Where do we draw the line between tinkerers and hackers? What role does tinkering play in contemporary society? How did tinkerers traditionally influence American industry and society? Do we still have what it takes as a nation of tinkerers to excel in the global economy?

I believe the answers to these questions lie somewhere in the tension between corporate discipline and individual ingenuity.

What exactly about the iPhone do I love, and what do I hate? Is there a path forward to a more healthy relationship with technology, that doesn’t involve the “nuclear option” of throwing your smartphone out the window?

No. I can tell you with absolutely certainty that these prematurely leaked books are never signs of any upcoming Apple products.

Technically, any compact Macintosh could serve as a clock, but the Mac Plus is the most attractive target because, when booted from a floppy, the Mac Plus clock will be completely silent. That's thanks to the Mac Plus's lack of an internal cooling fan—something Steve Jobs insisted upon for the original 1984 Macintosh model that carried over to the Plus.

Don't remember what OS X used to look like back when dinosaurs used to roam the planet and Apple's OS ran only on PowerPC processors? We've mined more than a decade of our own OS X reviews—studiously authored by John Siracusa—for screenshots and other OS X-related memories that trace the development of Apple's desktop OS through the 2000s. If you're interested in seeing how various UI elements have evolved over the years, strap yourself in for this safari showcasing OS X's big cats...

These apps have chosen to reduce details to achieve a minimal UI, but in the process the UI has also become harder to use. Unfortunately a UI walkthrough is quite an inelegant way to explain the core functionality of an app. It can be a frustrating obstacle before you can dive into an app, and you have to remember all of those new ways of using it once you get in.

I want to sign in to my Google account once, and have all apps on my iPhone use that auth token. This is what iOS already does for iCloud, Twitter, and Facebook. And Android already does this with Google accounts.

Drafts is a catch-all bucket for typing messages, jotting down ideas, storing templates, and—just as useful—doing things with that text when it and you are ready.

Apple Inc. chief executive officer Tim Cook will receive compensation for 2012 worth $4.17 million, down 99 percent from a year earlier because of a lack of stock awards he received for 2011.

The best way of creating that awesome app is not to insulate yourself from the power of the operating system you are running on but to embrace it.

That’s why I went to work for Apple. I wanted to be able to help people when their stuff was broken or acting up. I got to connect with lots of customers in meaningful ways.

Apple’s done robust data sharing before with OpenDoc. It didn’t turn out well for a variety of reasons. Apple knows that iOS devices will become more powerful. It also knows that trying to replicate the windowed workflow on a touch device is a lost cause. I’m honestly not sure what Apple’s solution consists of. I suspect we’ll see the following though.

Dispensing with visual clutter is what Bartender is all about. Sure, it's nice having those app icons up top where you can get to them quickly, but what about some lesser used ones? What about critical information like your battery status that just takes up too much space? Bartender has all that covered.

Free up your local disks by shoving that iTunes library onto external storage.

12 Days of Christmas promotion runs from today Boxing Day, 26 December until 6 January - with each gift only available for 24 hours.

In our tests, Google voice search delivered answers faster than Siri could, it had an easier time figuring out what we meant, and the Google Search app didn't require an awkward handoff for tough questions.

As four of the publishers have entered into settlements with regulators and revised the way they sell e-books, prices have selectively fallen but not as broadly or drastically as anticipated. The $10 floor that publishers fought so hard to maintain for popular new novels is largely intact.

One of the big changes in iTunes 11 is the new MiniPlayer. The iTunes MiniPlayer has been around for years, but its functionality has been enhanced with iTunes 11. In addition to being a control center for playing your music, you can also use it to search for songs, playlists, and more, and to access the Up Next queue. Here’s how you can get the most out of the iTunes MiniPlayer.

But with cloud-based computing I too am starting to feel like we have entered a realm of endless glitches and bugs, with incomprehensible behaviours that there is no point in trying to figure out.

It should be a top priority for Congress to clear out the murk. Buyers of e-books must have the explicit right to reformat their purchases and save backup copies for their own use, permanently. The sale of an e-book must be irrevocable. On the other side, it must remain strictly illegal to make multiple unauthorized copies of any copyrighted work for distribution. Lending by libraries, one digital copy at a time, should be facilitated — it tends to widen the audience for books.

For users who choose to turn off JavaScript in the Safari Web browser, the appearance of a Smart App Banner on a website will automatically and permanently turn JavaScript back on without notifying the user.

In terms of overall value, my money’s on Downcast. It’s cheap, works well, and has most every feature you could ask for. While the options can be overwhelming, its interface is relatively clean and simple.

If you don’t mind paying a premium for simplicity, then Instacast might be worth the extra cost. For me, it’s almost worth the money just for the automatic storage management.

Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr told us that the an earlier version of its iOS accessory guidelines had indeed prevented the use of both 30-pin and Lightning connectors on the same device — a selling point of the charging station — due to "technical issues," but that those problems had been solved and the guidelines since changed.

Maps have always related and realigned our history; increasingly, we're ceding control of that history to the cold precision of the computer. With this comes great responsibility.

Creating a suite of apps that combines its web design sensibilities with interfaces that make sense on iOS for the first time in a long time. Some small elements still stand out as foreign. the drawer tab in Maps, the clever but different tab browser in Chrome. But overall the interfaces feel like they’re being more honest to the underlying iOS platform and obeying the conventions there.

If you’re a fan of tweaking your Mac, you could spend a happy afternoon or two trawling through these features - or you could just go straight to one of the main categories and instantly fix an issue or two that’s been niggling you.

Available for iPhone, Wordament is the first iOS game to use Xbox Live achievements. Similar to other Microsoft iOS apps, you simply sign in using your Microsoft Account and the game is then linked to your gamertag.

We aren't paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you're not selling enough. We're supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren't that hard to sell, since they aren't a bad deal. But we're also supposed to push MobileMe, and that's really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

Like other publications, the Journal will be able to ask subscribers to submit their email addresses, a strategy that publishers say has been effective.

Perhaps my favorite user-interface feature, however, is a built-in browser that allows you to navigate the Web and allows 1Password to automatically fill forms for you using your secure data. This is a major step forward compared to the previous version—which required you to painstakingly copy and paste your data into Safari—and one that dramatically improves 1Password’s user experience.

Even though Google Sync will be discontinued, you will still be able to access all of your data with your favorite iOS apps on any new device you set up; you’ll just have to go through a slightly more complicated configuration process because you’ll be using different protocols.

I’m still not certain what the linkage is between a surge protector, the brightness level of my display, and a weird sound inside my Mac Pro. But at this point, I don’t intend to pursue it further. I’m just glad to have everything working again.

If you can be content with spending a fair chunk of change on a computer you'll keep for three to five years, the iMac is a good choice.

It’s clear Apple recognizes that security plays an essential role in maintaining the growth of the company. To that end, the company has not only been more responsive, albeit in its own way, but has made important long-term investments in the security of the Apple ecosystem. These efforts paid off in 2012, and we are likely to see them continue to pay off for years to come.

MailMate’s here to help you bend your email to your will, to tame the chaos of even the most cluttered and sprawling account. And MailMate doesn’t mess around.

Google Maps for iPhone is a very good mapping application that returns some much-missed features to the platform, but it’s not without its shortcomings.

For me, the best feature is improved support for Watchlist and the reorganized movie pages.

For the moment, my advice to anyone who has not noticed any Wi-Fi-related problems with iOS 6.0.1 on an iPhone 5 or iPad mini is to hold off on upgrading to 6.0.2 until more is known.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about iTunes 11, since its release two weeks ago. In this week’s column, I address some of the most common questions about iTunes 11, about what’s missing, and what’s changed.

With iStopMotion 2.0, you can now record audio right inside the app either before capturing frames or after while watching the clips play back. You can also limit the soundbyte to the length of the current clip, monitor the audio signal coming into the iPad and preview the sound to ensure it's exactly how you want. You can use the iPad's built-in microphone or any microphone or sound input device that is compatible with your device.

As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.

One of the most useful things about Evernote is the huge ecosystem that’s sprung up around it, consisting of hardware, software, and services that all use Evernote as their hub.

At first glance, Sandvox seems a pretty good fit for the sandbox. It's document-based and doesn't have too deep a hook into the OS's configuration. But as ever in programming, we did run into a few of those pesky edge cases.

We can and should support the companies we love with our money. Companies can and should have balanced streams of income so that they’re not solely dependent on just one. We all should consider the business models of the companies we trust with our data.

But we should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

Facebook and Apple grew closer today as mobile app install ads in Facebook for iOS 6 now allow users to download apps from the App Store via pop-up instead of interrupting users and forcing them to leave Facebook. By implementing Apple’s App Store pop-up API, Facebook could get developers to buy more of its ads since the clicks they pay for are more likely to turn into actual downloads.

Mac OS X allows you to set time limits for computer usage by way of Parental Controls. With the feature, you can set different limits to computer use for weekdays, weekends, and even set bed times, whereby the Mac would be unusable between some specified hours.

Since jumping into the world of touch devices, we’ve learned many things to which we feel can benefit the industry and parents alike. That’s why, after conducting over 60 studies on the ways children interact with tablet devices, we have released our best practices, or “lessons learned.” This document is by no means “final.” Our practices are ever evolving as we learn from our research.

The removal, publisher Arnold Kim confirmed to us, has to do with a new rule that Apple added back in September which governs the promotion of apps not your own inside your apps.

This is downright ridiculous. How on earth does Apple get away with providing no options for sorting search results?

You may know Gus because it makes two of the finest Mac apps — Acorn, an image editor, and VoodooPad, a note-taking and wiki app.

This includes the return of custom styles and colors, an option to auto copy the URL once an image has been uploaded, an overhauled sharing interface with a plethora of sharing options (yay FTP/sFTP!) and more.

The 6.0.2 update began to appear in iTunes on Tuesday with no other description besides "Fixes a bug that could impact Wi-Fi," leading to speculation that the fix addresses an issue that caused some iPhones to drop their Wi-Fi connections and use cellular data more often.

iTunes 11 introduces a whole set of new views and gets rid of most of what was available in previous versions. With iTunes 10, you could view your content in four ways: List view, Album List view, Grid view, and Cover Flow view. (Note that these were the views for music; some types of content, such as apps, didn’t offer all these options.) In the new version, all four of those views are more or less gone. Here’s a look at the different views iTunes 11 offers.

Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.

The free app makes it easy to post videos of life’s events on a number of different social networks.

The scary part though, is that one recurrent theme I see in nearly every single “how I write on the iPad” story is Dropbox. It’s the linchpin in the workflow. Scary, because Dropbox is outside Apple’s control. Scary, because if not for Dropbox, many of these people would not be using their iPads as much as they are. Scary, because Apple’s iCloud falls short of Dropbox.

Apple on Monday posted updates to the Wi-Fi and EFI firmware for almost all of the Macs it released in 2012 generation.

If you're tired of waiting for the next version of iOS to be jailbroken, check out these tweaks and customizations you can make whether you're jailbroken or not.

So, I'm sorry that my review didn't pick up the fact that Apple's Maps fall short for a number of people. I called them "very good" because I was comparing them with what had gone before on the iPhone, and my experience was positive. Vectors beat rasters any day; similarly, free turn-by-turn voice-directed navigation beats none. Some of Apple's errors were egregious. But many were also well-hidden until a huge number of people started using them. Location and navigation is at least partly a search business, and if you don't try the right searches, you won't find the flaws in the arrangement of the data. I failed to find the right searches.

I’m going to take a look at all the little hidden features that the Dock has — things you probably never noticed or mistakenly discovered.

For those who don’t know Slow Feeds, it’s a neat concept: the app analyzes your Google Reader account, and puts “slow feeds” — articles from blogs that don’t post 20 articles per day — in a separate section.

Apple’s mapping data undoubtedly isn’t as good as Google’s, overall, but in most cases, I doubt that it will make a significant difference. And it’s now easy enough — thanks to the “transit” trick — to compare routes in both apps, though I suppose that then raises the issue of which you want to believe.

Elgato Systems, the maker of a number of well-received “digital media” hardware products, has introduced EyeTV Mobile, an antenna-based system that lets iPad and iPhone users watch live TV over the air, even if they don’t have Internet access.

C++ 11 is “far better than previous versions”, says the inventor of the language Bjarne Stroustrup. He was speaking at an online event marking the launch of Embarcadero's C++ Builder XE3, a rapid application tool targeting Windows and Mac OS X.

You can’t make a complex application simple by adding a veneer of simplicity on top of it. in fact, that will just add to the confusion, because now you’re sending the user misleading signals about what’s really going on.

Apple has announced its iTunes Best of 2012 winners, and its two top apps include a movie special effects editor for the iPhone and a sketching app for the iPad.

The app feels like a combination of Sparrow and Clear — a beautifully designed messaging client meshed with a swipe-able productivity app.

It was strange reading Gruber's account of the evolution of system scripting on the Mac, because all the diversity that was present as it was evolving is gone from his story. As if it never happened.

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

For the first time in a year, Yahoo has updated the Flickr app for iOS, just as CEO Marissa Mayer promised she would. And you know what? It's good – as in better-than-Instagram good. Really. See why in this hands on with Flickr for iOS.

This is a much more comprehensive and status page compared to the previous version, and it shows that Apple takes communication about service issues seriously.

Launch CustomMenu, and its systemwide menu icon appears on the right-hand side of your menu bar. Click this icon and choose Customize Menu, and you can choose the items you want to appear in the menu.

Like the Mac App Store and Steam, GOG provides a place where you can download Mac games, although what’s available for the Mac is still just a subset of their entire library. But unlike the other two, a fairly large percentage of GOG’s games are old enough to vote in Chicago. As a side effect, this means that many games that were Windows-only the first time around are now arriving on Macs for the first time.

The European Commission announced on Thursday that it reached an agreement with Apple and four major book publishers that addresses concerns over possible e-book price-fixing. Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Hachette Livre, Macmillan, and Apple all agreed to modify existing agreements to allow retailers to discount e-books for two years and to eliminate "most-favored nation" clauses for five years. The Commission is satisfied that the changes address anti-competition issues and has suspended its investigation without levying fines or other sanctions.

The 11.0.1 update, available for both Mac and Windows, also fixes a bug that causes the AirPlay button to disappear.

For Mountain Lion users, there’s an “All Notifications” option in the Settings to, literally, receive all notifications for your stream. This means you’ll see every tweet from every user you follow show up in Notification Center as soon as they tweet.

UserLand's Frontier scripting environment supported OSA, both as a client and a server.

iTunes 11 is a radical departure from previous versions and nothing illustrates this more than the new album display mode. The headlining feature of this display is the new view style that visually matches the track listing to the album’s cover art. The result is an attractive display of textual information that seamlessly integrates with the album’s artwork.

After using iTunes for a day I wondered just how hard it would be to mimic this functionality — use a source image to create a themed image/text display.

Basically, Foldify lets you draw and create printouts that you can cut and fold into beautiful 3-D figures.

"User experience was the hardest thing in making the app, and the most important. It solves a lot of use cases, and we didn’t want to add just another menu button."

The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks.

Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article.

The pain in moving is not just packing everything up and shlepping it to a new location. The real pain is trying to make the new place feel like home.

The “Google Style” of UI design is a sub-style of flat design where everything is white or very light grey, icons don’t have text labels, and typography looks like it’s been through Weight Watchers.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of that style on the web (Google Reader looks awful in my opinion) but it works pretty well on mobile, especially for a maps app.

The new app will include voice-activated, turn-by-turn directions, which was previously only available on the Android version of apps, Google's mobile operating system competitor to Apple's iOS.

It's got a beautiful new look and very handy features such as favorites, a built-in tabbed browser, a brand-new setup process and even a "demo mode" for showing off to friends without presenting all of your data.

AppleScript has survived and remained relevant during a turbulent decade-long transition, despite its unbeloved language syntax and technical hurdles, for the simple reason that it solves real-world problems in a way that no other OS X technology does.

In the past, publications had a harder time differentiating themselves. Magazines and newspapers all needed to be the same sizes and shapes, working the same ways with the same business models and the same limitations. Today, we can all tailor our publications to our needs much more closely.

Other changes include built in Google+ sharing, of course, and some new filters and updated photographic frames. Those frames can be colorized to match the colors in your image.

Instacast 3 is selling you an app that has a their own Cloud Syncing solution, a better iPad interface, and a new a storage limit feature for better managing downloads.

T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere confirmed that the iPhone will be among the Apple products that T-Mobile sells next year, but he said that T-Mo will sell it in a far different way than other carriers. T-Mobile is eliminating all device subsidies in 2013, requiring new customers to pay full price for their phones up front, buy it on installment or bring their own unlocked devices, Legere said speaking at corporate parent Deutsche Telekom’s Capital Markets Day in Bonn.

It boots like a dream. Its Fusion drive seamlessly and invisibly manages my data, keeping the files system snappy and responsive. Even Xcode, bane of my existence, crashes faster and more smoothly than it did on my old system.

“We are looking at doing more manufacturing in the U.S. because, in general, customers want more to be done there,” Louis Woo, a Foxconn spokesman, said in a phone interview. He declined to comment on individual clients or specific plans.

As work progressed on the product, we realized we were making something special. When that happens, all sorts of crazy and wonderful things start to form without you really knowing how or why.

Instacast, the very popular podcast app, as been updated with a completely new design and a new robust syncing mechanism. Instacast is also now a universal app for iPhone and iPad so that you can enjoy and follow your favorite podcasts with any iOS device.

While Twitterrific 5 features a more competitive ecosphere than ever, there’s no reason it can’t co-exist along other excellent clients like Tweetbot; there’s audience enough for both Tweebot’s industrial design and Twitterrific’s more spartan approach.

"We don’t subscribe to the vision that the OS for iPhones and iPads should be the same as Mac. As you know, iOS and Mac OS are built on the same base. And Craig has always managed the common elements. And so this is a logical extension. Customers want iOS and Mac OS X to work together seamlessly, not to be the same, but to work together seamlessly."

In an exclusive interview with Brian Williams airing tonight at 10pm/9c on NBC’s “Rock Center,” Apple CEO Tim Cook announced one of the existing Mac lines will be manufactured exclusively in the United States next year. Mac fans will have to wait to see which Mac line it will be because Apple, widely known for its secrecy, left it vague. Cook's announcement may or may not confirm recent rumors in the blogosphere sparked by iMacs inscribed in the back with “Assembled in USA.”

If you’ve upgraded to iTunes 11 and want to control your music from afar, this app is a great companion for iPhone and iPad alike. It still gives Apple TVs short shrift when it comes to controlling nonmusic content, but the gesture controller and keyboard make the Remote app much more valuable than its metal cousin.

Twitterrific 5 strikes me as an exercise in simplicity with a focus on all the little details.

It may be completely redesigned, but the core tenants that Twitterrific were founded upon remain in 5. Twitterrific has always been opinionated, decidedly simple, and never wanted to compete for your attention. And at its heart, Twitterrific 5 is still a Twitter app built with the same passion The Iconfactory builds into all of their apps. Twitterrific 5 is simply a better Twitterrific.

Ian Page has released Mactracker 7, the popular encyclopedia of Apple products. It's been updated with Apple's operating system and hardware releases from the last couple of months, including iOS6, the iPhone 5, iPad mini, fourth generation iPad, 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, and the latest iPod nano and iPod touch models.

Publications like The Magazine and TRVL are now the ones showing the way. Others will come and expand upon these ideas. And I suspect some of them will eventually gain millions of happily paying readers.

A desktop computer may not be the most practical choice you can make. But the new iMac is hard to pass by.

Why release an update to Gmail for iOS and tout ”numerous new animations from swivels to transitions” when the way you display an email is still a terrible and awkward experience for the user?

In addition to the slight UI modifications, Google has added the ability to edit playlists, plus the opportunity to actually tap on URLs in video descriptions to go to the linked pages.

Some parts of the program have been simplified, while others see new complexity. With the focus on playing instead of organizing, Apple is trying to turn iTunes into a more user-friendly tool for playing media.

If you have a small iTunes library, you’ll probably like the new views and the ease of creating playlists. If you have a large library, however, you’ll likely be disappointed by the limited viewing options in iTunes 11, and you may want to think twice about upgrading (at least until Apple makes some improvements).

In addition to being Google-Plus-ified in the UI (which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how you feel about Google+), the app has gained a number of very practical features. These may tempt users of Mail—or even Sparrow—away from their apps of choice.

“My design goals with Letterpress were to do things that the graphics hardware was really good at. [Ive] is the kind of person who has the same aesthetic. It’s not superficial — he’d think about [the design of iOS and an iOS device] all the way through” not just make something that looked good, he said."

Selecting this menu item does indeed create a split-screen (or, more accurately, a split-window) view with the current tracklist of the playlist on the right-hand side and your music library on the left.

If you drag a graphic to the iTunes LCD – that’s the display at the top of the window, showing which track is playing – iTunes will add the graphic to the currently playing track.

I am not now, nor have I ever been an iTunes Match customer. But last night, I was able to download DRM-free copies of music I purchased from iTunes in the days before iTunes Plus via iTunes 11. I also determined that some of my iTunes content that I thought was securely tucked away on my hard drive had in fact made a retreat into the cloud.

BBEdit adds support for Retina display Macs, introduces features for more powerful navigation, adds options for maintaining websites, and includes a slew of other aesthetic, functional, and under-the-hood improvements.

The first thing users will notice—after taking a gander at the stripped-down UI—is that they have more options: The Gmail app now lets users access up to five different Gmail accounts from within the app, a feature designed for power users who keep different types of communication in different accounts.

So, the cloud icon is simply an indicator that at least one of the items in your library is available in Apple’s cloud infrastructure somewhere. Whether by purchase or by ‘match’, it’s not just on your physical hard disk.

Confusing? Maybe, but there it is.

Their success was that they got over 100,000 readers to pay at least $40 per year for a subscription. How many digital publications can say that? Not many. And the iPad — with Apple’s simple, trusted, familiar payment mechanism — made that possible. The Daily’s problem was simply that they weren’t conceived to operate on $5 or $6 million per year in revenue. A smarter, smaller team could.

The Model S Professional For Mac represents a good Mac-specific start for Das Keyboard. It provides a solid and reassuringly physical mechanical-keyboard experience, and its keyswitch technology and physical design differentiate it from the popular Matias offerings, providing a crisp, clicky sensation. However, I hope the next version of the Model S will offer standard Mac function keys, instead of just media-control keys.

With its beautiful design and quality fabrication, the iMac 27-inch (Late 2012) is the best all-in-one desktop we've ever seen, with a look and feel that manufacturers will be trying to replicate for years. It's not without a few frustrations, like the lack of height adjustment and a price that will give some shoppers a stroke, but there's no denying that the iMac we reviewed—the top spec'ed model of Apple's best configuration—is worth every penny.

But at the same time, as a non-power user of iTunes 11, I found it to be extremely complicated and confusing in other areas: the Done button to dismiss the device window, the separation of sections, views, devices, and Store buttons across the entire window, and the non-native sharing of the iTunes Store.

You can quibble with the old sidebar interface, but it was always clear where you were, and what you were working on. This new approach is undeniably more attractive and probably easier to use when you are within a screen, but moving between screens with so few locational and navigational clues is going to be a major problem for less-sophisticated users.

In the case of genius playlists you must indicate to iTunes where you don’t want the genius feature to tread. And you do that by simply switching off the tracks.

Firetask 3.0 is a well-designed and executed task manager with nearly all of the right features and zero bloat. Whether or not the letters GTD mean anything to you, if you’re serious about taming your to-do list Firetask is well worth your consideration.

The Daily, News Corp.’s attempt to create a newspaper for the iPad era, is shutting down after less than two years.

The Daily launched in February 2011 with a great deal of fanfare and a blessing from Apple, which worked closely with News Corp. to get the paper off the ground. But the Daily never clicked. It was initially hampered by technical problems, but its key issue was a conceptual one — while the app boasted lots of digital bells and whistles, in the end it was very much a general interest newspaper that seemed to be geared toward people who didn’t really like newspapers. You can’t make that work no matter what kind of platform it uses.

Automator's the perfect tool for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do on a daily basis.

So upon completing the collection, the school commissioned Portland-based interactive studio Second Story to transform the book into an iPad app, a resource that would draw from the original text but could also be updated with new projects and papers as needed. Now available for free, the app shows how dynamic areas of study can benefit greatly from equally dynamic texts.

There are a number of reports of problems updating over wired Ethernet connections. In some cases, the Apple TV may fail to boot after a failed upgrade. The solution is to unplug the Ethernet cable and update over Wi-Fi. That has worked for many people for whom the update wouldn’t install.

Do you own a smartphone? Flip it over. What do you see? Maybe there’s a hole for a camera, a company logo, and some FCC disclaimers? Do you see the cool design of a case you bought for it? Either way, it’s essentially inert. But for Greg Moon and Yashar Behzadi, it was an opportunity to do some clever design.

The following is geared toward independent developers looking to release a Mac or iOS app on a budget. Grass roots marketing for indie devs.

You never have to manage it. The Fusion Drive is set up at the factory; you never have to fiddle with any settings. The drive automatically moves often-used programs and files from the hard drive to the Flash storage and back, depending on how often you use an item.

Improvements in visual navigation and a more logical arrangement of tools are good, but for me the biggest positive within iTunes 11 remains its vastly improved performance on all three Macs I've tested it on, including a relatively ancient five-year-old MacBook.

The only way software really flows is if you focus relentlessly on a very small set of features, and write down what the rules are, and never break them, and take lots and lots of time to Get It Right.

Up Next is a great new feature in iTunes 11 that lets you quickly and easily stage songs you want to listen to shortly, without killing the song or playlist that's already playing.

Once enabled, the photos on your iDevice’s camera roll will be automatically synced with Facebook.

But don’t worry, they will be uploaded to a private photo album. So, none of your embarrassing photos will find their way to your Facebook timeline. Unless you deliberately share them, that is.

So now if you want to, say, copy track X from playlist A to playlist B, you can no longer choose where you are going to drop track X in the track list for playlist B.

HP's Spectre One does the design well largely by aping the iMac, and Dell's XPS 27 offers all the features I want — but I have yet to see the combination of design, features, and horsepower the iMac offers. I hope someone gets it all right soon, whether it's Apple or not.

The real article name might be something like: Configuring Raspbery Pi to serve like a Time Capsule with Netatalk 3.0 for Mountain Lion. But it's too long ;)

Curiously enough, gapless playback in iTunes 11 still works just fine. You just can't tweak any of your existing music to make use of the feature from the options editor.

If you were planning on buying someone an iTunes gift card this holiday season, you may be glad to hear that Apple has begun to roll out new versions of the card that let you add custom amounts of money.

Given all the mistakes and bad assumptions, it’s clear that the best choice here is to immediately change course. For now I’m going to replace the ads with an apology, and later today I’ll be submitting an update to Timer that removes the ad completely.

Please accept my sincere apologies for making a mess of a great app.

Nordstrom said he was “shocked” when told about the policy, which restricts operators to offering the new device on 3G networks until Apple enables LTE functionality.

It proved, he said, “who is running the industry”, adding: “Apple have put themselves in the driving seat; it’s really changing the game.”