Ah, a new release.... must be time for another slew of articles aimed at getting press and money for the "security" folks out there. For those of us with Macintoshes, here is my take on the whole Macintosh virus situation.

Many of you have already seen that Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) will be releasing on Friday. I've been running it as my primary OS on my laptop since the WWDC in June and look forward to getting a real install on there. You're probably also aware that PPC machines will not run 10.6 (and beyond), so this upgrade is Intel Macintosh only. Here is roadmap through the upgrade products.

Due to a problem encountered by a friend recently when trying to deal with a lost admin password on a relative's Macintosh, I had occasion to revisit the topic of resetting Macintosh passwords. This is both an interesting tip, and a cautionary tale for those with important data on their computers.

With Apple having announced some new machines, with really nice price points within the last week, I've been asked by some friends what my suggestions would be for copying the data to a new machine and removing data from the old one. Here, I'll try to put forth my current thoughts on these two issues.

As I write this today, I'm the happy owner of a new MacBook Pro (the "unibody" or "late 2008" version). So, what of it? So far, so great. I'm very happy with the purchase and I'm looking forward to making a happy new Mac user of the designated recipient of my old MacBook Pro. For more details on the new offerings, read on.

A good analysis from Charles Miller of the popularity and purposefulness of the PC in the Get A Mac ads. The article recons that the same play is at work with the PC in the ads as was with the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons.

A little known (but much loved by me) feature of every iPod (except the Shuffle) and the original iPhone was that you could charge the phone using the FireWire port on your computer. Of course, it's been quite a while since you could transfer data over FireWire, but you could buy a cable that powered the iPod/iPhone via FireWire and exchanged data over USB. Why would you want to do this? Simple: for USB ports to be powered, a Mac must be on (not in sleep mode). This means you can't sleep your Mac and charge your iPhone. However, FireWire didn't have that same requirement, and Apple kept the FireWire ports hot even as long as your computer was plugged into the wall, regardless of sleep mode.

Normally, I wouldn't post about an Apple security update, because they're relatively common and generally attack most of the issues within a period of time that everyone agrees is a bit too long. However, there was a lot of hubub about Apple's "delay" in getting the security patch out for the recent BIND issue that could allow for users to be sent to the wrong sites. This wouldn't have caused me to write, except that after Apple patched the problem, there have been a few articles (no links provided, so as not to give them advertising revenue) that indicate the patch did no good. This is UNTRUE. Full details in the rest of the article.

Since the iPhone 2.0 release, more people are considering Mobile Me (the follow on to Dot Mac). For those of us with more than one computer, it's a very easy way to keep your contacts, calendars and other data in sync. However, there are some tricks for some kinds of data. This installment talks about Keychains.

Michiel van Meeteren of Made by SOFA "fame" has issued a report entitled Indie Fever that stretches to over 100 pages of mostly text analyzing interviews that he made with a group of independent Apple software developers. I haven't had a chance to read it completely, although I did skim it, and it's an interesting survey of how the community looks and how it got here and possibly where it is going. Thanks to Ranchero.com for the pointer.