What I would be interested to know ( if anyone out there has a pointer ) is how much income Apple actually makes from MobileMe each year. I am sure it is a healthy amount, but feel equally as sure that whatever amount this is it could generate more from increased hardware sales as a result of a comprehensive FREE MobileMe style service, perhaps extended to cover things such as proper Domain hosting, iTunes music syncing, a Flickr like social front end to Photo libraries etc.

In reality this rumour will run and run until either it becomes a fact or some other previously unforeseen use for Apples new Carolina data centre is revealed. Whichever way it goes I can’t imagine for a minute that the investment they have made in the new centre isn’t going to be very significant for the future of Apple.

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.

Sosumi does have a couple of benefits over the Apple offerings however, firstly you don’t have to keep logging into it unlike both the iPhone app and the me.com website which require you to login each time you open them. Secondly Sosumi displays the current battery level of your device as well as whether it is currently on charge or not. This could be fairly useful information if you were unfortunate enough to lose your phone and wanted to track it down using this app, as it would give you some idea of how long you had before potentially losing contact with it if the battery were to die.

Sosumi is a tiny 800Kb download and is currently free from http://clickontyler.com/sosumi. If you have an iPhone and have registered with Find My iPhone ( and if you haven’t then why haven’t you ? ) Sosumi is a recommended way of keeping tabs on your phone/iPod.

Note : Sosumi is the name of one of the system sounds from Macintosh System 7 Operating System and is a play on the words “so sue me” aimed at Apple Corp, the owner of the Beatles music rights.

Obviously the ease of installation of apps from the App Store may well be a factor in this large number of downloads, though I do wonder how many of those 500,000 will translate into sales of the full product for Intego.

Intego’s product is not the only free solution available to Mac users. Recently Sophos began providing Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac, Home Edition for free. Alternatively there is the popular ClamXav which is a well thought of free solution. Neither of these products is currently available for installation through the App Store, though that could change pretty quickly now one of the main players has started to gain traction through this route.

Obviously many Mac users ( including myself ) continue to operate largely without virus protection, but for those who wish for the comfort of an installed layer of protection I would suggest looking at the other free alternatives before immediately opting for the “convenience” of Intego’s App Store offering.

Sounds as though some of the negatives of using Flash may have been resolved ?

Folx operates in several ways, firstly and most simply it integrates with your browser, replacing its download feature by catching attempts to download files. When it detects a file being downloaded the Folx window pops up giving you the option to tag the file, set number of threads ( for performance ), schedule a start time ( Pro version only ), add a description etc.

Alternatively you can launch Folx directly and add a new download task and enter or cut/paste the download URL and other details into the download task window before adding the task to the queue. The download task window also allows you to create a new Torrent download task either by opening a previously download .torrent file, or ( and again Pro version only ) directly searching for a require torrent by entering keywords in the Search for Torrents window. In this mode Folx looks very similar to iTunes with a left hand pane showing tags, Smart Groups and RSS feeds and the main window showing queued downloads at the top with the lower pane displaying further details about the currently highlighted download.

Folx is a powerful tool for heavy downloaders but will also be a useful addition to less demanding users, especially if the tagging and organising of downloaded files is important to you…

A free version of Folx is available to download from Eltima but the Pro version which contains extra features such as scheduling of downloads, smart speed control and faster downloads through increased concurrent download threads is normally $19.95. To claim your free Pro licence post an amusing story or reason why you need faster downloads on your Mac.

The best two responses will get a Pro licence courtesy of Eltima.

MacRumours have this coverage of the announcement, whilst Engadget were there live blogging the whole thing.

Interestingly from the photos on Engadget it isn’t just the Apple hardware being cloned but the whole presentation including the format and design of slides looks remarkably similar to those delivered by Mr Jobs…

I guess Apple can be pleased with one thing… They must have hit the nail(s) on the head to have so many major technology companies desperately trying to emulate their formulae
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