 13" MacBook Pro is 7 to 10 business days—the longest delay in more than two years. A quick check of several of Apple's brick-and-mortar retail stores also showed low stocks of 13" models. Click here to read the rest of this article - Chris Foresman