This week, all big companies are holding conferences with their shareholders to talk about the revenues they had in the first fiscal quarter of the year, and Apple is no exception. While Microsoft doesn't seem to have taken any financial hit due to the behaviour under expectations of the Vista operating system, Apple just made public the fact that Q1 2008 was heir best quarter ever!

To make a long story short, Apple's financial results for the quarter that ended on the 29th of December exceeded anything else analysts have seen so far, but only when it comes to Steve Jobs' company, of course! In this period, Apple saw the best revenue and earnings per quarter in its history.

While back in 2007, Apple got a $7.1 billion revenue, with a net profit of $1 billion, in the same period, this year we're talking about a revenue of $9.6 billion, and a net profit of $1.58 billion. International sales contributed with 45 percent to the quarter's revenue, and I am sure the iPhone had a serious part to play in this.

For the quarter we're talking about, figures look like this: 2,319,000 Macs (44 percent unit growth, and 47 percent revenue growth over the previous year), 2,315,000 iPhones, and an impressive 22,121,000 iPods, for a growth of 5 percent in units and 17 percent in revenue, compared to last year's same quarter iPod sales.

These being said, all we need to do is sit back and wait, because things look interesting, and Apple holds all the cards to keep growing. According to Steve Jobs, “We have an incredibly strong new product pipeline for 2008, starting with MacBook Air, Mac Pro and iTunes Movie Rentals in the first two weeks.”, and while others simply say things like these without any solid backup, I think Steve is right, this time.

While Windows Vista struggles to have the first service pack released, Apple's Mac OS X "Leopard" got very close to its second update. According to various sources from inside the company, Mac OS X 10.5.2, the second update to Mac OS X "Leopard", is going to be the most significant update Apple ever released to Mac OS, so let's see what do we know about it at this time...

Rumors started to flow about the fact that this update to Leopard will include over 100 new features, and the most important of them should be the ability to share DVD/CD drives, as it was seen on the new MacBook Air, Time Machine's capability to use a disk connected to the Airport Express as a backup location (finally!), a drop down menu for Time Machine in the menu bar, the reintroduction of the backup to network drive feature to the same Time Machine, an option that allows you to turn on menu bar translucency in Desktop Preferences, as well as a bunch of other improvements and tweaks.

Pretty impressive, isn't it? Well, we'll have to wait and see how the new Leopard is going to look and feel for ourselves, and the good news is that the release of this update may happen in any moment, according to certain sources. Unfortunately, these sources are not official, and Apple doesn't say anything about the subject, as usual, so I wouldn't bet my life on seeing Leopard updated this week, or even this month. Anyway, no matter when this is going to happen, we'll keep you informed!

I am sure most of you didn't heard about Zimbra so far. Don't worry, today I heard of them for the first time, too. Zimbra is a division of Yahoo!, and I am writing about it here because they recently expanded their support to various Apple products, such as Safari 3 or CalDAV for Mac OS X. To find out more about this, read on...

<-120x240 Vertical Banner - left->The flagship product of this Yahoo! division is Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and this application suite's current version is labeled 5.0. The Collabortaion Suite package includes email, contacts, a shared calendar, VoIP, as well as online document authoring, with the help of a rich browser-based interface.

Now, getting back to Zimbra and Apple, you should know that the new Zimbra Collaboration Suite fully supports Safari 3, so now you can take full advantage of this browser while working with your Zimbra Documents. Even more, the CalDAV, a key feature for iCal 3 users using Mac OS X Leopard, is also supported, so they should now be able to easily sync and browse their free/busy time and appointments schedule with both public and personal calendars.

At last, if you have an iPhone, things look even better, because the Collaboration Suite is also available for Apple's mobiles, via the Zimbra Mobile HTML client. After the latest enhancements to the product, Zimbra Connector for Apple iSync allows easy sync of email, address books and calendars between Apple computers and mobile phones.

At this time, there are two versions of the suite available - the Open Source Edition, freely available, and the commercially supported Network Edition, available for a 60-days free trial. For more details about pricing, visit this page.

The world we're living in is shaped by Math, before anything else (no matter the theory you believe in regarding the creation of Earth & Universe), and there is a lot of interesting stuff to be discovered when using this science and a computer. Unfortunately, I hate Math, but since random numbers don't require any special knowledge, I was thrilled to find a program that "uses natural looking random noise to create images and movies from scratch"...

The name of this program is FluidNoise, and it just got its first public version released. FluidNoise is developed by FluidMac, a company run by developer David Frampton, based in Wellington, New Zealand. So... what can be done with this program, after all?

The answer is simple - you can create height maps and textures for terrain generation in games and 3D modelling, tiling background images for websites, background still images or animations for various purposes, as well as "an augmented substitute to noise generators in compositing or image creation applications".

Featuring full drag and drop support, undo/redo functions, and the ability to save parameters for later use, FluidNoise allows you to export 8 bit or 32 bit images, as well as animated sequences, including the QuickTime format.

Priced at $20, FluidNoise requires at least Mac OS X 10.4, and comes as a Universal Binary for both older PowerPC Macs and the new Intel-powered Macs. To try this program for yourselves, download a trial from here. Have fun!

Only a week after its introduction, the MacBook Air is one of the hottest topics of the IT world. A lot of people love it (I am one of those, I must admit), maybe some of these already got one, and would do anything to defend the image of their favorite laptop, others are trying to bury it, using the price as one of their best weapons, while others simply sit back and enjoy the show...

Soon after its introduction at this year's MacWorld Expo, during a keynote that a lot of voices on the Internet claimed to be way below the expectations, most people started to claim that the MacBook Air is too expensive. Well, they may be right, especially since the ones that may be delighted to use the MacBook Air (I am talking about students here) have a pretty limited budget, in most cases, but I am sure that, in the long run, it may be worth the price.

We only have to wait a little longer to see some serious price drops for the solid state drives, because a MacBook Air with a SSD would be great, but a price tag of $3,100 is completely out of this world, especially since you only get 64GB of storage space on your new Apple laptop for the price...

Other people said the Air will have heat problems, and the only way to go is to grab the SSD model, but... where's the truth? The truth is that, first of all, everyone expected Steve Jobs to announce the iSpaceship, and that isn't possible just yet, and second, being given all this "love-it-or-hate-it" crowd gathered by the MacBook Air, this laptop will only get more and more popular, at least in the news, if not with users all over the world.

After all, the iPhone has shown the way for the a lot of mobile phones that followed it, and maybe that's exactly what the MacBook Air is all about, with its MIA optical drive and "it's-not-here" Ethernet port, leaving only the wireless communication as a link to the outside world. My only fear is that, this time, the MacBook Air may be one step too far ahead...