Energizer USB Charger Software Contains Malware

Newsfactor:A USB charger from Energizer uses software that contains a Trojan, according to US-CERT. The software was apparently developed outside the U.S. and may have been giving hackers access to PCs since 2007. An analyst said trust in the Energizer bunny may have led many consumers to install the DUO USB charger malware even with a warning. Some Windows PC users may hope the Energizer bunny didn't keep going and going. It turns out the Energizer DUO USB battery charger is a vehicle for attacks on PCs, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team. US-CERT researchers said Friday that the software that installs with the Energizer charger contains a Trojan horse that gives malicious hackers a back door into Windows machines. "An attacker is able to remotely control a system , including the ability to list directories, send and receive files, and execute programs. The backdoor operates with the privileges of the logged-on user," US-CERT said. "Removing the Energizer USB charger software will also remove the registry value that causes the backdoor to execute automatically when Windows starts." Newsfactor

Lip reading mobile promises end to noisy phone calls

BBC: Technology that could see an end to the bane of many commuters – people talking loudly on their mobile phones – has been shown off by researchers. The prototype device could allow people to conduct silent phone conversations. The technology measures the tiny electrical signals produced by muscles used when someone speaks. the BBC

Buying a New Windows Mobile Phone leaves you out of Window Mobile 7

Newsfactor: Even new purchasers of Windows Mobile 6.5 phones won't be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 Series will require new hardware and even the new HTC HD2 phone doesn't qualify. AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel will carry the Windows Phone 7 Series devices. Newsfactor

Final Fantasy I and II Now Available for iPhone

I like it when companies port their old games to the iPhone platform, even when the results are somewhat less than amazing. Aside from being the best way to convince your somewhat technophobe friends that the iPhone and iPod touch are totally worth buying, they also allow me to indulge in some pleasant gaming nostalgia during my commute or whenever I have a spare moment.

Even though I have played them both many times before, I have no doubt that I’ll enjoy playing through Final Fantasy I and II once again now that they’re available on the iPhone. Square Enix ported both titles to Apple’s App Store, now available for $8.99 a piece.

Now whether or not you’re willing to pay $9 for these classic titles may depend on how many times you’ve played through them in the past, and on how many different platforms. Versions of the games have appeared on the NES, GameBoy Advance, PSP, PlayStation, DS and Wii. Some of the newer ports featured extra levels and bonus content, which are included in the new iPhone versions, so if you haven’t played them lately, you might have good reason to take another spin.

The new iPhone versions also offer much-improved avatar designs and better sprites, though the story and gameplay mechanics remain unchanged. As someone who’s never not enjoyed playing through a classic Square title, I’m not too worried about becoming bored or being underwhelmed. By the same token, I know exactly what I’m in for, so there’s not likely to be any surprises coming my way.

I’m mostly just hoping that my purchase in this instance encourages Square Enix to continue releasing its classic titles for the platform. I don’t think it’s too impossible to imagine a time when Final Fantasy VII and VIII are available as fully ported iPad titles. And some more original content would be nice, too. Song Summoner is great, as far as tactics games go, but I’d love an original Square Enix RPG title for the iPhone platform that uses the device’s specific capabilities in a similarly innovative fashion.

A cursory attempt at playing the new games reveals some finicky, context-based controls that take a little getting used to, but eventually don’t really take anything away from the experience, though they certainly don’t add to it. As with most iPhone games, you do get the advantage of having the app auto-save your progress on exit so that you can quickly resume without having to return to a save point or something equally annoying. Like I said above, very few surprises here, but if you’re a fan of the series, there’s probably nothing I can say to either convince or prevent you from buying this.

GroceryIQ 2: Shopping in the Cloud

I wrote a review of GroceryIQ just over a year ago and I have continued to use it frequently. The new GroceryIQ 2 expands on the original concept by taking advantage of the power of a connected mobile device that can tap into the cloud. These significant improvements have pushed the app from “frequently used” to “indispensable” on my own iPhone. I’ll run down the features for you and then share some comments from the developer on how the cloud and the iPhone have come together to create great software.

What’s New in Version 2

The big update in version 2 is list syncing between multiple iPhones. In practice, this feature is incredibly valuable. Whenever my wife updates the list with something that we need, I get a push notification that something has been added to GroceryIQ. When I get to the store, I open the app and it quickly syncs my lists so that I am sure to not miss something we need. In addition, my wife instantly benefited from the effort I had put in to organize the aisles to match the layout of our store as well as the history and favorite items that I use to quickly build shopping lists.

GroceryIQ 2 also adds some features related to its acquisition by Coupons.com. You can find coupons on your iPhone and print them straight from the phone to a supported HP printer. I have a Canon printer so I use the email option to send the list of coupons I selected on the iPhone and print them from my computer. The list categories show logos for items that have coupons available as another reminder.

The gee-whiz feature in this release is barcode scanning to add items to your shopping list. You take a picture of the barcode using the iPhone camera and it will look up the item and add it to your list.

Frankly, I love this app because it actually makes shopping easier than using pencil and paper.

Jason Boehle from Coupons.com

I spent a little time catching up Jason Boehle from Coupons.com to talk about how the 2.0 release came about and how technology has made the simple task of making a shopping list even better.

Tell me about how you decided on the feature list for Version 2.

List sharing between devices has been a big request by users and was part of the original vision for Grocery iQ 1.0. We’re pleased to finally deliver it to our loyal customers. The new couponing features are another exciting addition to Grocery iQ and allow our customers to easily find coupons and savings directly related to what they’re shopping for. Barcode scanning is an incredibly useful feature for list building that many customers have requested, and we delivered one of the best barcode scanning experiences on the iPhone.

How is list sharing implemented?

List sharing is implemented using secure web services on the proven Coupons.com high-availability infrastructure. Apple’s push notification service is used to get list updates to your phone in real-time, while still taking it easy on device battery life. In addition to sharing a list between multiple devices, single devices can use the service as an online “backup” of their Grocery iQ data. One of the coolest things about doing all of the list sharing in the cloud is that we’re able to leverage this work to implement web-based list editing and sharing to devices as well as sync lists between other versions of Grocery iQ on other mobile platforms like Android, etc.

How does printing direct from the iPhone work?

We worked closely with HP to enable coupon printing directly from the iPhone to HP printers connected to wireless networks. In addition to loading coupons directly to your store savings cards, this is another feature that enables our customers who are away from their PC to still save money using Grocery iQ. The coupon printing feature is another example of highly leveraged work that is available in our Coupons.com iPhone app in addition to Grocery iQ. It also makes use of cloud-based services for all of the imaging and assembly of the retail-ready coupons.

How did the trend towards using cloud services impact the development of GroceryIQ 2?

The “cloud” has helped to enable all these new features in Grocery iQ 2.0. List sharing, coupon display, printing, and even barcode scanning all benefit from the power of a very sophisticated web service infrastructure. For example, we have an incredibly rich on-device product database which we use for barcode scanning and lookup. However, if we don’t find the product you just scanned in our on-device database we have the full power and extensibility of a web service that will search many other online databases to locate the item.

A cloud-connected device enables a whole host of scenarios. For example, your significant other can add items to your shared shopping list, load coupons to your savings card, and then send you to the store on your way home from work—and even make changes while you are there by scanning a snack box because the kids just finished it off. The built-in database enables a detailed shopping list, so you can be sure you’re getting the right items, and when you checkout, and the coupons are automatically applied when you swipe your savings card. Welcome to the digital age of grocery shopping!

Grocery Shopping Made Better

I know some of you may be wondering why I spilled this much digital ink on a grocery list app. Let me tell you, I use this app at least once a week and the list sharing features have really helped my wife and I keep up with the shopping demands of our large family. It really is better than keeping a paper list at home.

I also think that Jason’s comments about the cloud services that are leveraged in the iPhone app are important for the future of the platform. I think the next wave of iPhone development will show a lot of innovation in taking simple concepts that worked great in software and improving them by reexamining what is possible with a mobile device that is always connected to the cloud with push notifications. GroceryIQ is a great example of a cloud-connected app done right.

8 Great iPhone Games for Kids (According to Kids)

My family is originally from Ecuador, and I recently got the opportunity to go back to the land of my birth and spend a few months living there. During that time I’ve been staying with my aunt and uncle and as a result have gotten to see a lot of their grandchildren. These four precocious girls, ranging in age from five to 11, were delighted by my iPhone the first time I showed it to them and now, each time they visit, my iPhone is appropriated for a while so they can play games on it.

Seeing how much they enjoyed the games I had on there, I went out and bought a bunch of additional games to give them some variety, and now have almost 40 on my iPhone, most of them aimed at a younger audience. Curious about which games they enjoyed the most, I asked each to list their favorites. I’ve decided to share the results with all of you in case you’re wondering which games to go out and buy for kids.

Note: All links point to iTunes.

Animal Memory Match Kids
Endorsed by: 5-year-old
Cost: 99 cents
A matching game with adorable animals on the cards and cute sounds when you make a match. My 5-year-old cousin loves this game, and even challenges herself by switching between difficulty levels, which just increases and decreases the number of cards you have to match.

Brushes
Endorsed by: 9-year-old, 11-year-old
Cost: $4.99
Not strictly a game, I bought this as a curiosity after watching the demonstration of the iPad version during last January’s keynote. I had no expectation of actually using it, as I have no talent for drawing or painting, but a couple of my more creative cousins picked it up and love it. If you believe you might have a budding painter on your hands giving them this app to play with might be one of the best things you could do for them.

Crazy Penguin Catapult
Endorsed by: 7-year-old, 9-year-old, 11-year-old
Cost: Free (99-cent paid version also available)
The idea is simple: Use a catapult to launch penguins and take out polar bears and other enemies. Launching a penguin involves just a simple swipe across the screen, you just have to time it right. The music is engaging and the noises the penguins make when you launch them are very fun. There’s a second version of the game out now, with both free and paid versions.

Cro-Mag Rally
Endorsed by: 11-year-old
Cost: $2.99
One of a couple of racing games I have on my iPhone, this one definitely lends itself to kids with cartoonish characters, simple gameplay and a fun soundtrack and audio effects. Despite the simple controls, just tilt left/right to steer and use a couple of on-screen buttons, it’s still complicated enough that only the oldest of my cousins mentioned it.

Dizzy Bee
Endorsed by: 5-year-old, 9-year-old, 11-year-old
Cost: $2.99 (Free version also available)
The idea behind Dizzy Bee is simple: Gather the flowers while avoiding the bad guys. You move Dizzy Bee about using the accelerometer, but your movements also cause the bad guys to move as well, so you’ve got to be somewhat strategic. The bright graphics, fun sounds and gameplay that can get more challenging at higher levels made this a favorite across the range of ages of my cousins. Dizzy Bee 2 is also available.

Frogger
Endorsed by: 7-year-old, 9-year-old, 11-year-old
Cost: 99 cents
I bought this arcade classic for myself, and found it somewhat surprising that my young cousins enjoy it so much since they didn’t grow up with it like I did. Very simple gameplay and easy-to-use controls — just swipe up/down/left/right to move the frogger — makes this an easy game for small kids to pick up.

Pickin’ Time
Endorsed by: 5-year-old, 11-year-old
Cost: 99 cents
The gameplay is exceedingly simple: You pick a vegetable at the beginning and then are presented rapid-fire with images of various vegetables. Simply tap on the screen when you see yours and avoid tapping when it’s a different vegetable. Each time you play you are scored on both accuracy and speed. Although my cousins don’t use it, there’s also a multiplayer mode available.

Tap Tap Revenge Classic
Endorsed by: 7-year-old, 9-year-old, 11-year-old
Cost: $1.99
One of the most iconic iPhone games out there, I wasn’t surprised to see this game endorsed by my young cousins as it combines fun music with straightforward gameplay. So far they’re still working on the built-in songs, but the older girls are definitely getting better at it. I’ve also bought the newer Tap Tap Revenge 3, but for whatever reason the girls prefer the original version.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Is There Any Demand For a True Gaming Phone?

Apple Shareholder’s Meeting Roundup

Yesterday Apple held its annual shareholder’s meeting at its Cupertino headquarters. All the top brass were there to answer questions from the men and women to whom, let’s face it, they must eventually answer. Of course, that didn’t stop Steve Jobs from being his usual tactless self, quipping during a lengthy comment from one shareholder, “Do you have a question?”

There’s a lot of information to digest, so I’ve condensed the juiciest morsels into what I hope is a more accessible short-form. Here goes!

All seven board members were re-elected; there was an advisory vote on executive compensation and Apple’s public accounting firm was chosen (it’s Ernst & Young, by the way.) Votes also were cast on two shareholder proposals. The first called for a published “sustainability report” detailing the company’s environmental policies and its contingency planning in the face of climate change. The second proposal was for the creation of a second board of directors, tasked with overseeing Apple’s environmental policies and business strategy in the face of climate change. The board felt they were already doing a fine job in both these areas, and recommended voting against the new proposals. Votes were counted and, unsurprisingly, neither proposal was successful.

Green

According to Macworld, Jobs claimed that Apple is the first company to work directly with suppliers on issues ranging from environmental impact to worker protection and education. Macworld’s Dan Frakes writes;

Taking a jab at other companies, as well as organizations such as Greenpeace, [Jobs] noted that “other companies just make promises” and attend conferences and events to “schmooze with [environmental groups], but the work ain’t getting done,” whereas Apple is actually taking steps to improve the company’s real-world green credentials and treatment of workers.

Jobs also noted that the smaller packaging used across Apple’s product line has reduced the number of annual cargo flights “by the hundreds”;

“It’s the right thing to do from an environmental point of view; it’s the right thing to do from a business point of view.”

Money

In its first quarter 2010 investor conference call, Apple announced it had $39.8 billion in the bank at the end of December 2009. The question now is, what on earth should it do with it? Spend it? Save it for the next recession? Perhaps pay dividends to shareholders — something BusinessWeek says the company has not done since 1995? Jobs said;

We know if we need to acquire something – a piece of the puzzle to make something big and bold – we can write a check for it and not borrow a lot of money and put our whole company at risk. The cash in the bank gives us tremendous security and flexibility.

You never know what opportunities are going to be around the next corner. We are a large enough business now that, in order to really move the needle, we have to be thinking pretty bold – pretty large.

New Role

On the matter of Apple’s new role as a ‘mobile devices’ company (first announced by Jobs in January and reiterated by Tim Cook in last month’s earnings call) Jobs said;

This is not something that we’re ordaining from the top. This is something our customers are saying with their dollars, if you just look at the products that we’re selling. They’re telling us what they think is important and we’re reflecting that.

But specifically, what does this mean about the future of Apple’s desktop Macs, the iMac and Mac Pro? “We love desktop computers,” El Jobso assured the shareholders, “And plan to continue making them.” So, that’s alright then.

Asia

When asked about Apple’s efforts to increase international sales, Jobs turned to (VP of Retail) Ron Johnson, who announced that Apple is looking to open 24 more stores in China to join the existing store in Beijing. This is to be expected, given how important (and lucrative) China is to Apple. DigitalDaily’s John Paczkowski writes, “Mac sales in China increased nearly 100 percent year over year in the first financial quarter of 2010… while iPhone sales [are] ramping up.”

Apple's Beijing Store

Beyond the Mac, Paczkowski quotes Tim Cook on Apple’s overall revenue in that market;

“…if you look at greater China last quarter, which is China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, our revenues tripled year-over-year… We have a tremendous focus on it.”

I guess it’s only right China should get a little Apple-love… after all, they make most of Apple’s gear in the first place!

Stability

Finally, there was a moment of fun, Jobs-style; a shareholder wanted to know of Jobs, “What keeps you up at night?”

“Shareholder meetings,” Jobs immediately shot back, before getting very serious and adding, thoughtfully;

“Apple requires stability in the world. People aren’t going to worry about which laptop to buy if they can’t afford dinner, can’t afford to send their kids to school, can’t afford textbooks. There are things much bigger than us that are out of our control. So we try to just do the best we can.”

Bravo, Steve. And bravo, Apple.

Quicken Essentials for Mac

I spent the last week or so playing with a copy of the new Quicken Essentials for Mac from Intuit and I can make this review really short for you. If you’re a die-hard Quicken user, you will hate (I mean really loathe and despise) the new Quicken Essentials product. If you are new to Personal Finance Management (PFM) software, then you will probably really like Quicken Essentials but still feel a little confused about why you have to pay $60 $69 for it.

Quicken Pops a Mint

Quicken 2007 for Mac was released in August of 2006. Since that time, Intuit has struggled to define its Mac strategy and loyal users have felt left behind. Intuit tried an online product that worked with the Mac, but were bewildered when a little startup, created as an anti-Quicken, amassed more subscribers. Last September, Intuit took another look at that startup and acquired Mint.com and placed Mint’s founder, Aaron Patzer at the head of the personal finance group at Intuit. That move appeared to show that Intuit was floundering and was looking for outside help to fix its core PFM business. Understandably, the new Quicken Essentials shows a strong Mint influence.

The Essence of Quicken

To start on the new version, Intuit threw away the code for previous releases and started over to create a Mac native version with a modern look and feel. One of the design goals was to create a financial app that would feel at home as part of the iWork suite and it mostly succeeded. The new version looks great and shows a lot of attention to simplifying the user experience in areas like adding new accounts. People that are new to Quicken will love how easy it is to get started.

The new version had four key features: to see all your accounts one place, to see where your money is going, to stay on top of bills, and to track goals for saving money.

Accounts in One Place

Quicken Essentials will download transactions from about 12,000 banks out of the box (around the same number that Mint.com currently supports) and up to 16,000 financial institutions will be supported in the next few months. This is over 3x the number of FI’s that Quicken for Windows supports. This is a tremendous improvement.

Where is My Money Going?

Quicken Essentials provides a nice looking home page with pie charts to quickly show where you stand. Instead of being buried in reports, this information comes front and center. QEM also supports budgets for tracking spending by category.

Plan for Bills

Quicken Essentials will analyze your previous spending and detect recurring bills to help you anticipate upcoming expenses. Of course, you can enter bills manually as well.

Set Goals for Saving Money

You can set goals and track your progress towards that goal.

The reboot of Quicken for Mac comes at a price in features however. While Intuit was fairly certain that they would cover 80 percent of the users from previous versions, there are going to be a lot of pretty upset users from the other 20 percent.

What’s Missing?

No Bill Pay

There is no Bill Pay feature in this release. Intuit found that less than 10 percent of existing customers were using that feature. Because major banks offer free online bill pay to their customers, this feature was axed as “non-essential.”

No Turbo Tax Link

There is no quick link to export tax prep reports direct to Turbo Tax. Many users would simply run the reports to look at spending by category and then type those numbers in Turbo Tax so, again, Intuit decided that this feature was also “non-essential.”

No Investment Tax Lot Accounting

QEM will track the current value of your investment accounts, but it does not provide any reports on the history of your transactions. Fortunately, all the transaction data is preserved in the underlying data and will be available to future versions that offer more comprehensive investment reporting.

The Future

Banking Services

QEM is one of the first places where you will see the integration between Intuit and Mint. All of the back-end will eventually be the same across Mint, Quicken for Windows and Quicken for Mac. Quicken for Mac will be the first product to get the big connection and then the rest will be ported over.

Parity with Windows

The whispered goal at Intuit is to bring parity to the Mac and Windows versions. This includes file format compatibility between different platforms. There is a clear acknowledgment that customers just want to get access to their financial information on whatever platform is available or convenient and Intuit is interested in being there.

Whither Quicken 2007 for Mac?

Quicken 2007 is still being fully supported. Intuit made it clear that it will provide support for a three-version window to include 2006, 2007 and Quicken Essentials.

iPad

No official statement here, but Intuit did discuss that the iPad is an “at your fingertips” device and financial data is a nice thing to have “at your fingertips.”

TheAppleBlog Recommends

I mentioned at the start that Quicken Essentials for Mac is similar in many ways to Mint. The product is streamlined, simple, visually appealing, and easy to jump into. They are so similar, that it is hard to understand why you should pay $59 for Quicken Essentials when you can use Mint.com for free. That decision comes down to…

  • planning future transactions to manage cash flow
  • importing historical data
  • offline access

If you need any of those features, Quicken Essentials would be a good choice except for the price. For such a limited product (albeit a much cleaner and better designed product) I really think Intuit should have come out with $29 introductory pricing, $19 if you own any other Quicken product.

If you are a hard-core Quicken user and you like to reconcile your bank statements with your own records and you religiously enter all your receipts, you will be disappointed in this product. You might really like the next version that includes tax lot accounting and bill pay, but then hold on to your $60 $69 for a year (yes, I am an optimist and will hope against hope to see another version in a year). For the time being, hold on to Quicken 2007, or even Quicken 2010 for Windows, and see what happens.

iPad SDK Mining a Big Tease, But Let’s Stay Level-headed

After the rumor-fest surrounding Apple’s mystery device was stanched the moment Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, a new trend has emerged; SDK Mining. This is the art of digging through the iPad’s operating system to uncover clues about hitherto-undisclosed functionality.

Since the iPad and iPhone SDKs are so very close in core functionality, SDK Miners have been trying to unearth something (anything!) we didn’t already know about the iPad. I suspect most people simply glance over these reports, shrug, and move on without comment. After all, we’re a bit tired of tablet rumors by now, right? But looking at some of the comments in the articles (linked below), there are some people who take it all very seriously indeed. And that’s probably a mistake, as I’ll explain shortly.

Before I do, here’s a quick rundown of what we think we know so far from the SDK Mining that has happened in the last five weeks.

January 29

Engadget confirmed that the OS SDK contained support for Video Calling, File Downloads, SMS and even Handwriting input;

We’re told that there are hooks to accept and decline a video conference, flip a video feed (which suggests a front-facing camera) and — most importantly — run the video call in either full screen mode or in just a portion of the screen. That means you’ll be able to chat and do other things at the same time, which could mean there’s at least some type of multitasking going on here.

Engadget’s Nilay Patel adds in an update;

…there’s a spell checker with multiple dictionaries and user-added entries (huzzah!), much richer text support for apps, the ability to selectively draw to external displays (using the VGA or component adapters, we’d imagine), location-aware ads in Maps and possibly other programs that use the Maps API, file upload ability in Safari, a modifiable cut / copy / paste menu, and, most interestingly, prototype support for a “handwriting keyboard.” Maybe we’ll see some stylus action on this thing after all.

In all, Patel lists no fewer than 18 new discoveries, though many of them are pretty dry and technical.

After that, things fell quiet for a while, until just this week.

February 20

9to5Mac reported discovering a set of icons in the 3.2 SDK it believes are “pretty definitive evidence” for video calling functionality in a future iPhone or iPad device.

Image by 9to5Mac

It also found strings of code that refer to iChat, too, but didn’t speculate further. It did say;

While it is possible that Apple brought code over from its Mac telephony products, it is unlikely that they also built icons and compressed them into the iPad SDK for such a product if it weren’t being built for future release.

February 23

MacRumor’s Arnold Kim added to the fresh wave of SDK Mining reports with this graphic of the icons used in the video chat functionality;

Image by MacRumors

Kim writes;

It seems Apple built in API support to test to see if your iPad had a Front Facing Camera, Zoom and a Camera Flash. The front facing camera would, of course, be used for video chat, while Zoom and Camera Flash are often requested features for the iPhone’s camera.

Given the size of these buttons, they were intended for use on the the iPad’s screen rather than the iPhone. We’re not sure why these features were dropped…

And finally, just today, MacNN brings us news of (wait for it) advanced wallpaper options.

Image by MacNN

Well. Be still my beating heart. From MacNN;

In the current iPad simulator, users can now set separate lock- and homescreen wallpapers, reflecting the iPad’s ability to keep wallpaper active while navigating icons. In case the difference doesn’t matter, another button applies the same wallpaper to both screens.

The Disappointment of SDK Mining

While it’s fun to poke-around in the code (in the absence of an actual iPad to play with, it’s the next best thing!), SDK Mining often leads to disappointment. An operating system — even a ‘small’ OS like the one found on the iPhone or iPad — is hugely complex. It’s the end-product of years of development. In that time, as hardware and software prototypes came-and-went, functionality was added and removed, supported and dropped, many times over. This is common to any OS development process.

We need to be careful when reading breathless reports of “hidden” functionality in the iPad (or iPhone) SDKs. In the reports above, the code references camera features, proving that, at some point, Apple’s developers seriously explored that functionality. That doesn’t mean a camera is guaranteed to appear on the iPad. (For instance, just because I once learned how to ride a bike, it doesn’t guarantee I’ll become an avid cyclist.)

So let’s enjoy the speculation — but not get too worked-up over what it might mean. After all, it might never happen.

How-To: Support Everyone’s OS with VirtualBox

Using a Mac is a treat for many, and after years of living on Window machines, I appreciate the little things OS X provides. There’s no point preaching to the choir here about how OS X is better…most of us already feel that way. But what I’ve realized while working in IT, is that I have to be adaptable since not everybody can run OS X. Perhaps they are scared of the change or have an application that doesn’t have an Mac counterpart. Whatever the reason, not everyone will jump on the bandwagon. This is especially true in a more corporate environment.

So as an IT support technician, I have to be flexible. As much as I hate spending hours removing spyware from users machines using tools like AdAware, HijackThis & Malwarebytes; this is my trade and I need to be proficient in every aspect of it. This is why I need to live in both the Apple and Microsoft world at once. There are many options out there such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels, but Oracle’s VirtualBox offering is different in that it’s free.

Free is always good, especially if you only need to access Windows once in a while. VirtualBox can run all flavors of Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2 & BSD. If you need to support some random piece of software that only runs in Windows 3.1, VirtualBox will do it.

For my example below, I will run through installing Windows 7 in VirtualBox.

  1. Download VirtualBox from Oracle’s site.
  2. Run throughout the Install.
  3. Launch VirtualBox for the first time and it will ask if you want to register. It is not required.
  4. Once the Virtual Machine list comes up, we need to make a new VM.
  5. This will start the New Virtual Machine wizard. Enter your machine’s name and select the OS you will be installing.
  6. Set the amount of RAM you want to be available to your VM. I chose 1GB since this will be Windows 7 and I have 4GB to spare.
  7. We also have to create a new Virtual Hard Disk for the install to run off of.
  8. Choose whether it’ll be a dynamic or static disk. Dynamic is the default since it saves space until it’s needed.
  9. Choose your size, save location and your new virtual disk is done.
  10. Now we can launch our VM and start our OS install.
  11. The First Run Wizard will start and we need to insert our Windows 7 media so it can be installed.
  12. The Windows 7 setup process begins. To switch your mouse out of the VM and back to OS X, hit Control + Command.
  13. The Virtual Hard Disk we created earlier is available for Windows to install to.
  14. Go grab a bite to eat or a few drinks while you let Windows install. When it’s done, all should be well.
  15. Now we need to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. Click on Devices in the VirtualBox menu bar and select Install Guest Additions…
  16. The install will finish and then let the VM reboot at the end. You no longer need to type Control + Command to switch mouse controls. You can also resize the VM window and the desktop resolution will adapt.

Having VM’s available to you in the support environment is a godsend. I still use Snow Leopard on my iMac, but I have the ability to launch a VM with whatever OS the troubled co-worker is using. People seem to think you must know everything about Microsoft Office since you’re IT. I am constantly reminding people, this is not the case. But I can launch Outlook on my end and walk them through the process.

If there is a Windows app that your job requires you to run then it’s time to use Seamless Mode. This allows you to have a Windows Start Bar on the bottom of your screen and Window applications will float on top of OS X.

We also have used VMware Fusion in the past. But so far, VirtualBox does everything Fusion does in our environment. If you haven’t dabbled in VMs before, give VirtualBox a try.