Morning Report: Apple Speaks Out on Spotlight Privacy, RapidWeaver 6 Released

Call it the calm after the storm: Now that OS X Yosemite, iOS 8.1, new iPads, and Retina iMacs have hit the streets, Apple is likely to get a little quieter leading up to the holiday season — but not before touting huge sales for the iPhone 6 during Monday's quarterly earnings announcement. Cupertino had a bit to say about Spotlight privacy yesterday as well, and our Tuesday Morning Report also looks at a couple of new software offerings for OS X as well.

Apple Comments on Spotlight Privacy in OS X Yosemite, iOS 8

One of the more convenient new features in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite is Spotlight Suggestions, which serves up a wealth of information with every search at the expense of just a bit of your privacy. But exactly how much? iMore reported Monday that Apple has done "an excellent job balancing as much convenience as possible" while maintaining a delicate balance between privacy and security.

"We are absolutely committed to protecting our users' privacy and have built privacy right into our products," Apple said in a statement to iMore. "For Spotlight Suggestions we minimize the amount of information sent to Apple. Apple doesn't retain IP addresses from users' devices. Spotlight blurs the location on the device so it never sends an exact location to Apple. Spotlight doesn't use a persistent identifier, so a user's search history can't be created by Apple or anyone else. Apple devices only use a temporary anonymous session ID for a 15-minute period before the ID is discarded."

The same protections apply to partner Microsoft, whose Bing service powers a lot of the search results returned by Spotlight Suggestions. For the extra paranoid, Apple also reminds users that they can choose to opt out of Spotlight Suggestions, Bing search, or even Location Services for Spotlight.

Realmac Skips Mac App Store for RapidWeaver 6 (For Now)

After teasing the release in a blog post last week, Realmac Software officially launched RapidWeaver 6 on Tuesday, a major new update to the company's popular all-in-one solution for building websites without a lot of back-breaking code. Built exclusively for OS X Mavericks and OS X Yosemite with native 64-bit support for the first time ever, RapidWeaver 6 offers a complete user interface redesign with a new publishing engine that's up to 3x faster than the previous version.

Unfortunately for Mac App Store customers, Realmac has decided to forego submitting RapidWeaver 6 to Apple's OS X storefront at launch — but promises the new version has been "built with App Store submission in mind" and plans to release the software to the MAS in the near future, after the first few updates have been pushed to the latest version.

RapidWeaver 6 also includes five new responsive themes, an Addons Manager, presets for previewing what websites will look like on iOS devices, a new Markdown page type, and site-wide code support for HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Available today from the Realmac Software website, RapidWeaver 6 costs $89.99 for new users, with a free trial download as well as upgrades from any previous version also available.

Paragon Introduces Boot Camp Backup Beta for OS X

Moving to a new operating system or system is never fun, but Paragon Software Group is making the process a little bit easier for Mac OS X users with Boot Camp Backup. Now available as a public beta release, this software promises "the first unified backup, restore, and Windows system migration software for Mac OS X." Boot Camp Backup solves a major pain point for dual-boot users since Time Machine doesn't back up a Boot Camp configuration, offering a sector-level backup of both OS X and Windows installations. The beta release can be downloaded free of charge until the commercial release scheduled for November, with testers being offered a 30 percent discount on the final version.

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