When Apple shipped Mac OS X Lion 10.7, the “Library” folder located within every user’s home folder, which had previously been visible to users in the Finder, was made invisible. To access the Library folder, users must now hold down the option key while selecting the “Go” menu in the Finder.<p>

This is probably a good move for the vast majority of Mac users, but for folks with even a small amount of interest in tinkering with the configuration files and caches of various applications, it’s an outright nuisance.

A quick trip to the Terminal can fix it, or he has an app for that.

Yesterday we <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/mar/14/windows-8-user-interface-confusion">showed you Chris Pirillo's father using Windows 8 for the first time</a>. Now here he is using Mac OSX for the first time, and trying to find "the internet".

Fascinating piece of user interface film: watch this before you judge users. (Pirillo senior is a confirmed Windows user, though he has used iPads and iPhones.)

Intego:

We recently <a href="http://blog.intego.com/new-flashback-trojan-horse-variant-uses-novel-delivery-method-to-infect-macs/">reported about a new variant of the Flashback Trojan horse</a> which is using novel techniques to infect Macs. Since then, we have discovered a number of samples of this latest variant, Flashback.G, and have seen evidence that many Mac users have been infected by this malware.

What's not explained is what "many" is (even compared to Intego's client base) or what this novel infection method is. Flashback is a password-stealing program. Presently easy to detect:
• open Terminal.app
• type cd /Users/Shared
• type ls -l
• look for any file ending ".so". If you're infected, you've then got a problem. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)

Why the new Gatekeeper feature on the new version of the Mac operating system matters to all users.

Basically, anything earlier than 2008 means you're hosed, apart from the iMac. Though of course your existing system will continue to run.

Adi Kingsley-Hughes isn't enjoying. (We haven't upgraded from Snow Leopard yet, so can't comment.)

Glenn Fleishmann on some of what you can expect later this month from Apple.

Ars Technica: "Internally, Apple’s [IT] department mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company machines.”<br />
John Gruber: "This may be true for any Apple-owned machines running Windows, but it is not true for machines running any version of Mac OS X. I asked several Apple engineers whether any antivirus software was mandated or even recommended for Mac OS X, internally. All said no. Said one, 'You couldn’t get me to install Norton on OS X if you slipped me the date rape drug.'"

"The end of an era is the end of growth in one dominant business model. The PC era was epitomized by the concentration of profits in a dominant operating system vendor. That growth has slowed if not ended. The post-PC era is being kicked off by a new business model where profits are being concentrated in a hardware+software+service integrator."<br />
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It would be interesting to see the profits for Windows PCs manufacturers added in.

Intriguing: Apple's "Grand Central Dispatch" (a method to push some threads off to the GPU for processing) ported and "lightly tested" to Win32.<br />
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The interesting thing being that in days gone by, you'd have seen the Mac programmers desperately trying to port Win32 APIs to run on MacOS, not vice-versa.