Here’s a quick look at news over this Lunar New Year holidays.

iLife’09 begins shipping

Apple is shipping the popular iLife’09 application suit from today. The latest version which was announced at this year’s Macworld has some new features which will make managing and creating multimedia projects a joy.

iLife’09 is available at Apple Store Online (SG) at S$138 for a single license and S$168 for 5 License Family Pack. Customers who purchase a qualifying new Mac computer or an Apple Certified Refurbished computer on or after 6 January 2009 that does not include iLife’09 can also upgrade to iLife’09 for S$18 (offers ends 28 March’09).

iLife’09 is also available in the Mac Box Set that comes bundled with iWork’09 and OS X 10.5 Leopard at a price of S$288 (S$388 for 5 License Family Pack).

Another Trojan appears, again via pirated software

Intego sent out another alert about another Trojan that is bundled together with pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4. The package that is being distributed contains a clean Photoshop installer, however, the malicious Trojan stays within a crack application that serializes the program.

According to the alert:

After downloading this version of Photoshop, users will run the crack application to be able to use it. The crack application extracts an executable from its data, than installs a backdoor in /var/tmp/, a directory which is not deleted when the computer is restarted. (If the user runs the crack application again, the Trojan horse creates a new executable with a different name; these random names make it harder to ensure safe removal of the malware.) … Since the malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet, the creator of this malware will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac.

Just take note – you can prevent yourself from all this hassle if you #1 – download and execute files from trusted sources and more importantly #2 – don’t pirate softwares.

A few Software Updates

A few Software Updates is available via the Software Update app:

• iDVD Update – 7.0.3 (29.3MB) (details here and download link)
• iLife Media Browser Update – 2.0 (3.8MB) (details here and download link)
• NVIDIA Graphics Update 2009 (3.21MB) – improves cursor movement with DisplayPort enabled Macs, and HD playback quality on machines using newer NVIDIA cards (details here and download link

Local 9-year old writes iPhone app

Meet the world’s youngest iPhone developer. Lim Ding Wen of Singapore, who recently turned 9 (not a typo), has written an iPhone app called Doodle Kids that allows you to paint on the iPhone using shapes like triangles, circles, squares made up of random colours and sizes.

More on Ding Wen at the The Singapore iPhone Guide

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