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Minimal Mac
Stanislav Datskovskiy, Loper OS
Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a “bicycle for the mind.” But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)
Ryan Nakashima, The Associated Press
Although there are things to like about Google's and Amazon's systems, they both favor streaming, which isn't how I want to listen to music when I'm not at a computer.
Apple's iTunes Match is fundamentally more oriented to work with downloading in mind, and it meshes well with your existing song library, either on your device or on your computer.
Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker
While most people will still find a quick Command+C the easiest way, PopClip wants to make it simple for users who might be more used to iOS.
Pradnya Joshi, New York Times
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
A source confirmed to Ars that a handful of the new iOS 5.1 APIs allow developers to specifically handle the response from Siri's speech-recognition servers. These APIs don't allow developers to integrate Siri support for controlling an app the way that Apple has with, say, Messages or Reminders. But it does open up the possibility to better handle text dictation input.
Eric Slivka, MacRumors
Dan Moren, Macworld
Lex Friedman, Macworld
The company behind iTether published a statement on Tuesday in light of the app's removal, claiming that Apple cited the fact that the app “burdens the carrier network” in explaining the decision to unapprove it—even though, Tether claims, Apple understood the app’s primary function before it was released.
Kirk McElhearn, Macworld
Is it worth paying for the extra coverage? What exactly does AppleCare cover, and how does it work? Here's a guide to AppleCare to help you decide if you should buy this extended warranty with your next Apple product.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Whenever your iPhone 4S displays the on-screen keyboard, there’s a microphone icon at the bottom left; if you tap that icon, Siri will begin transcribing whatever you dictate. But you can save yourself that tap by lifting your iPhone to your ear when the keyboard appears on the screen. A single tone will sound (as opposed to Siri’s more traditional double-beep) to indicate that your 4S is listening and ready to transcribe. When you’re finished dictating, simply lower the phone again.
Karl Hodge, Macworld
ShareMouse is an easy-to-use virtual keyboard and mouse sharing program. Simply plug a keyboard and mouse into one computer on your network, and you’ll be able to use them on any other local machine that has the program installed.
Arnold Kim, MacRumors
Tether.com has somehow gotten App Store approval for their iPhone companion application "iTether". The $14.99 App Store app allows users to share their iPhone's internet connection with their Mac or PC computer over USB.
David W. Martin, Cult Of Mac
The old drag-to-remove option still works, but not without the Command key.
Topher Kessler, CNET
Adam Dachis, Lifehacker
Our favorite is OnyX for its exhaustive feature set that provides both basic and easy options for any kind of user.
Christopher Breen, Macworld
Kelly Hodgkins, TUAW
Sharon Zardetto, Macworld
What could possibly be “unexpected” when it comes to those four humble directional keys? Perhaps it’s that, totally unadorned (that is, without a modifier such as Command or Control), they can do more than just move an insertion point around in text or select something in a list.
Shawn Blanc
Jonathan Seff, Macworld
If you’re in a giving mood, there’s no better place to shop for the Apple-device-users on your list than the iTunes Store.
Matt Galligan
Brent Simmons, Inessential
But the hardest part of text editing remains text navigation. Moving around. Getting to the thing you want to edit.
Paul Thurrott, Supersite For Windows
Brian X. Chen, New York Times
A Black Friday visit to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif., offered a glimpse of the new technology Apple is using to speed purchases.
A store employee, Diego Aguirre, demonstrated an internal application running on iPod Touches that, for the last few weeks, has had the ability to show the in-store location of a shopper who has come to pick up a purchase.
Dave Bailey, Computing
Michael deAgonia, Computerworld
This is what makes Siri different—and better—than earlier voice technology. With Siri, the syntax—that is, the way you phrase an inquiry—doesn’t always have to be exact. For the most part, when you make a request for information, dictate an email or issue a command, the technology behind Siri parses out what is meant and responds accordingly. As noted, most phones understand a “dial” command followed by a string of numbers, but Siri knows exactly what to do when told to “create a reminder for every Thursday morning at 7:08 to take out the trash.”
Fabien Sanglard's Non-Blog
Riva Richmond, New York Times
Don Southard, MacStories
Black Friday is here and the deals are pouring in. Apple has announced this year’s Black Friday one-day shopping event. They have dropped their prices on Macs, iPads, iPods, and a pluthera of accessories.
Tony Bradley, PCWorld
The Sophos Naked Security blog reports that there are fake iTunes gift certificates being distributed via email which are actually malware-laden file attachments. The prospect of a free $50 to spend shopping on iTunes is a compelling deal for rabid Black Friday shoppers.
Adam Satariano, Bloomberg
“We were notified that the app was removed,” said Paul Thelen, founder of Big Fish, a game publisher in Seattle. The app had been available since Nov. 18, he said. “We’re trying to follow up with Apple to try to figure out what happened.”
Thelen said he was surprised by the move because Big Fish had worked with Apple for several weeks to ensure that it met the requirements for recurring monthly charges made through the App Store, a method most commonly used by magazines and newspaper publishers.
Sharon Zardetto, Macworld
When you add it to common key combinations it lets you access all sorts of unexpected commands.
Christopher Breen, Macworld
Leah Yamshon, Macworld
There are a few ways to beat waiting in a long line. It just takes a little planning ahead.
Aaron Pressman, Gravitational Pull
That’s a minimum of 10 clicks and slides to set one reminder.
Adam Satariano, Bloomberg
Apple Inc. is letting a video-game company offer its titles by subscription on the iPad, expanding the role of a feature typically used by magazine and newspaper publishers.
Big Fish Games, a Seattle-based game publisher, won approval from Apple to become the first to offer users access to dozens of titles for $6.99 a month. Until now, games have only been available one at a time, requiring users to download individual applications.
Christopher Breen, Macworld
While it’s easier to manage a single Mac, it’s still possible to have control over multiple Macs within your home. Not only can you remotely configure parental controls on another computer, you can also monitor what your kids do with their Macs, limit the hours they have Internet access, and share media between the computers within your home.
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
VMware has reversed course on allowing users to virtualize client installs of Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard. The company made a short post on its blog late Monday acknowledging the extra client support that appeared in Fusion 4.1, but claimed the software's previous checks for the server editions of those operating systems had been left out. VMware therefore plans to issue an update that will once again restrict users to installing only Leopard Server, Snow Leopard Server, Lion, or Lion Server.
Brendan Wilhide, Macworld
Anyone who has sat down to try and write a story can tell you that the actual writing is the most daunting thing about the writing process. One of the best ways to overcome writer’s block is to plan your story and your characters. Subplot is designed to help you do just that, so you have more time to focus on writing.
John Brownlee, Cult Of Mac
Graham Spencer, MacStories
Apple has begun placing banners on its online Apple Stores across the world, indicating that it will be holding a sale this Friday – on the yearly “Black Friday” as it is known in the US.
Graham Spencer, MacStories
This latest advert, “Love”, follows the general style of their previous iPad 2 adverts — with a strong narrator intertwined with people using the iPad, highlighting an emotional connection.
Matthew Panzarino, The Next Web
With the announcement of its new Search app, Google gave iPad users more than just a slick and well-made native search app that bests the experience on any Android tablet. It also managed to squeeze the core elements of Chrome OS into Apple’s ecosystem.
Ron Johnson, Harvard Business Review
So the challenge for retailers isn't "how do we mimic the Apple Store" or any other store that seems like a good model. It's a very different problem, one that's conceptually similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn't ask, "How do we build a phone that can achieve a two percent market share?" He asked, "How do we reinvent the telephone?" In the same way, retailers shouldn't be asking, "How do we create a store that's going to do $15 million a year?" They should be asking, "How do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers' lives?"
Adam Berenstain, Mac Life
While pricey as a simple replacement for Apple’s Calculator, Soulver is worth a look if you want something less cumbersome than a spreadsheet but much more powerful than the back of a napkin for working out complex calculations.
Adam Dachis, Lifehacker
Parallels Desktop is really a well-thought out application that has worked to consistently improve overall performance with every version and add new features to make virtualization easy enough for anybody.
Christopher Breen, Macworld
Although you can configure this Mac so that it has just a single account, you can make it more enjoyable for each member of your family to use (and easier for you to control) by creating a separate user account for each family member. Do this and everyone has a place to put their stuff, plus you have the power to control exactly what each user can do with the Mac.
Glenn Fleishman, Macworld
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Hints reader Keir-thomas discovered a secret preference setting built into OS X Lion that allows song notifications to pop up over the iTunes Dock icon.
Sharon Zardetto, Macworld
Zoom around the Finder and your favorite apps with these Tab-key tricks.
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
Thomas Jones, The Guardian
More pre-schoolers know how to use a smartphone than tie their shoelaces. Is this the future of child learning, or a potent image of 21st-century alienation?
Laurence Cable, TechRadar
Why Lion's Autosave and Versions features are a real boon.
Lauren Crabbe, Macworld
Starting with the Apple programs you already have on your Mac or iOS device, and ending with sites you may not be familiar with, here's a walk through a veritable winter wonderland of photo card-making options.
FairerPlatform
If you uninstall Flash, your Mac will use less memory, be more stable and more secure. You will also lose a small portion of the internet (mostly advertising), but the math and weight of history are against Flash.
Dennis Sellers, MacNews
Jason Snell, Macworld
Eric Slivka, MacRumors
Kelly Hodgkins, TUAW
Apple's iTunes Store in China received a major upgrade this week. The store now accepts payment in the local currency, RMB, and lets users replenish their iTunes account using bank cards from over a dozen Chinese banks.
Matt Tinsley, TUAW
Topher Kessler, CNET
When you open a document or click a link in OS X, the system launches a program that can read it. While OS X provides options to change the programs associated with documents, there is no option to clear all application associations for a file type.
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
Michael Rose, TUAW
WriteRoom iOS is among the most comfortable and aesthetically pleasant editors I've tried, though, and for narrative work without a lot of links or Markdown syntax, it's a winner.
Eric Slivka, MacRumors
Apple has updated its release notes to reveal that the 4.4.3 update adds support for Netflix streaming in Mexico and an audio output issue when the connected television set is turned off.
Rob Griffiths, Macworld
Parallels 7 is a fast, stable, and highly customizable way to run Windows on a Mac. Although its interface is focused on running Windows on the Mac, it also does well with other operating systems. There are minor issues with the built-in Windows purchasing and defaulting with Windows running as the Administrator, but neither of these are deal breakers.
TJ Luoma, TUAW
Don't let years of Spotlight's simplistic UI overwhelm you; options and choices are a good thing. Take a minute to see what's available, and just start searching.
Jason Snell, Macworld
Having my entire music library with me, wherever I go, is more compelling than I thought it would be.
Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times
Oregon last week became the first state in the country to use iPads to allow people with disabilities to vote, and it intends to use them again for another election in January. Several other states are expected to follow suit with iPads or other tablets, possibly as early as for next year’s presidential election.
Nick Bilton, New York Times
Companies are producing dozens of inexpensive smartphone attachments that can easily convert a mobile phone into a mini-professional camera. These products include zoom, fisheye and ultra-up-close macro lenses — all designed to snap onto a smartphone and make photos look as if they were shot with an expensive S.L.R. camera. And for the most part, they are easy to use.
Jordan Golson, MacRumors
Chris Rawson, TUAW
Dan Moren, Macworld
Dave Winer, Scripting News
Designers really need to hear the following, loud and clear: The iPad browser is fully capable. It doesn't need you to treat it differently. You're fighting with users when you get fancy. Just stick with what works on the desktop.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
With iTunes Match enabled, your iOS device will automatically remove some downloaded songs over time. The algorithm is smart—older and least-played tracks are removed first.
Adam Rosen, Cult Of Mac
Ryan Paul, Ars Technica
Any Siri client will have to include a key from an actual iPhone 4S in order to operate. If a developer embeds a key in a Siri client application that is widely distributed to users, Apple could simply disable the application by locking out that key.
It’s clear that Apple’s decision to limit Siri to the iPhone 4S and not roll it out to previous iterations of the device was not motivated by the hardware constraints of older iPhones. That means it’s still theoretically possible for Apple to make the feature available to older iPhones in a future update.
Sharon Zardetto, Macworld
Serenity Caldwell, Macworld
Here are some of the most common queries, concerns, and misconceptions about Apple’s music service, laid out for your reading pleasure.
David W. Martin, Cult Of Mac
Gary Coyne, Applelinks
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
But the service isn't necessarily as straightforward as it seems, and there are plenty of questions floating around about how, exactly, Apple determines which songs to "match," which to upload, and which to leave behind. We put together the answers to some of the most common questions and problems we've seen so far in hopes of clearing up confusion about how iTunes Match does and doesn't work.
Nick Wingfield, New York Times
While corporate technology buyers say Apple does not try to hide the fact that consumers are still its top priority, they note that the company has gotten easier to work with in recent years, adding features to its devices that make them more palatable to business. It also doesn’t hurt that Apple’s new chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, is known to be far more at ease meeting with the C.I.O.’s Mr. Jobs once so memorably disparaged.
Dan Moren, Macworld
Apple has announced that Arthur Levinson has been appointed chairman of the company’s board of directors. The role, which was previously held by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs upon his resignation as chief executive officer, has been vacant since Jobs died last month. Disney CEO Bob Iger has also been named to the board.
David Chartier, Macworld
Day One is a journaling app that focuses on making it easy to jot down private thoughts, ideas, or anything else you want to keep for posterity, and revisit it all down the road. The program offers a unique, yet straightforward and polished interface for creating entries, as well as calendar tools for revisiting recent entries or quickly flipping back through the months.
Lucian Constantin, Macworld
Apple’s iTunes 10.5.1 update addresses a weakness in the application’s update mechanism that could be exploited to trick users into visiting malicious websites.
Terrence O'Brien, Engadget
IconSettings lets you quickly access or toggle various settings on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, provided its running iOS 5. Setting it up is as simple as saving a bookmark to your home screen.
Jason Snell, Macworld
Jim Dalrymple, The Loop
What Core uncovered was a mechanism that’s only used by Apple for its internal system daemons. This isn’t something that developers would actually use for an application, so it doesn’t affect them — or the user — at all.
Serenity Caldwell, Macworld
Any computer that is authorized to play protected iTunes music can add that music to iTunes Match. This is the case even if the Apple ID being used for iTunes Match isn’t the same one that was used to buy the music.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Dan Moren, Macworld
So, now that the feature is actually available, what can you expect? I’ve had some time to take iTunes Match for a spin, so here’s a look at what it’s all about.
Jason Snell, Macworld
Christopher Breen, Macworld
Lex Friedman, Macworld
On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match in the United States, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC.
Federico Viticci, MacStories
Sharon Zardetto, Macworld
The Esc key has long been the “get me outta here” panacea for many things: canceling a dialog box, getting rid of a button-less splash screen, closing a menu that you clicked open. (Esc is, after all, short for "escape.") But those are only the obvious things. Here’s a handful of less-than-obvious but just-as-handy solutions the Esc key provides.
Aayush Arya, The Next Web
When you boot up a Mac and use Mac OS X for the first time, the best you can do with the keyboard is type using the standard characters that form the English language and use a few keyboard shortcuts that you are familiar with. But your keyboarding abilities on Mac OS X can be taken quite a bit beyond that, in ways not obvious to many, and in this article we take a look at the various ways you can do that.
Dan Frakes, Macworld
In a well-lit office, the K750’s battery takes advantage of that ambient light to maintain a full charge; according to Logitech, that would let you use the K750 for three months in total darkness. For obvious reasons, I wasn’t able to test this claim, but in real-world use, it means that if you’re using the K750 in most office environments, you’ll never have to worry about a low battery.
David Howell, Macworld
Apple’s own Bluetooth keyboard is a good choice for any iOS device when an external keyboard is needed.
Charles Moore, AppleTell
Lisa Gee, The Independent
Exploring the realms of digital literature can feel a bit “it’s writing, Jim, but not as we know it”. From e-books to book apps, from web-based artworks to keitai shousetsu – the ultra-concise mobile phone novels popular in Japan – there’s a brain-stretching multiplicity of forms and content-styles to navigate. And the only thing everyone involved seems to agree on is that it’s still early days. It’s early days for readers too: most of us are only now adjusting to straightforward e-books.
David Galloway, Lifehacker
For a lot less bloat and a more streamlined experience give Simplier a try—it's a simple music player that uses your existing iTunes music library.
Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian
The wide popularity of tablet computers such as the iPad has made digital entrepreneurs look again at the commercial possibilities of the kitchen. Most updated cooking apps now offer alternative ways of seeing each recipe, including a step-by-step guide for beginners and a wordless, graphic illustration that serves as a visual reminder for more assured cooks.
Harry Mccracken, Time
Everybody who learns about this breakthrough has the same question: What’s to stop people from merely pretending to use EasyPay, then sauntering out of the store’s front door without actually having paid? I don’t know what Apple is or isn’t doing to foil shoplifters. For all I know, there’s some complicated monitoring system keeping tabs on who’s bought what with EasyPay. But I wouldn’t be stunned if there wasn’t.
Apple Stores aren’t security-free zones; for one thing, they’ve got cameras in their ceilings. But already, Apple clearly errs on the side of an ingratiating shopping experience over hardcore anti-shoplifting tactics. It leaves products on shelves that other stores lock up in cases, and the demonstration Macs and other products are lightly tethered to the tables rather than being practically welded in place.
Megan Lavey-Heaton, TUAW
Apple has sent out emails to registered owners of 1st generation iPod nanos stating that certain iPod nanos created between September 2005 and January 2006 might overheat and pose a safety risk. This is because of a manufacturing defect from a single supplier, and the likelihood of problems increases as the model ages.
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
Apps that conform to Apple's sandbox design use a set of "entitlement" profiles defined by Apple; those profiles determine which system resources it can use and which are off limits. CoreLabs discovered that some of the limits in the default profiles can actually be circumvented by triggering certain Apple Events. In particular, Apple Events can cause launchd to launch a separate process without sandbox restrictions.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Jim Dalrymple, The Loop
“The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices,” an Apple spokesperson told The Loop. “We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”
Ted Landau, Macworld
After spending around twenty minutes experimenting with various possibilities, I spotted the culprit. It was in the Status Bar that appears at the bottom of Finder windows. The Bar read: “0 GB available.” As in zero, zip, nada, zilch.
AppleInsider
Tom Negrino, Macworld
When you already have one of—if not the—most robust and full-featured text editors available, what does a company do for an encore? Bare Bones Software chose, with BBEdit 10, to create a new version designed to make BBEdit easier to use and more accessible for existing users.
Jordan Golson, MacRumors
Jordan Golson, MacRumors
The update fixes an issue where the machine would shut off unexpectedly under heavy processor load, even when plugged in.
Steven Sande, TUAW
Alexandra Chang, Macworld
Lex Friedman, Macworld
The company’s customer service team told one Macworld reader via email that after releasing this update, “we will no longer be updating or supporting Stanza…"
Fraser Speirs
Firstly, there's a big win in the fact that the OTA update is also a delta update - meaning that only the changes from the previous version are downloaded, not the whole operating system. Where iOS 5.0.0 was over 700MB, my iPad only downloaded a package of about 40MB in order to update to iOS 5.0.1.
The next best thing about OTA updates is that they can be done unattended. They won't be installed automatically, but once you go into Settings > General > Software Update and hit "Download and Install", you don't have to touch the device again.
Neil Hughes, AppleInsider
The combined efforts of both Apple and its employees have resulted in more than $2.6 million being donated to nonprofit organizations since a corporate matching program began in mid-September.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Thursday’s release of iOS 5.0.1 marked the first time that public upgrades to the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can be installed directly on those devices, without requiring a visit to iTunes.
Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
David Pogue, New York Times
I doubt that people with severe motor control challenges represent a financially significant number of the iPhone’s millions of customers. But somebody at Apple took them seriously enough to write a complete, elegant and thoughtful feature that takes down most of the barriers to using an app phone.
I, for one, am impressed.
Jim Dalrymple, The Loop
According to Apple, the update fixes bugs affecting battery life; adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad; resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud; and improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation.
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
Nuance released on Thursday a new speech-to-text app for Mac users called Dragon Express. The pared-down app features the same speech recognition engine as its full-featured, $199 cousin Dragon Dictate, but at a much lower price.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Among the app’s best features are its ability to sync to-do lists and share them with other users via iCloud and its tight integration with Siri on the iPhone 4S.
Nicola Morrison, Macworld
Secure Mac Programming
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS
Christopher Breen, Macworld
Christopher Breen, Macworld
It’s a better experience when run on the iPad because of the larger work surface and ability to use it with external controllers and microphones. But the fact that Apple could create a version as accessible as this one, for more diminutive iOS devices, is a testament to the brilliance of GarageBand’s designers. Plus, the refinements and improvements brought with this version of the app make it a better and more musical tool.
Rob Griffiths, Macworld
Fusion 4 is a nice upgrade from Fusion 3; it's fast and stable, the interface is very Mac-like, and its drag-and-drop installation is about as easy as it gets. The redesigned virtual machine settings and library windows are great improvements over their predecessors. It'd be nice if Linux virtual machines supported OpenGL acceleration, and overall, video acceleration isn't as speedy as it could be.
Eric Slivka, MacRumors
Michael Grothaus, TUAW
With virtually no fanfare -- or even a press release -- The Criterion Collection has made 46 of its 680 films available on iTunes. Among the films released are art house classics any lovers of cinema will recognize, including The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa, and The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut.
Julia Moskin, New York Times
“I never thought I would say this, but I don’t go anywhere without my iPad,” said Kristin Young, a collector of cookbooks in Santa Barbara, Calif., who said that even her favorite volumes are gathering dust. “If it’s not on my tablet, it’s just not useful anymore.”
Serenity Caldwell, Macworld
Barney Jopson And Joseph Menn, Financial Times
Apple has simplified shopping at its bricks-and-mortar stores by introducing new ordering and payment methods that underscore its credentials as a pacesetter in retail innovation.
Federico Viticci, MacStories
Slash Lane, AppleInsider
The company on Tuesday posted a new support document detailing the Apple Adapter Replacement Program, revealing that some customers have received notices referring to the program. As part of the resolution, Apple has referred customers to the website adaptersettlement.com, which gives details on a cash payment available to those who own a 60-watt or 85-watt MagSafe MPM-1 T-shaped Power Adapter.
Macworld
Take your best pictures and make them better with editing. iPhoto includes most of the image-editing tools that casual photographers need to spruce up their photos. If you use iPhoto to manage your photo collection, try these fixes before cracking open a dedicated image editor.
Mike Gikas, Consumer Reports
In special reception tests of the iPhone 4S that duplicated those we did on the iPhone 4, the newer phone did not display the same reception flaw, which involves a loss of signal strength when you touch a spot on the phone’s lower left side while you’re in an area with a weak signal.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
Mickey is one of the numerous clock faces Apple now offers on the iPod nano, and Apple shows a full working, ticking preview of the clock on its website. Here’s how to grab it for your Mac.
Eric Slivka, MacRumors
Adam Dachis, Lifehacker
Mac OS X includes a great terminal editor, but among the handful of alternatives is one that easily rises above them all. iTerm2 is our pick for the best terminal emulator for Mac OS X thanks to its vast number of time-saving features and high level of customizability.
Joshua Schnell, Macgasm
Andy Greenberg, Forbes
At the SysCan conference in Taiwan next week, Miller plans to present a method that exploits a flaw in Apple’s restrictions on code signing on iOS devices, the security measure that allows only Apple-approved commands to run in an iPhone or iPad’s memory. Using his method–and Miller has already planted a sleeper app in Apple’s App Store to demonstrate the trick–an app can phone home to a remote computer that downloads new unapproved commands onto the device and executes them at will, including stealing the user’s photos, reading contacts, making the phone vibrate or play sounds, or otherwise repurposing normal iOS app functions for malicious ends.
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
Tom Kaneshige, CIO
Even though hospitals have emerged as early iPad adopters-tech-averse doctors supposedly love them, many hurdles remain for the iPad in healthcare. Chief among them is the legacy app world that clinicians depend on to get their jobs done. Apple’s new iCloud storage service is also cause for “trepidation,” Wright says.
Glenn Fleishman, TidBITS
Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
Both apps give you a variety of retro looks to choose from, and both can be quite simple to use. However, each app takes a slightly different approach to achieving an aged or vintage photo look—the differences in those approaches will likely appeal to different kinds of users.
Dan Frakes, Macworld
But there are notable differences between what gets synced using each method—some things are exclusively iCloud or Wi-Fi Sync, while other things can be synced via either method. And it’s important to note that Wi-Fi sync and iCloud sync aren’t mutually exclusive. You can, and mostly likely will, use both methods depending on the situation and your settings. Which is why it’s easy to get confused about the differences and similarities between the two.
Christopher Breen, Macworld
Jeff Carlson, TidBITS
Photoshop Elements 10 Editor expands its array of Guided Edits to easily create shallow depth of field effects, dreamy Orton effects, and more. It also adds the capability to align text to a path, paint using new Smart Brush designs, and recompose photos using crop guides.
Richard Gaywood, TUAW
Ed Rhee, CNET
If you're unhappy with the changes to Google Reader, we've highlighted some alternative feed aggregators to consider.
Matt Richtel, New York Times
The demand for technology in classrooms has given rise to a slick and fast-growing sales force. Makers of computers and other gear vigorously court educators as they vie for billions of dollars in school financing. Sometimes inviting criticism of their zealous marketing, they pitch via e-mail, make cold calls, arrange luncheons and hold community meetings.
But Apple in particular woos the education market with a state-of-the art sales operation that educators say is unique, and that, public-interest watchdogs say, raises some concerns. Along with more traditional methods, Apple invites educators from around the country to “executive briefings,” which participants describe as equal parts conversation, seminar and backstage pass.
Corey Woodcox, Macgasm
Glenn Fleishman, Macworld
Put these things together, and it means that whenever someone is using your Mac via the Guest User feature, your Mac can connect to the Internet, log in invisibly to your iCloud account, and report your location via Find My Mac.
Eric Slivka, MacRumors
Josh Ong, AppleInsider
Apple will temporarily close its flagship Fifth Ave retail store in New York on Thursday evening in preparation for the unveiling of the newly redesigned glass cube on Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.
Wil Shipley, Call Me Fishmeal
Meanwhile, we need to address real security in Mac OS X. We all want to feel as comfortable putting apps on our Macs as we do on our iPhones. I certainly admit requiring all apps come from the Mac App Store would do it, but giving developers access to their certificates is much less draconian and wouldn’t chase the free thinkers off Apple’s platform.
Adam Satariano And Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek
Most of Apple’s customers have probably never given that green light a second thought, but its creation speaks to a massive competitive advantage for Apple: Operations. This is the world of manufacturing, procurement, and logistics in which the new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, excelled, earning him the trust of Steve Jobs. According to more than a dozen interviews with former employees, executives at suppliers, and management experts familiar with the company’s operations, Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over nearly every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume—and its occasional ruthlessness—Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight. “Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, the former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”
Jacob Aron, New Scientist
Yes, says Boris Katz, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at MIT. He says Apple has created a "very impressive piece of engineering" by combining established techniques from fields such as voice recognition and natural language processing.
Phil Blunsom, who researches machine learning at the University of Oxford, stresses that Apple hasn't just put together existing techniques. But he has reservations: "The difficulty is that each one of these systems makes errors, and when they are fed into each other the errors multiply."
Josh Lowensohn, CNET
J. Freedom Du Lac, Washington Post
Heather E. Henderson sat down for lunch one recent afternoon at Bourbon Steak, the Georgetown Four Seasons restaurant where she’s a regular. She ordered raw oysters, Singapore noodles and one of the head bartender’s house-made apple sodas.
Then, she engaged her lunch companion: the iPhone that has commanded — or at least divided — Henderson’s attention on countless eating excursions.
Jackie Dove, Macworld
Media Composer 6 and Symphony 6 have been rebuilt on a new 64-bit architecture that promises to boost performance and flexibility. These applications feature a sleek, new interface and include support for third-party hardware, AVCHD and RED Epic with Avid Media Access (AMA), Avid DNxHD 444 codec, and Avid Artist Color.
Glenn Fleishman, Macworld
The program is a network viewer and troubleshooter that provides insight into the many different kinds of activity constantly occurring on any Ethernet or Wi-Fi network. This includes Bonjour activity, in which devices and services continuously say, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” to announce what they can do; active devices on the network and information about them; and a vast array of well-presented data for each Wi-Fi base station on the network to which you’re connected.
Christopher Breen, Macworld
If you've been having battery-life problems with your iOS 5 devices, you could sit back and wait for Apple’s promised iOS update to fix the problem. But if you’re more inclined to take an active approach, there are some things you can do to track down—and maybe even tackle—the source of your power problems.
Steven Sande, TUAW
Rich Mogull, TidBITS
iCloud data isn’t necessarily at greater risk than it was in MobileMe, but when you delete it from iCloud, it’s gone from the source, and recovery is definitely more difficult than it used to be.
Pauli Olavi Ojala, Naming Things
One side-effect of the sandbox model which makes me particularly sad and nostalgic is that it kills the notion of plugins. This will also affect many of Apple’s own pro apps on the App Store.
Glenn Fleishman, Macworld
Sophos SafeGuard Disk Encryption for Mac offers full-disk encryption (FDE) for the Mac, with protection at boot time from unauthorized access. FDE scrambles the entire contents of a disk drive, rendering it ostensibly unrecoverable without access to the long encryption key used, or a shorter account passphrase that unlocks that key.
Mel Martin, TUAW
The free app strives to provide you with a personalized magazine drawn from Yahoo! and other content sources like Scientific American, Consumer Reports News, Wired, Forbes, and Parenting.
Graham Spencer, MacStories
Jonny Evans, Computerworld
The future of computing is the device you hold in your pocket, the services and software as a service solutions you can access using that device, notions of distributed computing and the acceptance that you don't need all the power of the PC universe inside the device you own, you just need to be able to access that much power using cloud-based services now and then.
Topher Kessler, CNET
If this happens to you, the problem at hand likely arises from a fault in the way Preview is interacting with the sandboxing features that Apple has implemented in OS X.
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS
To summarize, then, it seems safe to say that if you buy a new Mac now, it’s a good bet that Apple will support it with new software releases for about 4 to 5 years, depending on when you buy in a given CPU generation’s lifetime. Snow Leopard cut the time to a low of 3 years for some outlying models, but the desire to focus on Intel-based Macs easily explains that.
Lex Friedman, Macworld
A popular iOS ebook reading app owned by Amazon won’t run under iOS 5, causing some users to fear that its days may be numbered.
Peter Cohen, The Loop
Retrospect 9 features data de-duplication, network backup of Mac, Windows and Linux computers, and new support of cloud-based storage: Retrospect 9 can now target any WebDAV-compatible storage system, including services from providers like Egnyte and Dreamhost.
Jim Dalrymple, The Loop
“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices,” an Apple spokesperson told The Loop. “We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
OS X Daily
Michael Branco, The Royal Gazette
John Cox, Network World
Lion may not have arrived with quite the roar of acclaim of Snow Leopard, but the numbers indicate there's no going back. And in the "post PC" era, Apple clearly continues to refine the Mac OS user experience based on the lessons it learns from the iOS mobile experience.
Yield Thought
On September 19th, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of a month spent working in the cloud.
NumbersForStartup Blog
Five hours, one wireless keyboard and $35USD of apps later, I was running the entire business from my iPad!
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, ZDNet
Developing ‘free’ games aimed specifically at children, and then bundling ridiculously priced in-app purchases inside those ‘free’ games feels scammy to me. Sure, it’s not illegal, and it’s not against Apple’s developer terms and conditions, but Apple is a company that prides itself in protecting users from harm.
Martin Bryant, The Next Web
Brett Terpstra, TUAW
Megan Lavey-Heaton, TUAW
The OS X utility keeps a copy of almost anything that can be sent to the clipboard. It'll also organize those into scrapbooks or however you want.
Serenity Caldwell, Macworld
In short: This is a huge update.
Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal
But the moves Mr. Cook has made since he officially took over the CEO title provide signs of how he will seek to run Apple in the years ahead, imposing more discipline on a place that for years was guided by Mr. Jobs's gut.
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
If you own an iPhone 4S and perform all 11 of these same queries every single day for a month over your carrier's 3G connection, you can expect to use roughly 20MB or so in a 30-day month. But it's unlikely that that you'll be asking those same questions, or with the same frequency.
Jim Dalrymple, The Loop
Katie Marsal, AppleInsider
Mel Martin, TUAW
Plex is an advanced Media Server that runs on your Mac and manages and distributes your audio and video to other computers, a connected TV and your iOS devices via the Plex iOS app.
Macworld
Sam Oliver, AppleInsider
A third-party iOS application that streamed music from Amazon's Cloud Drive service has been removed from the App Store due to legal complications with the music industry.
Kirk McElhearn, Macworld
Sara Yin, PC Magazine
Another day, another piece of Mac malware. This time security firms have discovered a Mac OS X Trojan that steals processing power to create Bitcoin, a virtual currency beloved by libertarians, computer programmers, and hackers of all shades.
Jackie Dove, Macworld
Squeeze 8 Lite is targeted to a growing segment of users who need to easily publish high-quality video online, but who do not need the high-end capabilities of enterprise or broadcast professionals that the main software package is designed for.
Anand Lal Shimpi, AnandTech
Thunderbolt products are finally starting to roll out. The Pegasus was a good start, and the Little Big Disk gives customers a more palatable price point. To hit the lower price LaCie does sacrifice a bit on capacity and performance. The move to 2.5" hard drives and only being able to accommodate two of them in its small chassis limits peak performance to around 200MB/s. Compared to USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 options however, that's not bad at all. Even compared to GigE, you're still looking at a significant performance improvement. If you do a lot of large file transfers onto your external storage, the Little Big Disk will likely be a huge step up from your current solution.
Kasper Jade, AppleInsider
Although the Mac maker has reportedly developed a revision to the existing Mac Pro that may or may not see the light of day, people familiar with the matter said management as far back as May of 2011 were in limbo over whether to pour any additional resources into the product line.
Tami Fry-Pietsch, MacNews
Nick Wingfield, New York Times
The discussions forums on Apple’s Web site are ablaze with comments from iPhone 4S customers about the poor battery life of the new Apple phone. Many of the people complaining say the battery on the iPhone 4S seems to drain quickly even when they’re not using the device much and even after they have shut down some of the power-hungry features that can affect battery performance.
Bob Tedeschi, New York Times
On iPhone, the free app CoffeeRunLE displays a list of typical java attributes and additives, so you can record someone’s order for a medium cappuccino with three sugars and low-fat milk, for instance.
James Galbraith, Macworld
The new MacBook Pro lineup won’t cause any buyer’s remorse for those who purchased a member of the early 2011 family, or perhaps even for buyers of a 2010 MacBook Pro. If you have a laptop that's older, however, the late 2011 MacBook Pros feature faster processors, larger capacity hard drives in the 13-inch models, and improved graphics in the 15- and 17-inch models that combine to make already attractive systems an even greater value.
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