Thankfully Will is a resilient sort and is already planning the replacement of his studios kit, but this story may have had a different ending if Will had installed the excellent utility Undercover from Orbicule. Undercover is a small application that you can install on Apple computers ( iMac, MacBook ) as well as the iPad and iPhone ( though I am not covering iOS versions in this article ). Once installed Undercover does, well actually, once installed it does precisely nothing ! The installer hides an application deep inside your Mac and leaves no obvious trace of itself to indicate that it is there. The application then lies dormant until the fateful day that your precious Mac is either lost or stolen, at which point you go to http://www.undercovercenter.com and login with the credentials you created when you installed the application. Here you can mark the Mac as lost or stolen and additionally can add crime reference details and email addresses of the police which is used to update the police directly on the status of your stolen machine.

What happens then depends on what has become of your Mac. In all likelihood the thief will either attempt to use it themselves before passing on or selling it. This is where you can help the Undercover application by enabling a default user account on your Mac with no password when you install it, as you want the thief to be able to login and start using the computer. Once they have logged in they will most likely attempt to connect to the Internet and as soon as they do this the Undercover application will be triggered and will start tracking the use of the computer in a number of ways. It will attempt to locate itself using the Skyhook wireless location service, this location information will then be reported back to www.undercovercenter.com and you will receive an email telling you that your Mac has been found ! In addition it will record the IP address of the device and fire off regular screen grabs of information on the screen and return those to your undercovercenter.com account. Finally Undercover will take regular snaps using your Macs built in webcam and send these up to your web account as well. Together this set of data provides the police with a very strong set of evidence for locating and apprehending the thief before they have chance to sell it on, in fact there are a whole host of stories on Orbicule’s web site of users who have retrieved their Macs after installing Undercover.

In addition to the steps Undercover takes as standard there is an option on the web site to trigger what they refer to as “Plan B”. In this mode the Mac will be configured to simulate a screen failure with the aim of fooling the thief into taking the Mac to a repair centre or Apple Store. A further mode can be setup to display a full screen message and to setup the text to speech engine to shout a user defined phrase at the devices highest volume level. These steps will hopefully ensure that if the thief does try to sell on the Mac it soon becomes apparent to whoever picks it up that this was stolen.

If you wish to test the recovery steps so you are clear how it works and what to do if you are in the position of needing to use for real, you can go through the process of marking as stolen and see for yourself exactly what the information retrieved looks like. Once you are happy simply mark it as recovered again and you will receive an email confirming that it has been recovered as well as a link which will delete the test data from your account.

All in all this is an essential purchase and is easily justifiable, especially if in the worst case it helps you to recover your lost Mac !

Undercover has a number of licence variations from a single user at $49, a household version for up to 5 Macs at $59, a site licence for up to 25 Macs at $249 and student and enterprise volume licences. Notably Orbicule also offer a money back guarantee should you not be able to recover your stolen Mac.

Unfortunately due to the fact that the application installs itself as a root process Orbicule are not able to sell through the Apple App Store so you will need to go to http://www.orbicule.com to download and purchase. For users who change their computers often there are full instructions on removing and transferring the software between machines so you won’t need to buy again when upgrading.

Of most interest to the majority of people will be the Magic Mouse and the astounding new 27″ LED iMac. The Magic Mouse extends Apples multi-touch technology to the mouse, disposing of the roller ball for scrolling in favour of a mouse surface that is a multi-touch trackpad able to respond to most of the gestures possible on the MacBooks trackpad. Mac haters will no doubt love the fact that the device still sports no obvious buttons and will no doubt gloat over the apparent inability of the mouse to allow right mouse clicks, everyone else will quietly configure it to work exactly how they wish and revel in the usual Apple design beauty. Of course even amongst Mac fans the mouse has traditionally been something you either love or hate but personally I think this latest revision looks stunning and sets off the look of the iMac to perfection.

The new iMacs take the Apple desktop range to new heights and push the Power Mac further into a niche corner by delivering superb 21.5″ and a huge 27″ LED backlit screens, Core 2 Duo and Quad processors including the option of Intel i7 and the option to install a huge 16Gb of RAM. Apart from the internal specs the design of the iMac is largely unchanged from previous models apart from minor tweaks including a slight thinning of the aluminium stand, though you could clearly argue that the current design is still very much of the moment and therefore Apple have rightly not felt it necessary to mess with it.

The Mac Mini has received a performance hike with two new models sporting beefier processors and expanded memory and at the same time a DVD-less model complete with Snow Leopard Server has been launched, clearly an attempt to tempt smaller companies away from Windows server solutions. Finally a slightly slimmer and lighter white Macbook now receives a unibody casing ( ala MacBook Pro line ), LED backlight, a glass multi-touch trackpad and a 7 hour battery life wrapping off an impressive list of upgrades.

There is no doubt that the timing of these updates was planned to detract some media attention away from this weeks launch of Windows 7, though even the most fervent Mac supporter will have to admit that this week will inevitably be remembered for Microsoft’s new product launch ( though time will tell which is ultimately the most successful ! )

The second “Surprise” has PC posing as Mac and advising another prospective PC buyer to get a PC. When the lady leaves PC strips his disguise just as real Mac enters stage left.

Not the greatest ads of the campaign it has to be said and it is becoming clear that despite their outstanding success these ads are becoming a little stale. Time for a new Campaign ?

For many the only safe solution until this release was to disable Java in the browser preferences rendering sites that depend on Java ( not Javascript ) unusable.

The update is available through Software Update and weighs in at a hefty 158Mb.

Personally I have free access to Sophos Anti-virus through licence at work, though I have to admit that currently I don’t have Sophos or any other product installed.

Let me know what you think ? Are Mac users in danger of becoming complacent, or is there really no real threat to our security ?

You can use dry for removing settled dust particles but if you have got any other sorts of marks on the screen you will need to VERY lightly dampen with clean water ( a few drops will do, the cloth should not get wet ). Gently buff the area with the damp part of the cloth being careful not to press too hard ( newer iMac owners with glass screens don’t have to worry so much about pressure but I do still recommend the same approach otherwise ).

Once you have cleaned the area change to a dry part of the cloth and light buff again. Any streaks caused by the water will clean entirely and you will be left with a screen that looks as good as new !

This will further consolidate the iMac as THE premium desktop all in one computer and will undoubtedly continue the rise in iMac sales and further blur the previous distinction between the middle range iMac and the high end Power Mac. For the vast majority of users the iMac now represents both the mid range and the high end product in a very slick and desirable package.

In addition to Apple laptops they have covers for iPods and Mac Minis. Well worth a look if you want to breathe a bit of new life into an older Apple product.