OS X Mavericks (10.9) will be out later this year, but you don’t have to wait that long to get the sweet new wave wallpaper that will be the default desktop background on future Macs and OS X releases.
Obviously iOS 7 looks incredible enough that virtually every single iPhone, iPad, and iPod owner on the planet is going to want to run the amazing new iOS on their devices… leading to the big question on everyones minds being, what devices does iOS 7 support? And what new features work on which device? The full lists are below, but it’s safe to assume that basically any semi-new iOS device has full support, though not all devices compatible with iOS 7 will get every single feature (like AirDrop).
Here is what we know so far, courtesy of Apple:
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iOS 7 is the most significant update to iOS since the original iPhone debuted, and Apple executives are describing installing iOS 7 as “like getting an entirely new phone”. Packed with tons of features and a beautiful new interface, with tons of animated interface elements that respond to movement of the device and provide a 3D appearance, it really must be seen to believe. Let’s review some of what was shown today at WWDC 2013, covering some of the major features and, of course, some screenshots too.
Apple announced a significant MacBook Air update today at WWDC alongside the all new Mac Pro, and the new Air includes dramatic battery life that lasts all day.
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Apple gave a sneak peak of the all new Mac Pro at WWDC 2013, setting very high expectations for the release later in the year. Professional users will be extremely excited with the new Mac Pro, which looks like something out of the future that has been somehow transported to our era, and the specs are equally as impressive.
The next version of the Mac operating system, OS X 10.9, is officially labeled as OS X Mavericks. Mavericks, named after an epic surfing spot in northern California, has a lot of new features, but also represents a change in naming conventions away from the familiar cat themes. In future versions of OS X will follow the same naming convention and all be named after inspirational places throughout California, where Apple is located.
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Need to securely delete a file, group of files, or an entire directory, insuring that it’s quite literally never recoverable by any known possible means? You can do this easily from the command line with the help of an incredibly powerful tool called srm. srm, as you may have guessed, stands for ‘secure removal’, and is a secure version of the commonly used ‘rm’ command that exists in virtually every flavor of unix, Mac OS X included. Be advised this utility is not for everyone and certainly not for novice users, srm should be considered an advanced tool, and it’s best used by those who are comfortable with the command line and understand the data repercussions of secure delete functions.
How secure is srm? Well, the default for secure remove is the incredibly secure 35-pass method which uses the “35-pass Gutmann algorithm”, that basically means that first the data is removed, then written over 35 times using randomly generated patterns, making recovery quite literally impossible. For some comparison on how secure that is, srm also has a “medium” option setting which uses 7-pass security, and 7-pass meets the US Department of Defense standard for securely erasing data… thus, theoretically at least, the 35 pass method is 7 times more secure than what the US DoD accepts as their standard for secure data removal. We’re not going to focus on the medium option though, we’re going to use srm as it was intended to be used, with full 35-pass data removal.
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Though most of us are accustomed to the default QWERTY keyboard layout, iOS does provide options to toggle between QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ. The latter two options are generally used in Europe, but you can enable them on any iPad or iPhone regardless of which region you’re in, the only requirement is that a Latin alphabet keyboard is the default. These new software layouts work whether the keyboard is docked or in the split keyboard mode, but other layouts like Dvorak are dependent on external keyboards and will not impact the iOS virtual keys.
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Just about everyone knows that you can get basic weather details, temperature, and forecasts through Siri just by summoning the virtual assistant and then asking one of a few basic questions:
(On a quick side note, if you want to change the temperature format from Celsius or Fahrenheit provided by Siri, you can adjust that in the weather app preferences.)
Those basic inquiries are undoubtedly the most used, but there are a series of lesser known weather features that aren’t listed in the big commands list that will provide detailed climate information that are also easily accessible. These questions will have Siri provide you with information on humidity levels, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, and the dew point. Of course this type of weather info is quite specific and not necessarily useful to everyone, but if you’re a weatherman, a weather nerd, or a pilot, you’ll probably be pretty excited that you can get this type of information instantly from your iPhone or iPad.
Mac OS X includes an excellent command line network utility called “nettop” that allows users to monitor all network activity, traffic, and routes from a Mac to the outside world, both through local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) connections. If you’re unfamiliar with networking tools like this, you can think of nettop as a network centric task manager, displaying active networking connections, sockets and routes, their respective names and process id, the state of the connection and whether the connection is established, waiting, or listening, and information about individual process data transfer. It’s a bit like the standard ‘top’ and ‘htop’ commands which show process and resource information, but rather than showing CPU and RAM usage, it will show live network transfer information like packets sent and received, packet size, and total data transferred.
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