Macgasm

It seems like these days everything interesting you could write about always comes down to Lion or iPhone 5 rumors. Every day there are new possible release dates and other information. And while we’re still waiting for Lion to appear in the App Store today, there now is another new rumored release date for the iPhone 5.

CNET UK reports today that Apple has started advertising job positions on the British employment website Reed. Posted by Gekko Ltd., a company Apple has worked with before to find new staff for its shops, the job description reads: “Full-time iPhone Sales Staff for an exciting project to work 5 days a week (Tuesday-Saturday) for the period 16th August – 29th October within key retail stores.”

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This week is not only said to see the release of Apple’s new Mac operating system OS X Lion, but there are also rumors saying that Apple will ship a new generation of MacBook Airs and Mac Pros.

“People familiar with the matter,” according to AppleInsider, say that this new version of the MacBook Air, besides getting a Thunderbolt port, Sandy Bridge processors, a faster SSD and shipping with Lion pre-installed, will bring back the backlit keyboard.

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After a long wait and a lot of promising tweets, App That finally released version 2.0 of its iPhone weather app Shine. The new version finally comes with international support and is now available worldwide, which means that I, as a European, can finally use it. So, I downloaded it, played with it and decided that I need to tell you guys about it. Because I love it!

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Fire up Software Update and find new versions of Java for Mac OS X ready to be downloaded. Apple released update 5 for Snow Leopard users and update 10 for Leopard users.

Both updates bring several improvements and fixes and bring Java to version 1.6.0_26. You can find the change-logs and links for both updates after the break.

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Final Cut Pro X is the new MobileMe.

At least it is just as much criticised as the early version of MobileMe was, back in July 2008. Apple promised to improve MobileMe and give the users what they expected to get for their money. And it did. Apple is now already reaching out to their disappointed pro-user community and promising updates bringing what they want. Until then, users can apply for a refund.

If you want to keep your shiny new app though, and are willing to wait (or actually are able to wait) until Apple makes Final Cut Pro X usable for professionals, you can now read your way through a new Questions & Answers document, which Apple released today.

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Last week’s Snow Leopard update brought Apple’s current Mac OS to version number 10.6.8 and brought us a few new features and bug fixes. Besides that, it apparently also brought a problem for Xserve users — the much dreaded performance issue.

On Apple’s Support Communities website, the thread about this problem keeps growing as more and more people experience the problem with the Mac OS X Server-exclusive hardware monitoring daemon called hwmond. After the update, this process reportedly uses up to 100 percent of the Mac’s CPU, which sounds like a teeny-tiny problem.

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In an official FAQ document published today, Apple has stated that a web interface with the corresponding web apps for iCloud email, calendar, contacts and Find My iPhone will launch this fall.

The document gives an overview of the features that will be available in iCloud when the service launches later this fall, showing that the Photo Gallery, iDisk and the iWeb publishing applications will be discontinued as of June 30, 2012.

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Every time Apple releases a new operating system (or for that matter, just a new version of an operating system) hardcore geeks among us start reading through all the system files, trying to find any hints at possible new products that haven’t been announced by Apple yet.

The same happened when Apple released the first beta of iOS 5 a few weeks ago. Found were some references to the next generation of iPhones and iPads, but nothing about a new iPod touch. This led many (including ourselves) to the assumption that there won’t be a new model of the iPod touch this year.

That is, until today, when a member of the iFans forum posted a screenshot showing the string “iPod 4,2.”

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