snow

The Weather Channel is a free weather-monitoring application that provides many more features than Apple's built-in Weather app. Released first in 2008, the app recently received a complete overhaul to the interface, adding features that make it even easier to check weather conditions wherever you are.

You can find paid weather applications that are more specialized, but The Weather Channel (sponsored by the cable channel of the same name) offers the features most people want in a weather app. You can view forecasts (hourly, 36-hour, and 10-day outlooks), quick access to Weather Channel local and regional video forecasts, severe … Read more

The Mac App Store in OS X is Apple's new means for delivering software and OS upgrades to Mac users. Some people have removed the store from their systems to keep their OS free of commercial links, but doing so makes upgrading to OS X Lion or later versions of OS X much more cumbersome.

Since the Mac App Store in Snow Leopard was appended to the existing OS infrastructure with the OS X 10.6.6 update, its removal was relatively easy and just required users to remove the App Store program from the Applications folder. Doing so … Read more

No matter how full one may be, most people would like to believe that there is always room for dessert. When the dessert in question is made mostly from water, it's almost hard to see how there could not be enough room. As for the contrivance that delivers the deliciousness, well, perhaps a little more room than expected will be needed.

The Classic Snow Cone Cart at Hammacher Schlemmer consists of a snow cone machine along with several 1-gallon syrup containers all rolled into one impressive display. The 65-pound cart and appliance measures 60 inches tall, 48 inches across, … Read more

Accompanying today's updates for OS X Lion client and server, Apple has released a number of other updates for its supported operating systems and OS X software.

The first is a security update for Snow Leopard, which applies similar security updates for its components that were applied to Lion in the OS X 10.7.4 update. Apple has a knowledgebase page on the security details of this update, but as of this writing the page is not loading from the Apple support site.

In addition to the Operating System updates, Apple has made available updates to its popular … Read more

Following the recent malware attacks in OS X, Microsoft has been exploring the 3-year-old flaw which has been exploited by several different malware attempts in recent months. Microsoft Malware Protection Center analyst Jeong Wook Oh has found that the exploit does not affect OS X Lion systems but can succeed on those running OS X Snow Leopard.

In the exploit in question, a maliciously crafted Office file takes advantage of a vulnerability addressed by the MS09-027 update for Office, and as such this latest exploit is referred to as MacOS_X/MS09-027.A by Microsoft. This exploit is the same one … Read more

We admit that we did not have particularly high hopes for DesktopSnowOK. This type of desktop enhancement typically leaves us annoyed and frustrated as we end up sacrificing system performance for special effects that aren't that special. But unlike most programs of this sort, we actually found DesktopSnowOK to be pretty impressive. It's not the kind of program that we'd usually use, but people who like the idea of having snowflakes or other objects blowing around on their screen will likely find it quite fun.

DesktopSnowOK is highly customizable, which is what makes it so enjoyable to … Read more

Apple has a plan to nudge more MobileMe users on to iCloud.

The cloud-based storage service will replace MobileMe in June, but only users running OS X Lion (version 10.7) will have access to iCloud. Apple has realized that many MobileMe users are probably running an older OS and may be left behind by the cost of upgrading their systems.

So Apple is giving users of older operating systems a gentle push by making the first step toward upgrading easy: the company is giving away Snow Leopard -- the 10.6 version of OS X -- to MobileMe users, … Read more

Apple still appears to be fighting the Flashback malware that was recently found to have infected more than a half-million Mac computers.

A second Java update has been released for Mac users, according to Mac security blog Intego.

No details are available as to why this latest update was released. Intego speculates that perhaps there was a small glitch in the first update. This latest update also seems geared just for the Lion version of Mac OS X, while the initial patch was designed for both Snow Leopard and Lion.

Some confusion also exists over the name, Intego noted. The … Read more

Apple has released a small update for its Software Update service, which addresses a problem with Snow Leopard systems where the installers for some software updates may not run. This issue does not happen for all software updates, so only a select few people will experience updates not installing; however, without being patched, the issue might surface with future updates that Apple releases.

On systems where this problem happens, the Software Update utility will detect updates as being available, but when you click to install them, nothing will happen. If you are having such problems on your system, then you … Read more