The World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence 2008 had an unusual high atten­dance (52.000 atten­dees). CEO Steve Jobs announced a couple of inter­est­ing items during the event: Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leop­ard), Mobile Me and of course the iPhone 3G. The ses­sion of Mac OS X 10.6 this after­noon will be cov­ered under non-​disclosure, so don’t expect any offi­cial fea­tures or announce­ments to be coming from Apple but as usual some infor­ma­tion is cer­tain to leak. The iPhone is finally coming to the Nether­lands, sorry you guys who’ve bought it recently on eBay. Again and again I’ll tell people the same mes­sage, it’s a devel­oper con­fer­ence not a con­sumer event. So for those who are dis­ap­pointed wait for the next event and you’ll be amazed!

MobileMe will hope­fully bring the long over­due upgrade to .Mac. Now I only have to wait until July 11 to buy myself an iPhone 3G.

Accord­ing to online trend research firm Net Appli­ca­tions, Apple con­tin­ues to gain market share. Last month, Net Appli­ca­tions reported that Apple’s share was up to 6.8% with cor­re­spond­ing declin­ing Win­dows market share. Today, Net Appli­ca­tions reports that the Mac has crested the 7% bar­rier and is at 7.31% for Decem­ber 2007. Mean­while, Microsoft’s Win­dows OS con­tin­ues to decline in market share, with a still dom­i­nant 91.79% in Decem­ber having eroded from 92.42% in Novem­ber. Apple (and to a lesser extent, Linux) have been steadily taking market share from Microsoft for the past 6 months.

Ahu­u­u­uha, Red Alert!!! A virus wasn’t detected!!! Some­one posted a file on MacRu​mors.com and said it were screen­shots of Mac OS 10.5 (code­name Leop­ard). The file is a com­pressed pro­gram with an icon to make it look like a JPEG file. Safari actu­ally warns you that “Name of the file” may con­tain an appli­ca­tion. The safety of this file cannot be deter­mined. Are you sure you want to down­load “Name of the file”? After you agree, Safari will down­load the file and if in Safari’s Gen­eral Pref­er­ence Pane the option “Open “safe” files after downloading” is turned on, it will expand the file auto­mat­i­cally to your chosen loca­tion. So if you want to be “super” secure, turn this option off.
Most users are admin­is­tra­tor on their machines, so if you double click the exe­cutable it will auto­mat­i­cally install itself in ~/Library/InputManagers and deletes all files from this folder. So if you want to be more secure create a stan­dard user and use this one as your default account. More details on OSX.Leap.A at Syman­tec.
The anti-​virus com­pa­nies are call­ing it some­thing worse than it actu­ally is. The “Trojan Horse” isn’t as dan­ger­ous as virus com­pa­nies claim, but hey they do got to sell soft­ware, don’t they?Update: There is some con­fu­sion if the new Oompa-​Loompa Trojan really a Trojan is, if you lookup the def­i­n­i­tion at Wikipedia: “a stand­alone pro­gram that mas­quer­ades as some­thing else, like a game or image file”.