ReadWriteWeb

Security researches revealed vulnerabilities in ChromeOS this week at Black Hat, it was reported today by VentureBeat. By exploiting an issue in the pre-installed ScratchPad extension, the researchers were able to gain access to data stored in a user's Google account.

This is particularly noteworthy since Google has cited security as a benefit in using Chrome and has been shifting its own enterprise desktops towards Chrome, Linux and OSX.

Today GitHub announced a client for OSX, GitHub for Mac. The client walks developers through the process of creating a GitHub account and uploading repositories and provides a local admin interface similar to the traditional Web-based one.

According to a new report from Forrester, Windows 7 is now in use on 20% of corporate desktops as of March 2011. Windows XP still holds on to 59.9% of the enterprise desktop world (down from 67.5% a year go). Apple now has an 11% share of the corporate desktop (up from 9.1%). Linux has only 1.4% (it was 1.3% a year before this study).

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer use is declining slightly while Chrome and Safari are on the rise.

Apple's enterprise sales of Macintosh computers surged again last quarter, this time by 66%. Last June, a similar surge made headlines. But these quarterly sales may indicate more sustainable growth for the company in the enterprise.

According to Apple Insider, the company had 94.7% growth in very large businesses, 75.5% growth in large businesses and 155.6% growth in government. The company only saw 1% growth in education, but the overall PC market declined by 6.5% in education last quarter. This is growth from a very small percentage to another very small percentage - IDC estimates that Apple sales accounting for only 3% of new PC sales last quarter. But it's significant growth for Apple none the less.

What accounts for the growing number of companies purchasing significantly more expensive computers? One answer might security. And if that's the case, these companies may be in for a rude awakening.

Steven Wittens got sick of staring at terminal screens from the 80s, and decided to do something about it. He built TermKit, a graphic replacement for terminal, using WebKit. But Wittens isn't trying to build a GUI. TermKit is still a command line system. Instead, Wittens is trying to retain the power of the command line with modern displays.

Wittens acknowledges that the traditional UNIX-like command line has stood the test of time, he writes that many areas of computing have come a long way. "We've gotten a lot better at displaying information. We've also learned a lot of lessons through the web about data interchange, network transparency, API design, and more. We know better how small tweaks in an implementation can make a world of difference in usability."

Want to write apps for OSX, the iPhone or the iPad? You can learn JavaScript and use a frameworks like PhoneGap or Titanium. Or you can learn the official language of Apple operating systems: Objective-C. The debate over whether to build mobile apps in JavaScript or Objective-C is beyond the scope of this blog post. But if you want to learn Objective-C, these resources will get you started.

"Apple had about 2.06 percent of the US desktop market in 2003. By 2010, OS X had about 10.9% of the market," writes Github developer Zach Holman. "There's a slew of reasons for this growth, but I think a large part of it is the migration of software developers from Windows to OS X starting in the early 2000's. Attracted by the reasonable UNIX toolchain and the straightforward usability approach, more and more geeks adopted OS X as their primary machines."

But there's always been a blight in developing on OSX under languages other than Cocoa, and that's compiler support. In order to get gcc, developers have had to download Xcode. According to to Holman, this wasn't a big deal back when X-Code was less than 500MB. But now Xcode costs $5 from the Apple App Store, and it's a 4.5GB download that takes up 15GB once installed.

Chameleon is a development framework for OSX that acts a drop-in replacement for the iOS framework UIKit. According to the project's site, some application can be ported to OSX from iOS without changing any code. However, Chameleon is still able to provide a desktop OS experience instead of a multitouch experience. You can download it from Github here.

The framework was built by Sean Heber and Craig Hockenberry, two senior developers from the software company Iconfactory - makers of the Twitteriffic app for both iOS and OSX. The pair created Chameleon to aid their own port of Twitteriffic from iOS to OSX.

This version of OSX, titled Lion, will be released later next year. Apple released a developer preview today and it may contain something of interest for the enterprise: OSX Lion Server. OSX Lion Server is a core feature of OSX Lion, included at no extra cost. You will be able to provision any Mac with Lion as a server through a guided setup process.

"And it provides local and remote administration -- for users and groups, push notifications, file sharing, calendaring, mail, contacts, chat, Time Machine, VPN, web, and wiki services -- all in one place," according to the Apple website. It will include a profile manager, Wiki Server and support file sharing with the iPad.

Developers have yet another app store to submit to: according to MacLife, Apple's Mac App Store is now open to developer submissions. Apple announced the new app store week before last at its Back to the Mac event. According to Apple, the marketplace will be open within 90 days.