Today game developer Electronic Arts has announced that the much-anticipated SimCity for Mac will be available for purchase on June 11.

The latest version, which is stripped of any version number and is being simply called SimCity, was announced on March 5 for both OS X and Windows, and was initially released for Windows early last month, but in an EA blog post today Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president and general manager of EA's Maxis label, is quoted as saying the Mac version of the software will be out in two months' time:

Macs of the near future may be able to tap directly into high-speed 802.11ac networks.

Code for the latest OS X 10.8.4 beta includes a string with the term "802.11ac channel," according to Apple-focused blog 9to5Mac. This appears to be the first reference to 802.11ac in OS X since the term does not show up in the code for OS X 10.8.3, the current version of Apple's OS.

Past rumors have suggested that Apple would be one of the early adopters of 802.11ac, equipping its laptops and tablets with … Read more

Mozilla's Web site log-in alternative known as Persona unveiled a Beta 2 version today. Now you can sign in to any Web site supporting Persona using a Yahoo Mail account.

Persona, which is still in development, is an open authentication system that works on desktops and mobile devices. In addition to being able to log in using either your Persona ID or your Yahoo credentials, today's release introduces support for Firefox OS, which means you can expect to use Persona to log in to any Firefox OS devices that launch later this year. It also includes back-end changes … Read more

In the OS X Security system preferences you can set the system to require a password when the system wakes from sleep or after the screensaver has been active for a period of time. However, you may run into a few cases in which entering your account password then does not work.

One cause can be if you have recently changed the name of your user account. For authentication, OS X will use either the short or long username, along with any aliases that you have associated with your account. However, if you have changed the long username for your … Read more

Higher-end video producers anxious to adapt to the new realities of online video will be pleased to know that Sorenson Squeeze 9 (Windows trial; Mac trial), released today, is trying to ease development of streaming-media Web sites.

Web video is a flagship feature of the newer HTML5 incarnation of Hypertext Markup Language. Adding the support is intended to make video as easy to use on Web pages as JPEG is for images. But it's not always so simple to use in the real world, so Squeeze 9 now generates video files and accompanying code quickly so Web developers can … Read more

Firefox has readied a more nuanced approach to how it implements the controversial "Do Not Track" setting and the Android version of the browser has a new font face in the browser's latest betas.

Firefox 21 Beta (download for Windows, Mac, and Linux) introduces more user choice for the Do Not Track header. The header, first introduced two years ago in Firefox 4, sends a signal to Web sites to not track where people who have activated it go as they bop around the Web.

Up until now, implementations of it have been limited to "On" or "Off.&… Read more

The latest update to Chrome beta refocuses its attention on speed through better memory management, as well as making numerous HTML5 and offline improvements in today's release.

Google reports that Web site content loaded in Chrome 27 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux, should appear about 5 percent faster because of how the browser manages its resources. Basically, the browser's resource scheduler gives more priority to critical resources, over preloaded content.

Calendar forms should look a bit cleaner in the beta because it now uses HTML5 date and time < input > code. WebReal-Time Communication (WebRTC) also gets … Read more

Blink, Google's new fork of the WebKit browser engine, is alive.

Yesterday, Google announced the project, which splits its browser work from Apple's in the open-source WebKit project. Today, Blink is up and running.

The first updates -- including a new list of 36 Blink "owners" who have authority to approve changes -- are arriving.

"Chrome 28 will be the first blinking release," Chrome programmer Mike West said in a Hacker News comment. The current stable version of Chrome is version 26; new versions arrive about every six weeks.

"The repository seems to … Read more

Amazon's Cloud Drive is one of many online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive where you can save pictures and documents for access on another system with Internet access.

While the Cloud Drive service has been available for a while, one of its lacking features has been a well-integrated file sync option that makes use of the online storage seamless. Additionally, Amazon's older tools for accessing the drive were written in Java, which is no longer included in OS X and which many are avoiding because of security issues.

To bring its service up … Read more