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Briefly: iPhone Euro prep, Final Cut update, trademark filings

Apple this week began evaluating repair depots for its iPhone launch overseas. Meanwhile, an update to the company's Final Cut Pro video editing solution is making the rounds. And six new trademark filings, covering primarily Leopard technologies, have turned up this month.

Apple scouts iPhone repair facilities

Representatives for Apple this week were said to be casing out a Unipart Trade Logistics-operated mobile phone repair centre in Europe to determine whether it would be suitable to handle iPhone repairs.

The Nuneaton, England-based depot is reportedly used by UTL to handle after-market hardware and software faults from other mobile phone manufacturers and network operators.

European iPhone availability is expected in late 2007 with availability in Asia to follow in 2008.

Final Cut Pro 5.1.4

Apple this week released an update to its Final Cut Pro video editing software solution.

According to a brief set of release notes, Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 [38MB] delivers important bug fixes to resolve plugin issues.

This update is recommended for all Final Cut Pro 5.1, 5.1.1, 5.1.2 and 5.1.3 customers.

Recent Apple trademark filings

According to checks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple this month filed for six new trademarks on terms relating primarily to its upcoming software technologies.

In addition to filings for marks on "iTunes Store" and "Cover Flow," the Cupertino-based company is also seeking the rights to trademarks on Leopard-related technologies "Core Animation," "Spaces," and "Xray."

For those who don't recall, Xray is a new timeline-based performance visualization tool Apple is rolling out with Leopard, which offers developers the ability to see how their application works in a completely new and intuitive way.

"It let's you watch CPU, disk I/O, memory usage, garbage collection, events, and more in the form of graphs tied to time," Apple wrote in a description of the new application. "For example, you can track UI events in real-time and see how they affect I/O activity and CPU load at the same time. And, once the data has been collected, you can scan back and forth through your application's run and see exactly what occurred, and when."

A sixth trademark request by the company was made on the term "Objective-C," in reference to the reflective, object-oriented programming language use primarily amongst Mac OS X programmers.



13 Comments

eruithildur 18 Years · 165 comments

Good Apple is protecting their back... We don't want something like the iPhone trademark issue hitting... But with the product released AND Apple not being able to settle. That wouldn't be pretty.

jeffdm 20 Years · 12733 comments

I guess I missed Xray but it doesn't seem that groundbreaking. It would be nice if a screen shot was given.

feynman 19 Years · 968 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM

I guess I missed Xray but it doesn't seem that groundbreaking. It would be nice if a screen shot was given.





Quote:
Performance monitoring tools have long been an essential part of the developer's toolset. The limitation with those tools, however, is that they have only been able to give you part of the picture of how your application runs. Selecting the best tool for the job could be tricky, and there was no easy way to compare data between tools to see a complete picture of the behavior of your application. Xray, new in Leopard, changes all of that. It allows you to view multiple aspects of your application's performance over time. With time-based graphs, you can monitor CPU usage, disk I/O, memory usage, and how they interact. This will give you a more complete picture of the behavior of your application.

Xray borrows a cue from music editing applications where multiple instruments perform over time. It allows to you select just the instrumentation that you need to examine your application. For example, you could set up instruments to monitor both object allocation and garbage collection. Then, when you run your application, these instruments present their findings alongside each other so that you can see the relationships between the two.

Watching your application's performance in real-time is only the start of Xray's capabilities. Once the data has been recorded, you can move back and forth through the application's timeline and closely examine the recorded data. This lets you exercise your application as a user and then later roll back through the recorded data to narrow your focus to see exactly what happened and when.

Linkage: http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/index.html

While it may not be a big deal to you, it is to developers.

shookster 18 Years · 113 comments

So could a user use Xray on an app they didn't create to determine why it's running slowly (e.g. requires more mmory, faster HDDs, etc.)?

feynman 19 Years · 968 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by Shookster

So could a user use Xray on an app they didn't create to determine why it's running slowly (e.g. requires more mmory, faster HDDs, etc.)?

I'm no expert but I don't see why not, unless the app has to be in debug mode

I'm no developer but I see this as a good thing and I am really hoping that Apple use this when they cover stress testing. I know for me sometimes Safari comes to a complete stand still and almost brings the entire system to a halt.

I'd be more than happy to live without the Spinning Beach Ball of Death™