In February, we took a look at smaller changes in the pre-release version of OS X Mountain Lion that Mac developers are using. These changes are good indications of what we’ll see when the final version goes live sometime this summer. Apple has released two new previews since then with quite a few updates — some significant, some seriously minor, and some that have even undone changes since we last wrote about it.

Here’s what’s new:

General changes

• The App Store now supports automatic downloads, which is one of the things I’d hoped Apple would add. You can also go backward and forward in the App Store and Game Center with two fingers, the same as Safari. Notably, you still can’t do this in the Finder.
• There’s a new popover for choosing avatars, which is used in Game Center and the Users and Groups pane in System Preferences.
• You can no longer remove apps and stacks from the Dock by simply dragging them off. You have to do it by right-clicking, which I expect is going to draw the ire of many power users.
• Launchpad is no longer arranged alphabetically. The “Utilities” folder has also been renamed to “Others”.
• The linen background in Mission Control is slightly darker than in Lion.
• Font Book now has a full-screen mode and two smart folders in the sidebar for fixed-width fonts and monospaced fonts.
• The battery item in the menu bar has been simplified so that the only option is to show the percentage left or not. Showing time left has been removed.
• You can go from one stack to another in the Dock with one click. In Lion, clicking another stack with one already open just closes the current stack. (Updated: Sorry, this isn’t new to Mountain Lion. Turns out, it doesn’t work in Lion when your Dock is hidden — which mine was — but does when unhidden.)

Safari

• There’s a new button for iCloud tabs, which allows access to tabs on other devices.
• There’s a new page-loading animation, which you can see in this YouTube video.
• Web apps can send native notifications through Safari, as evidenced by the new Notification Center tab in Safari’s preferences.
• Reading List has a new look, with a more neutral background color and paper texture instead of linen. It also supports offline reading.
• When you download a file in Safari in Lion, the file flies into the downloads button. In Mountain Lion, it flies into the downloads stack in the Dock, and a progress indicator appears over the stack.
• Safari has a more “responsive” UI: when you resize a window past a certain point, buttons will be hidden to save space.
• There’s a new tab button next to the bookmarks bar when only one tab is open and the tab bar is hidden.

Notification Center

• There’s a new “do not disturb” mode, which disables notifications when active.
• The menu bar icon has a gray dot in the middle, rather than black. It also changes into a moon when do not disturb mode is on.
• There’s a new button in the lower-righthand corner that’ll take you to Notification Center’s preference pane in System Preferences.

System Preferences

• The General perefence pane has been simplified. The options for smooth scrolling and double-click to minimize are gone, with the latter being moved to the Dock preference pane. The three dropdowns for the number of recent items has been consolidated into one. The dropdown for choosing the sidebar icon size has been moved to the top section. Finally, there’s a new checkbox for “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.”
• The preferences for “tap to click” have been moved into the Trackpad pane and are enabled by default.
• The Mission Control pane now has the option to disable grouping windows by application, so all windows will be shown the same way.
• Time Machine’s pane has been updated slightly, with flatter buttons and a simpler explanation of what Time Machine does.

What do you think of the new changes? Tell us in the comments.

Header image via Flicker user sigsegv.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

Here’s what Apple predicted for its overall results for the January through March period back in late January:

“Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2012, which will span 13 weeks, we expect revenue of about $32.5 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $8.50.”

Wall Street investors, naturally, are expecting a bit more from the company that always lowballs its forecasts: They are anticipating revenue to be around $36.64 billion for earnings of $9.99 per share.

So how will Apple match — or surpass — that forecast?

The second fiscal quarter had one big new product release: the new iPad. Its sales are likely to be a highlight and provide Apple with a nice boost. While the company sold 4.69 million iPads during the same quarter a year ago, this year the new iPad sold more than half of that total in its very first weekend, with 3 million. Apple also dropped the older model iPad 2 by $100 so it starts at $399. So, expect iPad sales to be a fairly large number: the average estimate from Wall Street analysts is just under 12 million units.

Mac sales have been up for dozens of quarters in a row, but it’s also getting to that time of year where Apple should be refreshing its MacBook and iMac lineup. However, that didn’t happen during the quarter, so it won’t be a huge surprise if unit sales don’t match last quarter’s record-high 5.2 million with potential buyers (sensibly) waiting to upgrade. The quarter in question is also typically a low point in the year for the PC industry in general — it’s after the holidays and still months before graduation and back-to-school shopping. A year ago, 3.76 million Macs were sold. On Tuesday, analysts are expecting a little over 4.5 million sales to be announced.

But again, the key metric influencing Apple’s earnings these days comes down to the iPhone. Sales of the device are what have propelled Apple’s success in the last five years to the top of the tech and business worlds. It’s also what can lead to a major Wall Street freakout: When Apple didn’t meet analysts’ expectations in August thanks to a delayed upgrade cycle of iPhones, there were predictions of the company’s imminent doom. When Apple announced at the end of last quarter that it sold an astonishing 37 million iPhones following the 4S debut in the fall, its stock went on a tear, rising 44.7 percent in just over two months.

So should we be prepared for investors’ handwringing or high-fiving? More likely the latter. Estimates of how many new iPhones Apple sold vary widely, as one might expect. Cannacord Genuity says 32.6 million; JP Morgan is looking for 31.1 million units; Fortune polled 48 analysts that follow Apple and the average estimate was 30.5 million, though the low estimate was 26 million and the highest 33 million.

There was some degree of concern last week after Verizon announced it had activated 3.2 million iPhones, or 26 percent fewer during the last quarter than it did the same quarter a year ago. But, to be fair, was the first quarter that Apple freed the iPhone from AT&T’s exclusivity in the U.S., so there was a bit of pent-up demand back then. And Verizon still sold more iPhones than all of its Android phones combined during that quarter.

Either way, compared to Apple’s iPhone sales the same quarter a year ago (18.65 million) it’s extremely likely this past quarter’s growth is going to be above 50 percent.

Though other new phones that launched during the quarter have had some buzz, like Nokia’s Windows Phone-powered Lumia phones, Nokia has already said sales of the heavily anticipated phones were “mixed.” Samsung, on the other hand, is continuing to charge ahead as Apple’s most significant competitor in smartphone sales. It says it expects to report a record quarter for the same period, and analysts are estimating the Korean electronics maker may have shipped 44 million smartphones between January and March.

We’ll be covering the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT Tuesday, so be sure to come back here then.

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• The new IT manager, part 1
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

Apple’s “solution” of disabling Java on versions prior to Snow Leopard isn’t realistic for users that still intend to keep their Mac on the Internet, since web-based Java is still popular, especially for proprietary corporate applications. If you are on a Leopard (10.5) or older system, Apple’s solution means that you could try to enable Java only while you are using websites that require it and then immediately turn it off afterward (a common example of usage is for remote control programs such as GotoMyPC and Logmein). To be fully secure though, the better solution is to upgrade your OS. However, upgrading your Mac’s OS could introduce incompatibilities with existing software that will require further costs to upgrade. Plus, if a user hasn’t upgraded to Snow Leopard — an admittedly old OS — yet, they may have a good reason for doing so.

Apple updates its operating system at a much faster pace than Microsoft. Leopard was superseded by Snow Leopard in August 2009 and Windows XP was superseded by Vista in November 2006, yet Microsoft is still providing critical security updates for XP until April 2014. Microsoft is providing more security updates for more versions of their operating system while Apple is starting to abandon users after less than three years.

To be fair, a majority of Mac users have already moved to either Snow Leopard or Lion, according to estimates from Net Market Share so most Mac users will be protected from this security flaw after installing Apple’s latest updates. Windows XP, meanwhile, is still on a majority of PCs according to that same study, even though its successor, Windows 7, was released in July 2009. Microsoft is doing this right by continuing to provide security updates for its older operating systems, which sort of makes sense given Microsoft’s constant battle with malware over the years. But Apple isn’t.

With Apple’s accelerated OS release cycle, leaving Leopard’s Java security unsupported after less than three years is unfair to users and a potential class action lawsuit waiting to happen since Apple’s extended warranty (AppleCare) is designed to support the Mac for three years. That MacBook you bought in May 2009 has a problem that Apple knows about, and Apple’s solution is to simply disable portions of the OS provided by Apple for your computer.

At the very least, Apple should be required to either patch a security flaw in any computer still under AppleCare or provide a free update to a currently supported version like they are doing for MobileMe users. Two years is simply too short of an upgrade cycle to expect users to keep up with in order to maintain the security of their systems.

If Apple continues this “current and previous version” approach towards security, Snow Leopard users are going to miss out on security updates when Mountain Lion 10.8 comes out this summer, only two years after they upgraded to Snow Leopard. Apple needs to step up to the plate and provide security updates for at least three years — otherwise Mac users could be more secure wiping an older Mac OS on that Intel-based Mac and installing Windows XP instead! At least then they’ll have until April 2014 before their computer turns into an unsecured ticking time bomb.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1
• Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals

According to IDC numbers released Wednesday, HP sold 4.6 million PCs in the U.S. during the quarter, a growth rate of 6.6 percent. Apple sold roughly 1.7 million Macs, a growth rate of just 5 percent over the previous quarter.

It’s true that HP is the world’s largest producer of computers by a long shot — it has 18 percent marketshare worldwide and 28 percent in the U.S. But Apple’s computers — especially its MacBooks — have become a surprising success story for the company in the last year or so. The company’s marketshare doesn’t even register in the top five globally, but in the U.S. Apple has worked its way up to the third-largest computer maker with about a 10 percent share. And its sales growth rates have far surpassed its competition over the last few quarters — in the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple was up 18 percent while HP was down a whopping 25 percent year over year. So this last quarter was a significant improvement for HP.

Meanwhile, as expected, the rest of the market saw a bare minimum of growth — 2.3 percent worldwide. But that’s a bit more inspiring than the previous quarter, which saw a .17 percent decline in shipments from the previous year.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

Back in the day, our best options for learning were either slowing down a song, having a friend teach us, or hoping it was featured in a guitar magazine. Apple has a surprising amount of available technology for picking the guitar back up — my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro are at the heart of my learning process. Here’s a look at how I’ve used them, and some tips for those who’d like to do the same.

The iPhone

Every Monday night, I take a lesson from an excellent blues guitarist. Rather than take notes and write down the various chord progressions he shows me, I instead shoot video of the homework parts of the lesson on my iPhone 4S. I then quickly edit the clip in iMovie to add a title and then re-save it to my camera roll.

I also have a few apps on my iPhone to help me out. I have an iRig, which I pair with their Amplitube app (free). While I don’t use the app as my main practice amp anymore after I bought a modeling amp, I do use the app as my tuner and for the Song feature to play along with a song I’m learning.

GarageBand for iOS ($4.99) is also a handy practice tool. I really hate using a metronome, but having something keep the beat is crucial. So my solution is to use a sample drum loop from GarageBand on my phone that sounds close to to the beat I want.

The iPad

My iPad is the device I keep on my music stand while practicing. I use Apple’s Camera Connection Kit to import the video from my iPhone onto my iPad. I’m also toying with shooting the video on my iPad and skipping this step, but I find the small size of the iPhone is easier for recording when I’m also holding a guitar. Then I watch my lesson video and follow along, pausing and fast-forwarding as needed.

I also use Songsterr to look up the tabs for songs I’m interested in, and then use its iOS app ($9.99) to “favorite” the song. Then the app becomes my music sheet when I’m playing. While Songsterr isn’t perfect — some songs are transcribed perfectly, some are good enough and some aren’t even close — I find it does an adequate job.

We’ve covered reading apps on the iPad already, so I won’t go into it too much here, but there are two apps I use for reference: Zinio and the Kindle app. I subscribe to several guitar magazines on Zinio, so I reference those while practicing. I also have some music theory books I’ve purchased for Kindle that I’ll look up chord fingerings on.

The Mac

While the iPad sees the majority of the music action, I still use my Mac. When I find (an accurate) song on Songsterr’s site I want to practice, I’ll mute the instruments on the web view of the song and then use Audio Hijack Pro to record the backing tracks. While my Amplitube setup lets me play along to the song, I find this is good if I want to do any recording, or if I don’t want to listen to the additional guitar parts.

After that I import those into GarageBand for Mac ($14.99)  and lay down guitar tracks on top of them. I have an amp (a Peavy Vypyr 75 watt) with a USB port, so I can hook my Mac up to it without having to mess around with mikes and the like. I’ll also use the drum loops in GarageBand to outline a basic song structure to jam over. If I want to try and mimic jamming with friends, I’ll use the Magic GarageBand feature to add some drums, bass, keys and harmonica to a track. One thing I don’t like about Magic GarageBand — the jam session feature in Apple’s software — is that I have to click “Open in GarageBand” to change the key; it would be nice to be able to do that from the main screen.

Coda

It’s been a lot of fun getting back into the guitar, and a lot of that fun has been how much iOS devices and OS X have aided me in the process. While I’m still in the early stages of getting going again, the skills and techniques I’m gaining with the software, in addition to the instrument, will form a great foundation for future work. It won’t be too long before I’m recording full demo tracks in GarageBand.

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• The new IT manager, part 1
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Filemaker Inc. also produces the popular Bento line of personal databases available on the Mac and on iOS, but Filemaker Pro has been a staple in small and medium businesses and workgroups that need to create their own custom database solutions for managing business records and processes. More than 18 million copies of Filemaker Pro have been sold over the years and it is somewhat unique as a bestselling solution from Apple that runs on both Mac and Windows.

The big changes in Filemaker Pro 12 come in three parts: design enhancements, improved file and media handling and better support for iOS.

Design Enhancements

The design improvements are meant to bring some of the style and polish seen in Bento templates to Filemaker. I’ve been working professionally with Filemaker since 1994, when I started teaching introductory database classes at University of California, Santa Barbara, and one consistent feature of Filemaker Pro has been that most of the custom solutions that people create for their own use are utilitarian, if not downright ugly.

Filemaker Pro 12 introduces 40 new “themes” that can help quickly set background colors, tab and button control colors and font styling to create a more appealing design. There are also 16 redesigned starter solutions that show off the new styles, including layouts tailored for the iPhone and iPad screen. It’s now really easy to add gradients to buttons to improve their look, and the gradients are calculated in software so they look fantastic on Retina-display iOS devices like the iPhone 4/4S and the new iPad. There are five new styles of charts (bubble, scatter, positive/negative, stacked bar and stacked column) and the new guides and rulers help you layout your database with precision. I really like the new “Stencils” that help you design layouts for the iPhone and iPad screens so that you can get the sizing and placement just right.

File and Media Handling

Filemaker Pro 12 now has some great improvements to file management. You can drag and drop to store documents and files in container fields, and Filemaker Server adds the ability to stream videos, music and PDFs. The new feature that I’m most excited about is the automatic file handling, which allows Filemaker Server to organize files stored in the filesystem rather than only being embedded in the database.

This means, for example, that a law office could drop a PDF of a court filing onto a container field from the local desktop, and then that file would be saved into a folder on the server, which is also accessible from filesharing over the network. The folder path and the name of the file saved to disk can be determined by rules that automatically save it to a client folder, with subfolders for different types of documents (as set in a field in the database record), and then name the file from the name of the related matter.

Support for iOS

While the previous paid versions of Filemaker Go were popular, Filemaker Go 12 for iPhone and iPad are now free downloads from the App Store. Making the product free is a big step towards increasing mobile adoption for Filemaker databases. These apps support the new container fields with the ability to directly add files and record audio and video into the database. You can then stream that audio and video content with AirPlay. Using the design enhancements mentioned earlier, it is even easier to create specific layouts that look great on the iPhone and iPad.

Filemaker Server: First impressions

Along with the new file handling and streaming features that I mentioned earlier, the new Filemaker Server is now 64-bit so it can take advantage of more RAM to improve performance. Wide area network (WAN) performance has been improved, and the backup system now allows for progressive, incremental backups to make it easier to take more frequent snapshots of updates.

I spent some time with the new version before press time, and to test it out I built a quick solution for a client that tracks equipment rentals. I was really impressed with the look of the new themes and the ability to quickly create iPhone and iPad layouts with the stencils. I can definitely see the potential in these new tools.

Pricing and Availability

Filemaker Pro 12 is available beginning Wednesday. To upgrade will cost $299 or $179 to upgrade, FileMaker Pro 12 Advanced runs $499 or $299 to upgrade, FileMaker Server 12 is $999 or $599 to upgrade, while FileMaker Server 12 Advanced  costs $2,999 or $1,799 to upgrade. Filemaker Go for iPhone and iPad is available on the iTunes App Store as a free download.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

There are two ways to think about securing information: Enabling access to information that you want to keep, and disabling access to information you no longer want to keep.  In this post, we will focus on the information Mac users no longer want to keep.  If you are thinking that this is as easy as moving a file to the trash, then emptying the trash, think again.  There are numerous data recovery utilities on the market that can recover lost or deleted files.  And these utilities work because most of us do not know how to securely erase information off of our Macs.  The following are some tips on how you can at least make if very difficult for others to recover your unwanted files.

Finder’s Secure Empty Trash

When you just empty the trash on a Mac, OS X no longer keeps track of where the data associated with the file is stored on the hard drive.  The data is still there, it’s just that the Finder can no longer find it.  As you continue to work and OS X saves new files on your hard drive, OS X could write over parts of your deleted files data with the new files data.  What many data recovery utilities take advantage of is the chance that old data is still there, and has not yet been written over by new data.  When you instead elect to use Secure Empty Trash, OS X does in fact ensure that the old data is written over with new data, which will ensure that the old data is no longer there — think of it like scribbling out a written message on a post-it note.  What is not known for sure is how many times Secure Empty Trash writes over the old file’s data.

The U.S. Department of Defense data erasure guidelines require that erased data be written over no less than seven times.  Why seven times?  It just so happens that because of the way hard drives work, there is an opportunity for parts of the data to remain on the physical disk.  There is a mechanical arm that reaches out across the hard drive to read and write data off of a magnetic platter.  That mechanical arm may not pass over exactly the same spot on the hard drive with each pass.  If you remove the platter from the drive, you can actually scan the surface of the drive using a much more precise mechanical arm to read old data off of the drive.  Writing over the data seven times compensates for this opportunity.  Think of it like plowing a field: The more times you plow over the earth, the less likely you are to see last season’s crop lines.

Permanent Erasure Utility

There are utilities that you can use that take this even further.  Available in the Mac App Store is a free utility from Edenwaith called Permanent Eraser.  Tools like Permanent Erasure give the user greater control over how the old data is written over with new data when you empty the trash.  For instance, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, had devised a method of overwriting data 35 times, each pass utilizing a different pattern of ones and zeroes.  Permanent Erasure is configurable to take advantage of Gutmann’s research and can apply his technique of writing over old data when the trash is emptied.  In fact, Permanent Erasure goes even further by also scrambling the original file name and truncating the file size to nothing before finally unlinking it from the system.

Gutmann’s technique is quite dated, as it was originally applied to a variety of consumer grade hard drives available back in the late 1990s.  While widely considered the most secure means of erasing data off of an old hard drive that you still intend to use, some have speculated that this technique is no longer entirely necessary on modern-day, high-density and large-volume SATA drives.  Some security forums online have speculated that a single pass of random ones and zeroes is sufficient on modern equipment.  Even though there are tools that make utilizing even the most secure of techniques easy, you do wear down the drive and decrease its lifespan by overemploying this technique on a daily basis.  It is probably best to utilize the Finder’s Secure Erase on a daily basis, and use tools like Permanent Erasure when you have recently deleted something important that you want to make absolutely sure no one will be able to access again.

Time Machine Backups

Lets not forget about Time Machine and other backup solutions you may have implemented.  Going to extremes to erase a file from a hard drive that you routinely back up could be seen as a fool’s errand if you neglect to erase all of the backup copies as well.  But there is a way to delete all backed up versions of a file from within Time Machine.  Before you delete the file you want to remove permanently, open Time Machine and click on the gears to expose a menu.  From the menu select “Delete all backups of this file.” This will remove all references in Time Machine showing that the file ever existed.

This feature of Time Machine will not implement the same technique as Secure Empty Trash or any more advanced utilities like Permanent Erasure by writing over the data on the drive that the original file occupied.  It just so happens that a halfway decent automated backup strategy could end up being the Achilles’ heel of a halfway decent security strategy.  Once you backup your files online for instance, you may not have any way to delete individual files from all of the redundant backups that your cloud-based service provider has elected to employ.  The data is still out there, somewhere.

Disk Utility’s Secure Erase Options

Looking at this problem from an individual file perspective is good if you intend to keep using all of the old hard drives you have ever owned.  But what if you want to sell or give away your old equipment to somebody else?  At such a time it is a good idea to securely erase an entire drive’s data.  Fortunately Mac OS X’s Drive Utility has you covered.  Just open Disk Utility and select the drive you want to erase.  Choose the selector labeled “Erase” and click on the “Security Options” button.  Here you will find a range of options from “Fastest” to “Most Secure.”

Unfortunately, Disk Utility stops short at just a seven pass overwrite and does not employ any other technique of securely erasing an entire drive.  And since OS X 10. 7 Lion, you no longer have the option to boot from DVD in order to gain access to Disk Utility in order to wipe the internal hard drive of your Mac clean.

One of the most widely used and highly recommended tools to use in cases like this, Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN), can be accessed from a bootable CD/DVD on your Mac.  You can also create a customized USB drive that will boot to Ubuntu where you can install and use the terminal command “wipe“ (there is also a GUI interface for “wipe called Parted Magic).  Your best bet is to stick with something like Micromat’s TechTool Pro Wipe Disk feature, which will also boot from DVD or USB.  Any one of these three tools will wipe the internal drive of your Mac completely clean.

Hardware-Based Accessories

You can always try booting your MacBook in target disk mode in order connect to the hard drive externally and securely wipe the internal hard drive.  However, wiping a drive clean may be difficult if the Mac that the drive is in no longer boots up.  There are two hardware accessories for sale at MacSales by NewerTech that can come in handy once you have decided to remove the hard drive from your old Mac.  If you only need to do this on a rare occasion, consider the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Universal Drive Adapter.  It supports both IDE and SATA formats for 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives.  If you are looking for a more permanent SATA solution, one that you can connect to via eSATA, then get the NewerTech Voyager hard drive dock.

If you happen to do this a lot, or if you are the go-to person when it comes to IT issues, you may consider investing in a hardware-based wipe solution to securely erase all of the hard drives you have to work with.  WiebeTech’s Drive eRaser Ultra will wipe your IDE and SATA drives clean and won’t lock up your Mac in the process as it is a standalone wipe accessory.

Physical Destruction

There are ways to render a hard drive completely useless to others through the means of bashing, grinding, shredding, incinerating and even exposing the raw elements of the drive to a phase transition by vaporizing all of its components.  Rather than try to handle this yourself by purchasing your own Model 22 HDD Hard Drive Disintegrator, there are services that will take care of this for you.

But even professional disintegration services recommend that you first perform your own due diligence by securely wiping off any private information before submitting the equipment to them for disposal.  One thing to look for when shopping around for such a service is to see if they are NAID Certified, if they offer an audit trail of the destruction process and will issue some sort of certificate of destruction.

Solid State Drives

This is all well and good provided you only have a traditional IDE or SATA hard drive that uses mechanical arms to read and write data off of rotating platters.  But what if you have a solid state drive (SSD), what then?  SSDs utilize a completely different technology that renders many of the above techniques ineffective.  The Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory of the University of California San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering department has commenced a study to look at the effectiveness of various sanitizing techniques on SSDs. What researchers found was that a new approach to securely wiping a drive is needed.

The SSD’s wear-leveling technology, while designed to prolong the lifespan of the drive, makes it almost impossible to guarantee that a given file has been overwritten.  The implementation of many SSDs’ buffering technology, which was designed to help compensate for memory failures, also challenges many of the established erasure techniques.  The only recourse then is to always use full disk encryption on SSDs.  SSDs store the encryption keys in a Key Storage Area (KSA).  This KSA can be cleared to make the data that remains on the drive practically impossible to recover.  Some newer SSDs provide an “erase unit” command, but this has not been implemented uniformly across all drives and is not exposed in popular drive utility tools currently available to consumers.

When thinking about both your security as well as your backup strategy, think also of the reverse side of the equation — not just how can you continue to securely access your most private information, but also how can you prevent access to your private information by wiping it clean off of any device it has been stored on when you no longer want that device.  Paying attention to someone can access your files stored on old discarded computer equipment is key to any good security strategy.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

On the surface, the functionality is roughly the same as previous versions of iChat. It supports text instant messaging with one person or in a group “conference room” and video chat with up to three other people. You can still enter multiple accounts from different services like AIM, Google Talk and other Jabber-based accounts. What’s new is that you can now connect your Mac to the same iMessage account that you use on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. When setting up an iMessage account, you can choose to use your email address, and you can optionally attach your phone number during setup.

Messages walks you through a quick setup when first launched and reveals a somewhat familiar window layout, with conversations listed on the left and the chat pane on the right. The “Buddies” window is still available to show which of your friends are online and available to chat. One thing that might look different is a Mail-like address bar labeled “To:” at the top of a new conversation, where you can just start typing the name of the recipient. It will find all the matches in your address book and present the various choices of phone numbers, email addresses and accounts associated with different chat services for that name. This is particularly important when using the iMessage service, where email might be associated with the Mac and the phone number might be associated with an iPhone.

The iMessage service supports “delivered” notifications just like on iOS, and optional “read” notifications to be returned to the sender after you’ve viewed their message. These settings are controlled in the app preferences, where you will also find general preferences, account setup, message settings, alert styles and audio/video settings.

When you launch a video chat with someone using Facetime, it actually launches the Facetime application on your Mac. AIM video chat is still available in the Messages application itself.

When I tried Messages out this morning, replies to an iMessage chat showed up in Messages on my Mac, but also appeared as notifications on my iPhone sitting next to me on the desk. I could switch back and forth between the two devices and continue the conversation on either one. The entire conversation was visible on both my Mac and my iPhone and the entire experience was completely seamless.

Conclusions

The importance of this seamless transition between devices for me is the ability to keep the context of the entire conversation in front of me, no matter where I chose to pick up and continue with my next reply. I might get some iMessage “texts” on my iPhone, but when I get back to the office, I can open my laptop and continue right where I left off.

It happens fairly often that clients (or my wife and kids) will text me about something that I need to look up on the computer to answer. As long as they are on iMessage, I can see the original question on my Mac and easily reply from there.

One nice detail is that the repeat notifications on the iPhone are muted when you read the message on your Mac. I left my iPhone untouched beside me while chatting with a friend on my Mac. I saw that the repeat notification that I usually get for text messages never showed up. This is great as long as the iMessage service knows that I read the reply in Messages for Mac. When I turned off Messages for Mac, the continued conversation now triggered repeat notifications on my iPhone.

The area that might require a little more polishing is that, when the message is unread on the Mac, it still appears to mute the repeat notification on the phone. If you left your Mac running unattended, you might not get repeat notifications of new messages on your iPhone. Obviously, this feature doesn’t affect everyone as some people might disable repeat notifications, but it does point out the necessity of being careful about working with betas and figuring out how things work, and what might change over time as Apple refines the Messages application.

Overall, I am pretty positive about the new features. I think Messages for Mac will actually be a big help in my professional and personal life and will make text/IM even more convenient. As for the big picture, I think the overall theme of Mountain Lion (including this beta of Messages for Mac on Lion) is not so much that iOS features and apps are coming to the Mac, but that the apps will work across both iOS and Mac in a completely seamless experience.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his company’s recent earnings call that iPad sales haven’t really been affected by the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is no doubt contributing heavily to the success of Android tablets. It’s also likely the Barnes & Noble Nook Color and Nook Tablet are included in the Android figures. Instead, Cook admitted the iPad has had some cannibalization effect on sales of Macs, and he predicted that one day, the tablet market will be larger in volume than the PC market.

Compared to Android, Apple still has a dominant position in the tablet market, with a 57.6-percent share compared to Android’s 39.1 percent, according to Strategy Analytics’ most recent numbers. In terms of year-over-year growth, the tablet space has grown by 150 percent between the end of 2010 and 2011. In other words, even if shares were more evenly split, the iPad would still be seeing big gains in unit sales.

The PC market, on the other hand, contracted by around six percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to research firm Gartner. That’s despite 20 percent growth by Apple’s own Mac line of computers. Kevin Tofel recently pointed out here on GigaOM that half of computing device sales are now mobile. If the trend of growing tablet and smartphone sales continue, and PC sales continue to decline, we’ll soon be in a position where mobiles are considered a primary device by the majority of users.

Apple will continue to sell iPads. A new refresh expected in the coming months might even help it turn the tide of slipping market share, since while the low-cost Kindle Fire may be a success, other Android tablet makers still seem to be having a hard time putting out a product consumers can get genuinely excited about. Kevin wrote last week about how Android 4.0, while it improves the Android tablet experience, still has a lot of glaring pain points. Also, Android’s tablet-specific app library lags considerably behind Apple’s, and isn’t catching up anywhere near as fast as the market on the smartphone side.

The companies putting out Android tablets that fail to achieve the Kindle Fire’s level of success are the same ones being hurt by the slowing PC market, and they’re the ones that stand to lose the most. Amazon’s Kindle fire has reportedly sold as many as 6 million units through the end of 2011, according to estimates, which would make it the world’s best-selling Android tablet.

Apple continues to appeal to a steadily growing audience of tablet users, but Amazon is answering the call of those who were happier buying bargain-priced netbooks for their basic computing needs, rather than spending more on an iPad. That’s the market PC makers should have been trying to retain with their own tablet efforts, and also the one Amazon has positioned itself best to appeal to.

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Even this year’s CodeMash 2.0.1.2, a developer’s conference in Sandusky, Ohio sold out in an amazing twenty minutes to over 1,200 attendees.  So rather than holding out to see if Apple expands its own event, you should check out these upcoming alternatives:

• MacIT in San Francisco at the Moscone Center Jan. 26-28, 2012.
• 360|MacDev in Denver at the Embassy Suites Feb. 3-4, 2012.
• CocoaConf in Chicago at the Elk Grove Village March 16-17, 2012.
• 360|iDev in Denver at the Crowne Plaza Sept. 2012.
• MacTech in Los Angeles Oct. 17-19, 2012

You may even be able to score an event closer to home by checking Eventbrite, or by contacting a local CocoaHead. However, if you have your heart set on attending WWDC, there may be something you can do about it.

Cult of Mac points out that there is a service that will send you an SMS message the moment WWDC tickets go on sale.  WWDC Alerts, the site  extending this offer, also has a Twitter account that you can follow if you prefer. So sign up for the alerts, monitor your Apple information channels, and you just might get in.

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