Weekly Wrap, June 16 - 22

by Macteens Magazine Editors • 06/22/2008 at 04:08 PM

Welcome to Macteens’ Weekly Wrap, a weekly column that covers all the important and interesting news for the week. This week on The Weekly Wrap: Firefox 3, Spore Creature Creator, AT&T 3G speeds, PHP debugging with MacGDBp, Visual Voicemail settlement, Media Temple’s Xserve Virtual and Apple sales updates.

The Big Stories

Firefox 3 makes a splash with Firefox Download Day - On Tuesday, Mozilla began its “Firefox Download Day”, designed to smash the record of the most software application downloads in one day, with the organization’s official 3.0 release of Firefox. Over 8 million copies were downloaded on Tuesday.

Firefox 3 brings many changes for Mac users, with a new more “Mac-like” user interface covering a new cocoa code-base. Check out the release at Spread Firefox.

Spore Creature Creator launches - As part of EA’s new game Spore, the company has made available a trial version Spore Creature Creator for both Mac and PC. It allows players to build and customize creatures that can be later used in the full game.

The application is a preview for the full game, which is scheduled to be released on September 7th. It’s available now on Spore’s website and requires an Intel Mac with an ATI X1600, NVidia 7300 GT graphics chipset with 128 MB of RAM or an Intel integrated GMA X3100 graphics card. The trial costs $9.99.

AT&T 3G speeds to ‘average’ 1.4 Mbps - MacNN posted a report earlier this week referencing an AT&T webpage that showed the new iPhone as having download speeds of up to 1.4 Mbps on the company’s cellular network. This was said to be notably slower than other smartphones on the AT&T network, and much slower than other carriers’ 3G networks (which offer speeds as fast at 5 Mbps downstream).

MacNN later updated their post, saying that the 1.4 speed mentioned on the company’s website is an “observed speed” over the cellular network.

PHP Debugging on the fly with MacGDBp - Develop PHP riddled by the occasional bug? Check our MacGDBp, a new tool to squash those bugs quickly. Created by 18 year old Robert Sesek, the app builds upon Xdebug to offer remote debugging of PHP scripts - all one has to do is to connect to the script they’d like test, and they can skip around each instruction to see how a script is working. MacGBp is Leopard only, and launched on Tuesday. Check it out on Blue Static’s website.

Also this week..

Apple settles Visual Voicemail patent lawsuit - Klausner Technology and Apple appear to have settled a patent dispute, according to a Macworld report.  The 1994 patent shows similar functionality of visual voicemail as implemented on the iPhone, and with the settlement, allows Apple and AT&T to license the voicemail process. Details of the settlement are not public, but the company was seeking $360 million in damages.

Media Temple announces beta for Leopard VPS offering - Off the heels of Parallel’s integration of Leopard Server with Fusion, Media Temple announced a private beta program for its (xv) Xserve Virtual product. The first-of-its-kind virtual private server offers shared utilization (eight customers per Xserve) of dual 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Xserves with 32 GB of RAM and three 300 GB 15,000 RPM drives.

Interested parties can apply for the beta here.

Apple sales updates: opens Sydney retail store, five billion downloads in iTunes sales - Apple opened its first retail store in Australia on Thursday to a large crowd in Sydney. The store features two floors dedicated to Apple’s product lines, while the third floor is dedicated to service, including the world’s largest Genius bar.

“We are thrilled to bring the unique Apple retail experience to Australia,” said Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail. “This breathtaking new store will be the ultimate place for the people of Sydney to shop, learn and be inspired.”

In other Apple sales news, Apple also announced that they passed the five billion download mark on the company’s iTunes store.