At the August meeting we discussed the month’s Apple news including iTunes movies in the cloud (now available in the UK), Apple gaining control of the Apple.co.uk domain and the rumours of an iPhone announcement on the 12th of September.

We then talked about the widely reported hack on Wired reporter Mat Honan which lead to the breach of several of his accounts including his Apple iCloud account. As well as being an interesting story this hack has some important lessons on how one vulnerable account can let a hacker into many others and the potential consequences.

The bulk of the meeting consisted of a presentation of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion by Dave and Robert. Dave showed many of the new features of the OS including some smaller ones members might not have heard about. Features that sparked particular interest were Dictation, the Safari 6 “Omnibar” and the Gatekeeper security system. Robert then gave a more in-depth look at Notification Centre.

At future meetings we’ll cover some other aspects of Mountain lion in more detail. If you’re interesting in finding out more, Ars Technica have an excellent review covering the OS in great detail.

At the July meeting there was plenty of news to discuss with Apple’s WWDC announcements of iOS 6, the Retina Display MacBook Pro and details of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. We also talked about Microsoft’s Surface announcement and the Google Nexus 7 tablet.

Robert gave a talk on SSDs (Solid State Drives, flash memory based hard drives) which Apple are now fitting as standard to many Macs. He covered the principle of operation and some of the advantages and disadvantages of using an SSD. Then he explained how he upgraded his Early 2009 Mac mini with an SSD.

Some useful pages with further information about SSDs:

Storage Review’s comparison of SSDs and HDDs - http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

Paper on SSD security (technical) by Michael Wei et al. - http://static.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf