After back and forth rumors about the health of Apple's revered Steve Jobs way back in last year and the beginning of 2009, it turned out that he really did have some health problems: complications with his liver requiring a transplant. It was supposed that he'd return to Apple by the end of June, and now he's finally made his first public appearance since he first took his medical leave of absence earlier this year.

It's time for a trip down memory lane. Exactly ten years ago today - 09-09-1999 - Sega released the Dreamcast on the North American market. Widely regarded as far, far ahead of its time, the Dreamcast pioneered several concepts which the competition only picked up on years and years later. Sadly, the Dreamcast would face an early grave.

I've been developing software for quite a few years. One of the issues that seems to come up again and again in my work is this concept of design and implementation. I recall it being a significant part of my education at the University of Waterloo's Computer Engineering program as well. The message was always the same. Never write code first. First you must design software by writing a design document, flow charts, pseudo-code, timing charts... then it's merely a trivial matter of implementing it. Make note of the attitude here given towards implementing. The real work is in the design, and it's just a trivial matter of implementing it. It sounds so simple doesn't it? Now, how often does this work out in real life?

In a move reminiscent of the Pre launch, Palm has unveiled its second webOS mobile phone today, ahead of Apple's music/iPod event. The Palm Pixi is a candybar incarnation of the Pre, but is clearly positioned below its big brother; smaller screen, and more worryingly, no wifi.

We usually don't report on security flaws, unless they're on platforms that usually don't see such flaws, or when the flaw in question is pretty serious. Well, a new zero-day flaw has been discovered in Windows Vista and Windows 7 which will trigger a blue screen of death using the new SMB 2.0 protocol. Update: Windows 7 RTM and Windows Server 2008 R2 are not affected by the flaw. So, this is less of a problem than expected.

"When you double-click a document in the Finder, how does the system decide what application should open it? The relationship between a document and its owning application is called a preferred application binding. Since the very first day of the very first version of Mac OS X, there has been an uneasy detente between the Unix way of binding documents to applications and the former Mac way, inherited from the early days of the Mac OS. Now, in Snow Leopard, users and developers are complaining that the Unix way is being allowed to run roughshod over the Mac way."

Over the past few days, we've seen yet another rollercoaster ride in Apple's App Store. The fully licensed Commodore 64 emulator, which was rejected earlier this year, was admitted into the App Store yesterday, only to be removed this morning. This tug of war between Apple and its 3rd party developers is getting a bit old, so let's take a look at a company that treats its 3rd party developers right: Palm.

Late last week, we discussed the Apple vs. Psystar case (again), and in that article several points were raised which would be handled during a hearing Friday morning. Right after publishing said article, the law firm working for Psystar sent a general email to members of the press (including Groklaw and OSNews, among others) which contained the court order which resulted from this hearing. So to finalise these issues, let's walk through them so we can put the lid on this case for a while.

Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.

"If you're a Web designer, expect your CSS colors & your untagged/unmanaged images to look darker on Snow Leopard than on previous versions of the Mac OS. You'll also see less of a visible color shift when going from Photoshop to Flash or other unmanaged environments (e.g. Internet Explorer). Why is that? Apple has switched to a default gamma of 2.2, which is what Windows has used for years. Colors that aren't color-managed are going to look darker on the whole. Your whole display will now be closer to what Windows users see."

This was a bit of a weird week for OSNews. Monday and Tuesday I was unable to reach OSNews and its related domains from home; we still don't know why, but the end result was that I could not work on OSNews, meaning very few items. For the rest, it was a very quiet and relaxed week, with little going on.

Earlier this week, news got out that Apple was shipping an outdated version of Adobe's Flash Player with Snow Leopard; if you updated to a more recent version before the upgrade to Snow Leopard, you would receive a downgrade. This older version had security holes in it, so Adobe advised everyone to upgrade. The Mozilla team has now announced that Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 will include a Flash version checker.

Geeks.com, home of many digital media players, sent in the Zune 120 GB for a spin. In the eve of the upcoming Zune HD release, how do these players stack up against the iPod? Read on to find out.