A wish list for the Apple Mac App Store

Apple has just released a new version of OS X - version 10.6.8 and it should be the last Snow Leopard update before Lion is released. So what is in this latest update and is it worth downloading?

One of the things that is does is to enhance the Mac App Store to get ready for upgrading to OS X Lion. Apple has said that Lion will be available from the Mac App Store (and not on DVD) in July, so we are literally weeks away from its launch. It is not clear how the Mac App Store has been modified, but it is not hard to guess what might have changed.

OS X will be a download from the store like any other application and it will be huge. OS X normally comes on a DVD and it could be a 2 or 3Gb download. That is a lot and if you are on a slow internet connection it will take many hours. What we need is a suspend and resume feature, partly because you might start a download and then not have time to finish it and partly to overcome connection problems. Part way through there might be a glitch that causes your internet connection to be lost and you don't want to have to start again at the beginning.

I don't know whether the Mac App Store supports this because I've never downloaded anything that couldn't be grabbed in one go, but a 3Gb OS X download is different and the chance of a download problem is greater. I sure hope Apple has thought this through and can I resume after an error or power off. If you go to the Store menu there is an option to check for unfinished downloads, so maybe it does actually resume.

Another thing that would be really useful and I hope has been put in the Mac App Store is bandwidth management. Normally you want to download an app from the store as fast as possible. This is fine with 20 or even 50Mb downloads, but when its 2 or 3Gb it would be useful to have bandwidth management. It would be really useful to have the download trickle down over a day or two in the background rather and than use all the bandwidth and render my Mac unusable for any other internet access for the duration.

Another essential feature that I hope is in this update is the ability to burn downloads to a CD/DVD. Now this normally doesn't matter because most downloads are small, but suppose you have several Macs and want to upgrade them all to Lion? You don't want to have to download 3Gb on every single machine! Surely you will be able to download it once and burn it to a DVD, which can then be used to install Lion on other Macs.

Not only would it be useful to create a DVD for upgrading several Macs, you also need a boot disc just in case there's ever a problem with your Mac. It is essential that you be able to boot from a disc and reinstall the OS, run Disk Utility, repair errors and so on.

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Flaw in iOS reinstall from the cloud feature

A new feature was enabled in the app store recently and at first sight it seemed quite useful, but it has an irritating flaw. Here’s how it should work: If you have multiple iOS devices, such as an iPhone and an iPad, you might purchase an app, download it and install it from the App Store on one device and wish it was also on the other device. Now you can easily do this without having to go through the App Store and purchase it all over again. All the apps you have purchased are listed in App Store Updates and you can re-download and re-install any of them with a few taps of the screen.

On the iPhone for example, you go to the App Store, tap Updates at the bottom of the screen, and tap Purchased. On the iPhone you can then select either All or Not on this iPhone. All the apps you have purchased are listed and there’s a little cloud icon next to each one. Tap it and you can download and install the app.

This sounds fine in theory, but the snag is that free apps are technically purchases and they are recorded as purchases against your iTunes user account, even though you never paid anything for them. So here’s the flaw: Every app you ever downloaded gets listed! There are thousands of free apps in the App Store and if you like trying them you will have clocked up a large number of (free) purchases.

Some apps are brilliant of course, but some are not and you might quickly delete them after trying them. They sound interesting in the App Store blurb, but when you try them they turn out to be boring, not what you thought it was, or isn’t appealing for some other reason. All the apps you ever download and rejected are listed on your device for re-installation. They get in the way of the apps you are interested in. You might have tried hundreds of apps if you have had your phone for some time and all the apps you rejected for whatever reason are listed.

This feature hasn’t been thought through properly. It can be fixed though and one thing that could be done is to filter out free apps. There is no need for them to be listed and if I have a free app on my iPad and I want it on the iPhone then I can just find it in the App Store and download it. The second thing to do is to filter out apps that have been deleted. If I download an app and delete it, it means I don’t want it! It shouldn’t come back and pester me to be downloaded again.

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OS X 10.6.8 to remove malware

You can't have failed to notice that the Mac has been hit by a malware attack recently and MacDefender has been infecting many peoples' computers. There are several variations of the name, so you may see it called something different elsewhere, and there at least two variations of the program. The first version required the user to enter their administrator password in order to install it. The second did not and just downloaded and installed.

Because the first version required the user to physically enter the admin password, many people said that anyone that did this was stupid and deserved everything they got. This is plain wrong. It is true of any computer expert or even a reasonably knowledgeable person, but there are large numbers of Mac users that have a limited knowledge of how computers work and how internet scams operate. If they visit a website and a pop-up window in the browser says there is a security problem with their computer then they will believe it. If a program downloads and prompts for the user to enter their admin password then they will enter it.

People trust their Macs. They know they must follow instructions displayed on the screen exactly or stuff won't work. They are used to downloading apps and installing them and entering their admin password when prompted to. They know the Mac doesn't get malware - Apple says so.

The second version of the MacDefender malware didn't even prompt for a password. It just downloaded and installed automatically. How is this possible? The reason is that Safari, which is bundled with all Macs and is the default web browser, is set to automatically run downloaded programs without any user intervention. The firewall is also disabled by default. It's a malware author's dream scenario - every Mac is set to auto-download and install apps. I went to a local Apple store and all the Macs were set to do this. I was half tempted to visit one of the poisoned websites carrying the malware to see what would happen.

It's a really bad idea to have a setting like this in a web browser and operating system. Apple should change the defaults immediately. In fact, the auto-run setting shouldn't even exist.

First Apple denied the existence of the MacDefender malware, but after some time it eventually provided instructions on how remove it. The company has promised an update to OS X that will automatically remove MacDefender and its variants and at the time of writing OS X 10.6.8 is in beta and should be released in the not too distant future.

Although Apple could easily produce an OS X update that removes MacDefender, what about the next malware program? The MacDefender author could tweak the program to get around Apple's detection or removal procedure, a new variant could be written, other malware authors could write different malware programs that OS X doesn't recognise. Surely some new malware will pop up as soon as OS X 10.6.8 is released?

It is hard to see how OS X updates can combat malware. You can't update OS X hourly, daily, or even weekly. All you can do is plug the security holes and tell users to install security software. The situation is so bad on Windows that anti virus programs update hourly. We are nowhere near that scenario yet on the Mac and malware is still rare in comparison to Windows, but it will be interesting to see if or how the author of MacDefender responds to the OS X update. We may see a new variation within days or even hours of the OS X update. I think that would be a strong indicator that the Mac is going down the same path as Windows and is becoming a serious target for malware authors.

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Apple and Microsoft move to ARM chips

It seems that both Apple and Microsoft think that the future of microprocessors may lie with ARM rather than Intel products. Both companies are working on getting future versions of their operating systems running on ARM chips.

With Apple, of course, there are only rumours and speculation, but there have been plenty of them in the last week or two. Here is a Cnet report: Apple to ditch Intel for ARM in MacBooks in which is is said that Apple is to drop Intel in favour  of ARM and that it is a done deal. Here is another, Analysts' take: Apple going to ARM on MacBooks. One more example, Rumour: Apple plans to move laptops from Intel to ARM processors.


Only Apple knows what its plans are and it isn't telling anyone else. Microsoft though, is very open about its future development plans and it has publicly announced that the next version of Windows will run on ARM processors.You can read the press release at the Microsoft website.

Given Microsoft's announcement it is quite likely that there is some truth in the Apple rumour. It is interesting that these two companies are investing a lot of money and resources in getting their OS running on ARM. They obviously see a future in which ARM devices are running Windows and OS X instead of, or perhaps as well as, traditional Intel ones.

If you look at the hardware development of mobile phones and tablets, they are becoming increasingly powerful and now we have 1GHz dual core ARM chips powering them with up to 64Gb of RAM, fast graphics chips and so on. Just think what we'll have in a couple of years - 2GHz quad core ARM CPUs? maybe, and with this amount of processing power you could run a full operating system and not just a cut down mobile version.

Microsoft has tried putting Windows on tablet PCs and it didn't work, but perhaps it was just an idea that was ahead of its time. Next year or the year after we may have hardware that is powerful enough to run a full OS and still give 10 hours battery life in a device that is light enough to hold in your hand.

It will soon be possible to create a tablet or smartphone that has the full Windows or OS X operating system on it. All it needs is two user interfaces. When you are carrying it around in your hand it would have a mobile touch-screen interface like today's tablets and smartphones. When you get home or to the office you plug the device into a cradle or docking station and it becomes a desktop computer running the full OS. You seamlessly carry on working on your documents whether in mobile or desktop mode and only the interface changes. That's an interesting prospect.

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1 in 3 choose iPad over TV

1 in 3 choose iPad over TV, said the headline at the CNN website recently. I know headlines have to be short and grab people's attention, but should this be at the expense of being misleading? It implies that 1 in 3 of the general population chooses the iPad over TV, but it was actually a survey of tablet users and not the general public. What's more, it wasn't even a survey of iPad owners and it was a survey of tablet users. Given the huge market share of Apple's iPad compared to Android devices, the vast majority of tablet owners in the survey probably were iPad owners, but not all of them.

So the headline isn't quite right and something like "1 in 3 tablet owners prefer it to TV" would be more accurate.

It's interesting to look at tablet usage though and the original source is a Google Mobile Ads blog. There is a PDF containing lots of slides that is worth viewing. When looking at the tablet usage chart it says that 52% of people spend more time on their tablet each day than listening to the radio. Well I spend more time sitting on the toilet than listening to radio. I just don't listen to it, so what does that prove?

I wonder what the results would be if you surveyed console owners - Xbox and Playstation. I don't know, but I suspect that the results might be similar. Do gamers spend more time on their console than reading a paper book or listening to the radio? It wouldn't be surprising. What if the survey was of Amazon Kindle owners? Would it still say 59% prefer it to reading a paper book or that 52% prefer it to the radio, and so on?

Whenever something new comes along no matter how much time we spend using it, there is less time for something else. As tablet ownership grows we'll spend less time doing other things and that's because there are only 24 hours in the day. We have to cut down on something else to focus our attention on the tablet.

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School gives every child an iPad

There is a school in the US that is giving every child an iPad according to a news report at CNN. It is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Apple gadget and opinions on the wisdom of this is divided. Is it a good idea for a schools to spend this amount of money on a gadget like the iPad, or should it be spent on books and other traditional educational materials? Of course, there are some great educational apps on the iPad, but you have to bear in mind that the money spent on iPads is not available for other things, such as books. Increasing the spend on technology means decreasing the spend on other things the school might need.

The iPad is costing $475 per child and this would buy quite a few good educational books. It is hard to get children to look after books, never mind an iPad, so you can expect several breakages each year. There will also be a small number of hardware failures because, like all electrical goods, they occasionally fail. They also have a limited lifetime and will need replacing in a few years too. This is a never-ending drain on a school's budget and replacements and repairs need to be factored in to the equation.

Of course, books can be damaged and eventually need replacing, but they are quite likely to outlast an iPad. Maintenance and replacement will be lower with books.

In a perfect world where money doesn't exist or is unlimited then buying every child an iPad would be a great idea, but schools are struggling with limited budgets. The cost of each iPad is not $475 because this is $475 that is not available for other things. I don't know how much money is allocated for the educational needs of each child, but even so, would you want the school to take $475 out of it for your child to buy them an iPad?

Schools have to spend wisely and get the most educational value out of their limited funds and you have to wonder whether this is a good idea.

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Secure ways to chat in public

Security is always an important topic with the web and you should constantly be on the lookout for ways in which to keep yourself and your personal information private. One of the ways in which you can improve security on the web is by using an encrypted communication protocol like https instead of plain old http. You'll see it if you ever buy anything on a website or access a bank.

Now you can use https://www.facebook.com and https://www.twitter.com to ensure you have a secure and private communication between your PC and the site. I can see the point when accessing a bank or online store, but why encrypt a conversation that will be made public anyway? Everyone can see what you post on Facebook and Twitter, so why would you want to encrypt its transmission between your PC and the server, only then for it to be made public? Am I missing something here?

When you log in then maybe the password you enter is sent as plain text, but someone would have to be sniffing the network and capture the data for the nano-second it takes for the password to be sent. That would represent a slight security risk, so is this what it's for? It's certainly not needed after login.

Anyway, if you want a secure connection then use the http URLs above. You can also make this a permanent default setting to be used all the time. In Twitter click your name in the top right corner and select Settings. Down at the bottom of the Account tab is Always use https. Tick the box. In Facebook click Account, Account Security. On the Settings tab expand the Account Security section and tick Secure Browsing (https).

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