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The Apple Mac OS X continued to gain momentum in the operating system market according to Web measurement firm Net Applications.

Mac OS X increased about a quarter percentage point in January, when it comprised 7.6 percent of all the systems that surfed sites tracked by Net Applications. Apple’s share of the operating system market in January rose 0.27 percentage points from December 2007, up about 1.35 percentage points in the last 12 months and a one year increase of 22 percent.

Gartner predicts that Apple will double its U.S. and Western Europe market share by 2011. “Apple’s gains reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple’s success,” Gartner analysts said.

“Apple is challenging its competitors with software integration that provides ease of use and flexibility; continuous and more frequent innovation in hardware and software; and an ecosystem that focuses on interoperability across multiple devices.”

Net Application’s data for January showed that Microsoft Window’s still has a majority of the market share at 91.5 percent, a decrease from 93.3 percent a year ago.

Editor’s note: The following is a post from Dave Taylor, a blog partner of ours who answers reader questions.

My sister and I share a Mac computer and I’m tired of her looking at my files. Is there some way I can protect or hide my folders without downloading any software she’d notice?

Dave’s Answer:

Seems to me that the very best possible solution is for you and your sister to set up different accounts on your Mac, actually. That’s one of the real benefits of Mac OS X (and, for that matter, Windows too).

You can do that by simply going to Apple –> System Preferences… –> Accounts and setting up an account for her. Then simply ensure that you log out when you’re done with the computer each time and she won’t be able to get to any of your files and you’ll be safe from having her mess with your preferences, settings, etc.

No? That’s not what you want to do?

Okay, I’ll give you a couple of neat Terminal tricks that can help you out, one that lets you make a folder closed to everyone and another that makes it disappear completely until you make it reappear.

In both cases, you’ll need to launch Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal.app. It’ll start out in your account “home” directory, which you can check by typing pwd. Move to the directory where your folder or files lives by typing in cd followed by the name of the directory.

For example, if I wanted to protect a folder on the Desktop, then I’d type in cd Desktop and move there.

Now, to make a folder completely locked and unreadable, simply type in:

$ chmod 000 my-protected-folder

You won’t get any feedback but you’ll end up with something like this (pay particular attention to the “testing123″ folder and how it’s portrayed):

To get back in when you want to, simply go back to the same place with the “cd” command and type in:

$ chmod 775 my-protected-folder

To hide a folder or file completely, simply preface its name with a “.”. For example, to hide “testing123″ I’d rename it “.testing123″:

$ mv testing123 ".testing123”

Wanna get that one back to normal? Go back to the same directory and type in the reverse: mv .testing123 testing123

So there you go, three possible solutions to your problem. Hope one of them works out for you!

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About the Author

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

Apple is on track to capture 12 percent of the U.S. personal computer market by 2011, more than double the share the company currently has, according to Gartner.

Gartner says some of Apple’s success is due the PC business lacking compelling, consumer innovation. It says Apple is capitalizing on the biggest trends, such as digital entertainment and photography.

The report says,” “Apple is challenging its competitors with software integration that provides ease of use and flexibility, continuous and more frequent innovation in hardware and software, and an ecosystem that focuses on interoperability across multiple devices (such as iPod and iMac cross-selling.)”

Tony Lawrence is running a good article on trying to convince the common man to purchase a Mac. He shares an anecdote about his neighbor who is looking into buying a new computer, but wants to make sure he can use the Internet and Microsoft Excel.

“He may actually think that Microsoft Excel is required for him to produce a spreadsheet. I needed to get back to work, so I didn’t want to get into a long explanation of available options for “Office-like” apps, so I just quickly said something to the effect that yes, he could do spreadsheets with a Mac and left it at that,” writes Lawrence.

The interesting thing, however is that Lawrence makes it abundantly clear that his neighbor is a very smart man. He’s not talking about just some completely naive person. That’s kind of the point of the whole story. Many people tend to feel that they’ll be losing some capabilities by using a Mac rather than a Windows-based PC.

How do you convince the average joe that they should by a Mac over a PC?

Macs have a reputation for being “safe,” and a new security update should keep it that way. Well, all right - the existence of this update highlights some problems, but now that they’re fixed, no one can complain.

Anyway, “The update is available for Intel and PowerPC-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4.10,” according to the Mac Observer’s Jeff Gamet, “and includes updates for iChat, CoreAudio, PHP, Quartz Composer, Samba, WebCore, WebKit, and more.”

Gamet goes on to get into the specifics - and there are quite a few details to address - but users might be best off downloading first and asking questions later.

Apple continues to do well and the iPhone has had little to do with the company’s success according to Peter Burrows of Business Week Online.

He points out that Apple increased its computer sales by 33 percent in the second quarter and gross margins increased from 30.3 percent to 36.9 percent. The boost in revenue is attributed to low prices on memory chips, more direct sales from Apple stores and its Web site.

Another factor in Apple’s success is that many of its products run the same Mac operation system software. “The iPhone illustrates the point: It runs the same Mac operating system software, the Safari browser, and the same iTunes music software as all of the company’s computers. It also utilizes many of the same chips as the iPod.”

“Apple’s ability to develop, launch, and support new products, using the same R&D and sales and marketing investments, creates [earnings] leverage that is substantially greater than people thought even six or twelve months ago,” said Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey in a recent interview.