Apple this week announced Swift 2 and said it would open-source it later this year. Swift 2 is a programming language for iOS, OS X and watchOS. It has a new error handling model that works with Apple SDKs and NSError. Two new features in Objective-C -- nullability annotations and generics -- make S...

Here in the Linux community, it's no secret that there are more flavors of our favorite operating system than most of us can keep track of. That doesn't mean, however, that one can just up and disappear without anyone noticing. Case in point: Pear OS. One day it's freely available for download, offe...

Well we've had a few weeks of fun here in the Linux blogosphere with one of our favorite pastimes -- dissecting Linux poll results -- but last week brought those inwardly focused musings to an abrupt end. The cause? Yet another news flash from the outside world, of course, originating this time from...

Given all the legends surrounding Apple's widely mourned Steve Jobs, it's not entirely surprising that comparisons should be made any time another tech leader begins to resemble him in any way. Case in point: Mark Shuttleworth. The billionaire Canonical founder has actually been compared to Jobs on ...

The Secure Boot saga may seem like it's been dragging on forever here in the Linux blogosphere, but the truth is that it's a mere babe in Redmond arms compared with the never-ending Apple v. Samsung drama. It seems safe to say that most FOSS fans are sick to death of hearing about both of them, but ...

When life gives you lemons, everyone knows you should make lemonade, as the old saying goes. But what if life gives you Linux on a Retina MacBook Pro? That, too, has been shockingly referred to as a "lemon" in recent days, but the solution there isn't so clear. "If you are planning to buy one of the...

There may not be enough tequila in this world to see the tech community all the way through to the end of August 2011. We've had Googlerola; we've had the ever-escalating software patent storm. We've had HP's lily-livered maneuvers regarding webOS and PCs. Did we need more than that? No, we did not....

By the year 2012, there will be more smartphones running the Android OS than Apple's iOS. That's according to iSuppli, which projects that 75 million Android-based smartphones will be in use two years from now. Android will have a 19.4 percent share of the global market for smartphones, says iSuppli...

In the collective psyche of the Linux community, there has traditionally been one primary enemy. Just as Dr. Strange had Baron Mordo, just as Aragorn had Sauron, Harry had Lord Voldemort, and Odysseus had Poseidon, so we in the world of FOSS have had Microsoft. That, however, appears to be changing....

"Do you want hemlock, or will a cyanide capsule do?" That was Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson's response to a question being debated in the Linux blogosphere in recent days. Specifically, is Apple or Microsoft worse for FOSS? Cupertino was the choice of Alastair Otter, the blogger who originally rai...

The lawsuit Apple filed this week may target smartphone maker HTC, but Cupertino is likely shooting for much bigger prey. Specifically, Google is the real focus of Apple's wrath, said Chris Hazelton, research director for mobile and wireless with the 451 Group. Based on the details of the lawsuit, "...

Mozilla's Firefox has a loyal following of people who say it's a lot better than the leading browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But Mozilla CEO John Lilly looks like he also has a close eye on Apple's Safari browser, which commands a mere fraction of Firefox's market share even though it's avai...

Much of the technology world may have been at CES last week, but there was apparently still plenty of time to discuss events announced there and elsewhere on the Linux blogs. Indeed, there's always time to debate the merits of Linux versus other platforms, we at LinuxInsider always say, and most rec...

It's not Apple's release of a Windows version of its Safari Web browser that concerns Mozilla COO John Lilly. It's Apple founder Steve Jobs' apparent view of a Web browser market shared, for the most part, by two companies: Apple and Microsoft. In a "John's blog" entry published last Thursday, Lilly...

In an effort to reach out to open source developers, Apple Computer this week said it will release buildable kernel source code for Intel-based Macs, beginning with code for Mac OS X, version 10.4.7. The firm previously released similar code for its PowerPC-based Macs. Apple quietly announced the o...

X-Win32 is the first PC X server to support Apple Computer's Boot Camp software, claims StarNet Communications, a publisher of Windows-to-Unix/Linux connectivity software. Boot Camp lets users install Microsoft's Windows XP operating system and Windows-based applications on the latest Macintosh comp...

As regular readers of this column know, I'm a big fan of the Apple Macintosh, but I'm much less of a fan of Apple Canada in general and their dealers in the Toronto area in particular. This morning (Tuesday, October 19) I needed an external power adapter for a 17-inch titanium -- since it doesn't ha...

It might be a dubious distinction at best, but it's one that Apple has had for a very long time: second most popular desktop operating system. Now that mantle appears destined to belong to Linux. According to Hewlett-Packard of Palo Alto, California, shipments of computers running desktop Linux shou...

For the last three weeks I've been talking about the impact the new Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental IBM ideas about how computing ...

Apple this week released the latest source code for its Darwin open-source project -- Darwin 6.7 and 6.8 -- which corresponds to the Mac OS X operating system and its latest versions, 10.2.7 and 10.2.8. Among the most prominent of open-source projects from Apple, Darwin is based on FreeBSD 4.4 and i...