Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Websites can now steal your Safari browser autofill information including Name, Address, Email, Credit Card etc. without a mention using a very simple exploit detailed by Jeremiah Grossman."

Malicious web sites could get personal information from your Address Book if you leave AutoFill on, so this is a pretty simple fix until the situation is addressed by Apple. According to Jeremiah Grossman, Apple has been notified but no word yet on a fix, well other than turning it off.

"A handful of recent threads on Apple's Support Discussion forums - backed up by our own testing - indicate that Snow Leopard suffers from a bug that prevents users from opening multiple recently downloaded files simultaneously."

So if you drag a group of files, say docs for example, into your word application icon, it will only open up one of them. Testing was done with Leopard and it worked fine for several users, but when they switched to Snow Leopard they ran into the bug. No word on a fix, but you can see the comments about it on the Apple discussion boards.

"If you experienced some odd performance problems on your Snow Leopard-running Mac early this morning -- say, right around the time of the Daylight Saving 'fall back' -- you're apparently not alone."

CPU spikes were the norm during the "switching hour" that was associated with having the "menu bar clock enabled" or having the clock "automatic set feature turned on." I guess CPU watching is one way to spend that hour, I instead chose to catch up with Fringe and eat some Halloween candy (pays to have a house that isn't convenient to get to this time of year). Anyway, the fix is to turn off the menu bar clock in System Preferences for a few seconds and it should go away. Although some on the message boards were reporting the problem went away as mysteriously as it appeared. Coincidence? Haunted OS?

"A serious data-loss bug is affecting a small percentage of users who have upgraded to Snow Leopard and use guest accounts. Though Apple says the bug is "rare," it is working on a solution."

This was creeping up in reports in September, and what has happened isn't too much fun. If you update from Leopard and your guest account is enabled, then you run the risk of your home directory being wiped clean. Apple says they are aware of the problem and are working on a fix. No real fix other than making sure you don't have your guest accounts enabled when you upgrade, and to make sure you have a back up of all your data before you do the upgrade. You do have a back up line ready don't you?

Is anyone else seeing this? It would appear that the contact page for the iPhone OS 3.0 isn't hiding empty sections properly and you get this glitch. I can replicate it reliable on my iPhone 3GS and my wife's 3G. I'm assuming Apple will be fixing this in the next point-release, but it's kind of disappointing to see a display glitch from Apple, particularly because they have a reputation of putting a ton of effort into their UI.

"Some owners of Apple's new unibody, 15-inch MacBook Pro are reporting in Apple's support forums (1, 2) that their connections to wireless access points often lose signal strength or drop their links altogether. The problem echoes a similar one witnessed by owners of aluminum iMac owners since mid-year that has created similar difficulties. What conditions are exactly necessary to trigger the problem are unknown. Connections to some access points work properly, while others create severe connection problems. Network and security settings don't appear to matter, nor do devices attached to the systems. A collection of the MacBook Pro owners have partly diagnosed the problem and have discovered that the latency between their Macs and their Wi-Fi hotspots can fluctuate wildly, shifting from normal response times of under 10ms to as high as 39,290ms -- or more than 39 seconds between signals. These extreme variances result in the data packet loss that ultimately interrupts the signal."

As I said in the comments on my review of my MacBook Pro, I haven't had this issue, but apparently a lot of people are. It's long been hinted by disgruntled users that the aluminum case is equivalent to a Faraday cage, from which no radio signal can escape in tact. I have no reason to believe it isn't happening, I just haven't experienced it yet. It's definitely something to be aware of when you're choosing your next Apple product, especially considering that all of them seem to be moving toward aluminum as the material of choice. Then again, there is the MacBook White...