Alf Watt attended MacWorld New York in 1999 and saw Steve Jobs launch AirPort in the first iBook and base stations. A geek at heart, he immediately wanted to understand this new technology, and iStumbler for Mac OS 9 was the result.  Later, he headed a team at Apple working  on Wi-Fi technologies. Basically, Mr. Watt has spent ten years making an invisible technology, indistinguishable from magic, very visible. The story of how that turned out includes fascinating technical tidbits about how Wi-Fi works.

Apple released Java updates for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and OS X 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion). The update brings Java SE 6 to the most recent version.

The AluCup from Just Mobile is another inventive product from a company that provides convenience for the users of Apple’s many iOS devices. In this case, it is a small holder that works in different ways with all the iPhones, iPod touches and iPads.

Mavericks testers have reported problems installing the Mavericks Developer Preview in a Parallels virtual machine on Mountain Lion. Parallels has provided some knowledge base articles to assist, including the installation of Parallels Desktop 8 in Mavericks itself.
 

Apple gave the public its first preview of iOS 7 last week during its annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. A beta version just for iOS developers was released the same day, and it found its way to many people outside of that group who promptly started complaining about stability issues, non-functioning features, poor battery life, interface problems, broken third-party apps, and more. Of course iOS 7 has problems; it's beta software.

With Apple's annual World Wide Developer Conference behind us for another year, analysts are looking through the pieces the company dropped in our laps during the keynote presentation for clues as to what might be coming next. Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um thinks iOS 7's fall release schedule means we'll get a new iPhone in September, and he also thinks iTunes Radio will be a tool to draw in and keep new customers.

Adobe began shipping, in a manner of speaking, its new Creative Cloud design application package Monday evening. Creative Cloud was first announced in May and includes Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and more. It does away with traditional perpetual software licensing in favor of a software subscription model.

Sir Jonathan Ive's title at Apple has been simplified—flattened, if you will—from "Senior Vice President, Industrial Design" to "Senior Vice President, Design." By dropping the qualifier, Apple has officially recognized that his role at Apple has greatly expanded.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Services, took the stand one more time on Monday in the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit against the company. Mr. Cue was questioned by Apple's attorneys about the process of building the iBooks app, the iBookstore, and he talked extensively about the role of the late Steve Jobs in those processes. Bryan Chaffin walks us through what we learned.