An article from tells that analysts from The Yankee Group (unlike those from Gartner and some other IT analysis groups) think that both the security and policy issues about the iPhone have been overblown. Basically, it boils down to not being any worse than any other smart phone, and the analyst finishes with "Security worries about the iPhone are overblown. To boost employee productivity, enterprises would be better served thinking about how to accommodate the iPhone."

Way off topic, but I'm a bit surprised to find out that Queen guitarist Brian May is about to get his PhD in Astrophysics! Well, bully for him! Check out the BBC News coverage of Queen star set to hand in thesis.

Many moons ago, Parallels was the only game in town for Macintosh virtual machines. The software is good, but there is a new player in town. VMWare, the big name in PC virtualization has thrown its hat into the ring and is expected to release version 1.0 of VMWare Fusion for the Macintosh next week. At this time, people may be interested in trying it out, or converting altogether. But, if you've already got Parallels disk images, how do you get access to them from VMWare?

There are a lot of ways to manage passwords for web-based services. If you're like me, you have logins on an absolutely insane number of places. I've used a lot of different tactics for maintaining passwords and logins in the past, and every site I go to has a slightly more perverse set of constraints (some don't allow numbers in passwords, others require them, some have strange user name requirements, or require a unique email address). My current solution, and I'm rather happy with it, is a program called 1passwd. It integrates with most of the software I use online (Safari, Firefox, NetNewsWire) and a ton of other stuff, and does the job. Read on for more.

Often I'm asked what software I use on the Mac. Now, places like iUseThis are great places to go to get a general idea of what's going on and read basic comments. I even put information about what I'm generally using on there. However, I wanted to create a more in-depth review location—not quite what you get from major magazines, but something that allows me to gab a while about software that I find does the job... and there's a lot of that on the Mac. Be on the look out for more items in the "Useful Mac Software" category.

The wacky Fins at F-secure have decided to put an iPhone through its paces in a fridge and the result is a chilling video. Thanks to The Ultimate Apple Weblog for the pointer, and YouTube for the video.

There are plenty of stories floating around these days, such as Apple faces mounting complaints on iPhone battery from MacWorld. I have an iPhone and have owned (and still do) a number of iPods and thus expect to be dealing with the battery issue any day now, except that I've never had a problem with even the oldest of my iPods. However, no matter what the various consumer groups say, I'm completely against an easily replaceable battery in the iPhone.

Many of you know that I've had a large number of (annoyingly expensive) smart phones over the years. In general, I've been pretty loyal to Sony Ericsson, especially the Pxxx series (P800, P900, P910, P990) because of their large screen, pretty good web browser, email support, and, in the case of the 990, the nice qwerty keyboard. However, after year-long+ suffering suffering over the P990's promised support for appropriate syncing on the Macintosh (something I consider absolutely crucial to a phone), I was finally given a gift by Apple— the opportunity to spend $600 and switch my service to AT&T so that I could get a phone that works correctly.

Last night, Apple released the first update to the iPhone, software version 1.0.1. The update is only available via iTunes and is automatically applied the next time you sync. If you haven't applied it yet, you might want to do so before the weekend, as the big hack that has been promised for the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas is fixed in this version. Security details are available on the Apple web site. Since the Safari bug that is fixed also affects the Macintosh versions of Safari, Apple released another security update separately.

Thanks to a pointer from Daring Fireball (great site, especially for Mac heads), today's article on the evolution of graphics is not actually from our favorite author on the subject, Edward Tufte, but from Anil Dash, for his article on Pixels are the new Pies, which covers the apparent move towards representing data with squares that are partially filled instead of with pie charts.