All personal information stored by British internet users on major "cloud" computing services including Google Drive can be spied upon routinely without their knowledge by US authorities under newly-approved legislation, it can be disclosed.

The updates are aimed at the MacBook Pro, the MacBook, and the MacBook Air. In each case, Apple says, the new firmware should give fresh life to old batteries. The update “addresses a rare issue on some Apple notebooks, where a battery that has accumulated more than 1,000 charge cycles may unexpectedly shut down or stop functioning.”

"We sometimes make component changes which require an updated model number for regulatory approval. The component changes we made don't affect product features and Apple TV customers will continue to have the same great user experience."

Despite Flickr’s influx of returning, disgruntled Instagram-ers and my own earnest attempts to rekindle my account, after six weeks, the Flickr app hasn’t come close to replacing Instagram for me, and it’s largely because, using the Flickr app, viewing and commenting on my friends’ photos is a pain (though the uploading and editing experience is superior to Instagram’s). Instagram is where my photos get “likes” and comments. And it’s still, for the most part, where my friends are. For now.

However, Apple happened to build an API to receive the location of your phone, remotely. This tool rocks when you get your phone nabbed by a stranger, but also has potential for recording your movements.

It happens to every Mac user sooner or later. The virtual gears inside your computer begin to act as though they're running in a vat of tapioca pudding. No matter what you try to do, your Mac moves at a pace that a snail could run circles around. But before carting your Mac off to an Apple Genius Bar, try these fixes.

A decade after Apple revolutionized the music world with its iTunes store, the music industry is undergoing another, even more radical, digital transformation as listeners begin to move from CDs and downloads to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.

On some Macs, the default lowest brightness isn’t as low as we might prefer. Shady puts a shade over your screen to help soothe your tired or dazzled eyes. You can use it to reduce your Mac’s brightness far below the usual minimum, without any risk of damage to your screen.

With the release of iOS 6.1, Apple has also announced a new Search API that will allow developers to query its Maps servers to get back point-of-interest and location data. This will allow them to integrate these kinds of local results into their apps when users search for things around them.

A new update to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac has rolled live, and it fixes several issues for PowerPoint users, as well as a calendar bug for Outlook.

The FCC filing doesn't show much else other than the fact that the Wi-Fi standards are the same as the current generation Apple TV. Many were speculating that the Apple TV 3,2 could simply be an international model but if the dimensions are indeed different, that may not be the case.

That's not to say that the Mac will simply disappear. Rather, the iPad and iOS will simply become the core thrust of the company's efforts — more so than they are already.

The template selection alone—compared to the dozen or so themes that come with iPhoto—is worth the price of admission, and the resulting slideshows, which can exported up to full-1080p resolution, have a quality that rivals purpose-built videos handcrafted by professionals.

Not only have the controls been modified to look like the ones found within the Music app, but more importantly they're laid out the same, too. This means that unlike in previous iOS releases (shown below) they're no longer so close together that you can accidentally press play/pause when trying to select the next or previous track.

Apple on Tuesday announced a new iPad that’s a lot like the existing fourth-generation iPad, only with more storage than ever before. The iPad with Retina display will now be offered in a 128GB variety. The Wi-Fi model will retail for $799; the Wi-Fi + Cellular option will cost $929.

Users concerned about having their personal usage habits tracked by apps and advertisers now have a convenient button to reset the identifier, essentially making them appear like a new user.

Apple also added the ability to download individual songs from iCloud—a common complaint from iTunes Match users, who have found themselves stuck between syncing all songs over the cloud versus none at all.

You can send the audio from movies, TV shows, and other content you play back on Apple TV to AirPlay-enabled speakers and devices including the AirPort Express and other Apple TVs.

If your Mac is running Mountain Lion, it is easier. It goes like this.

Designate another volume as a second backup destination—a hard drive attached to your Mac or a network volume, for example.

But the truth is that Vine doesn't have a problem with porn, at least not one that isn't shared by any other social media app. Apple has a problem: its App Store's puritanical, unevenly-enforced policies for adult content. Vine is just today's example.

Best of all the laptop disappears, it allows you to forget it’s there and focus on being productive. Smartest life improvement decision of 2012.

The only people who read release notes are the people who care about changes in the software — these are support documents, not marketing pieces, and failing to admit bugs or acknowledge foundational changes reveals Apple’s lack of respect both for those of us who rely on Apple products and for the work we do.

"Our auditors were dismayed to discover 74 cases of workers under age 16 — a core violation of our Code of Conduct. As a result, we terminated our business relationship with PZ," the company says in the report.

While convenient for quickly selecting and setting font sizes, the Font panel also contains a number of additional features that can be applied to your text.

Overall, the macro feature in Nebulous Notes comes pretty close to what you can do with BBEdit clippings or Keyboard Maestro macros on the Mac.

A crowded Apple Store (i.e. almost every Apple Store during retail hours) isn’t a pleasant place to be if you’re on a mission to buy something or have a Genius fix your ailing Mac.

The most significant new features in TextExpander 4 are additional options for “fill-ins,” which are complex snippets offering fields that you can fill in on the fly, or which can contain multiple choices.

In my humble opinion, you should be able to jump into your emails, process them quickly, and then get back to work. A mail client, for me, is just a way to send and receive emails, not a big messy, clunky, filing cabinet with hundreds of manually created and sorted folders. Read on to find out why, in that case, Mail.app is the best for me, even when processing hundreds of incoming messages per day.

Apple also says that 92 percent of its suppliers now comply with a 60-hour work week. It also discussed the company joining the Fair Labor Association and the subsequent independent audit Apple asked it to conduct. Suppliers were also made to reimburse US$6.4 million in excessive foreign contract worker fees.

Some might say that Apple doesn't have the right mindset to play low-margin offense, that it's against their nature. But they've effectively dominated and wrung every last drop of money from the iPod market using pieces of this strategy, and they have the operational expertise and vertical integration to achieve it. In fact, Apple now turns its inventory more times a year than Amazon, by a healthy margin, a staggering fact.

New features include Dropbox actions, URL actions, Share Actions, Action Directory, URL Callbacks, and Action Triggers. In other words, even higher level ninjary than Drafts already allowed.

If you see this on your Mac you might quite logically be concerned about the integrity of your data, but this issue is simply a result of an incorrect indexing of your hard drive and does not reflect the true contents of your system. In order for the system information tool to properly report the space usage on the drive, it needs to have a Spotlight index that is both properly built and enabled.

Origin from Electronic Arts will be joining Apple's Mac App Store and Valve's Steam as the latest distribution platform for video games on OS X.

I believe good app icons are most valuable for your customers, your everyday users, not first-time shoppers.

No one uses MacWrite or MacPaint today, but in a sense we all do, all the time.

Did you buy an old Macintosh computer such as the Macintosh 128K, the Macintosh 512K, the Macintosh Plus or the Macintosh SE on eBay, Craig’s List, or a garage sale, but it didn’t come with the floppy disks for the operating system and programs? Let’s see how you can generate them and bring your old Macintosh back to life.

Competition is good and necessary, but not for all things. I would love to see browser vendors focus on competing on features to benefit the user, not their own interpretation of the W3C standards.

The good news is that Lion is still available from Apple... but you have to call Apple to get it. It will cost you US$20 and will come to you as a redeemable code that you will use in the Mac App Store, which means that you will need a Mac running at least 10.6.8 to use the code.

It’s a slight change in Apple’s tenor, which has typically focused on higher-end markets. Cook re-iterated it on the call, but does leave the door open for the possibility of a cheaper iPhone.

To kick things off proper, you choose from a template as your starting point, with options such as beach trips, business trips, camping trips and so on.

Chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer also said the company has in the past given a “single point estimate of guidance that was conservative.” Instead, he said Apple “will provide a range that we believe we are likely to report within.”

The map guides people blocks away from the restaurant’s real location, so understandably they’re getting lost.

And that means lost revenue.

"On iMac, we're confident that we're going to significantly increase the supply, but the demand here is very strong and we are not certain that we'll achieve a supply/demand balance during the quarter."

This is just an example. There are other similar issues, in Contacts and in other OS X applications made by Apple, that suggest that attention to detail in OS X software development is becoming something of a dying art. And it’s rather sad.

Towards the end of the call, an audience member asked Cook about keeping up iPhone 5 demand in light of his cannibalization comments. "There's a lot of demand for lower price points on the iPhone. Why not get more aggressive?" the caller asked.

After a long pause, Cook replied: "I'm not going into our pricing strategy."

If you’re running Mac OS X Lion or later, you can take advantage of Preview’s Signature feature. Alternatively, you can use Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.

There are plenty of more complex runners out there, and the beauty of the App Store is that you're free to play any and all of them to suit your tastes. But Temple Run 2's simplicity and intangible "something" is what made its predecessor a game that I always went back to even in the face of a smorgasbord of alternatives, and it's what will keep this on my device easily within thumb's reach for a long time to come.

You can think of EazyDraw as MacDraw on steroids. It offers a wide range of vector drawing tools, it supports layers, offers calibrated colors, supports SVG and PDF and more. For an interface that at first glance appears quite simple, it hides an enormous feature set.

Caffeinating the system basically means to manually create a power assertion in the system, which can be done globally or targeted to a specific application so the system will not sleep while that application is running.

While there are third-party utilities like Caffeine, or Sleep No More, Apple has a couple of ways you can do this directly in OS X, so these tools are not always needed.

Demand for its phones appears to be running high in the U.S. But much of that demand appears to be coming from price-conscious segments of the market buying cheaper—and likely less profitable—Apple phones.

Apple has responded with the following comment, which confirms that the app was removed for "pornographic" images and, in a new claim, "possible child pornography."

Beyond being a way to launch applications with a single click, the docks you created could be used to access or launch a variety of items—folders, devices on a local network, servers, URLs, and so on. And you could create multiple docks. In my case, I created one dock for my currently running applications and another for applications I used routinely. The Macs I use today employ that same configuration.

The concept behind Airendipity is that you write your feelings, quotes, questions, or encouraging words in a short message and send it out to the world as a virtual paper airplane with complete anonymity. The main app screen features dozens of similar airplanes zooming all over the screen which you can capture, read, comment on, and then send back into the fray. You can track the path of your messages and see what cities or countries it has landed in, which really helps to offer a human aspect to the whole experience.

Out of the box, Evernote comes with some pretty robust syncing tools for all your note-taking needs. If you haven’t dug in to all Evernote can do, though, you might not be aware of everything on offer or just how well you can integrate Evernote into your workflow. From automation to advanced searches, we’re going to make Evernote start working harder for you.

When BBEdit first appeared in 1993 it had very little competition. While that may not be the case now, Bare Bones Software has continuously developed its premier software and this latest version has plenty going for it. Casual text editors may find that the company’s free TextWrangler does the job. If not, BBEdit’s difficult to beat.

In the book and newspaper industries, digital versions are typically cheaper than print ones. But some in the magazine world are going the other way, charging more for their digital versions.

"This represents an opportunity for the magazine business to become more leveraged toward consumer revenue and a little less dependent on advertising," said David Carey, the president of Cosmo publisher Hearst Magazines, in an interview at his office at the top of New York's Hearst Tower.

Jony Ive talks about being true to the characteristics of a material, such as the ability to make a sturdy unibody out of a single piece of aluminum. I wonder what that approach is when it comes to user interfaces?

The prepaid market, without carrier subsidies, is already in a PC-like race to the bottom. For Apple to enter and prosper in this segment, it has to determine two things: What sort of premium can it get for a low cost iPhone, and what would the device mean for the rest of the product line?

Apple’s Fusion Drive is probably the best hybrid SSD/HDD solution I’ve ever used, and it didn’t take rocket science to get here. All it took was combining a good SSD controller (Samsung’s PM830), with a large amount of NAND (128GB) and some very aggressive/intelligent software (Apple’s Core Storage LVM). Fusion Drive may not be fundamentally new, but it’s certainly the right way to do hybrid storage if you’re going to do it.

Lode Runner Classic offers up a faithful, mostly unchanged port of the 30-year-old original — but while the game itself is still mostly fantastic, the iOS shell that's been built around it leaves something to be desired.

It adds a new submenu to the familiar green button in OS X that does more than just zoom the window to its previous size (its current behavior). The Moom submenu allows you to easily move and zoom a window to the top, bottom, left or right of your screen.

One of the long-known criteria for evaluating future Apple retail store locations is a proximity to a institution of higher learning, and it doesn’t get any higher than Princeton University (NJ). Perhaps that’s why an Apple store will appear later this year inside the Quaker Bridge Mall, about five miles away from that university’s 5,000 students.

Internal emails show that executives at tech companies such as Apple and Google believed that an agreement to refrain from poaching each other's workers would bring real financial benefits, a U.S. judge said on Thursday.

These days, TextEdit imposes much fewer compromises than TeachText did. It’s actually an amazingly capable mini word processor, and there’s no question one could easily desktop publish a quite professional-looking newsletter with it, although it wouldn’t be my first recommendation for that purpose. That said, TextEdit actually now supports some pretty advanced near page-layout functions, such as text kerning, ligatures, baseline adjustments, shadowed text, and style copying and pasting. If you aren’t familiar with those terms, you’ll more than likely never miss the capabilities to which they refer. But if you have use for them, they are there, and you don’t have to pay a cent extra to get them.

Kaleidoscope epitomizes the concept of “versatile software”: anyone can pick it up and use it, and the app will “scale” according to a user’s needs.

Apple isn’t the only company that “views apps differently than books or songs,” but it is still strange for a company to state it so bluntly. Apparently, Apple doesn’t think games are capable of the same kind of social criticism as books and songs — but why?

Following an uproar over a new target practice game for iOS from the National Rifle Association, Apple has changed its App Store age rating from a benign "4+" to "12+" for "Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence." The updated rating may seem more appropriate than the original rating, but some critics feel the game itself should be banned from the App Store altogether.

Guided Access has a hidden perk: It mutes both the sound and visual effects of incoming notifications.

The developers are targeting a wide swath of users: product managers, artists, software developers, designers, photographers, even technology writers. For those users and others, Napkin’s focus is on marking up images (or creating brand new ones), with a straightforward interface and quick, simple sharing.

The $3 Write 2 HD note-taking app for iPhone and iPad is a solid offering: it gives users basic note taking and text-creation options, but it offers better-than-average security and multi-device use.

Black Pixel on Thursday released Kaleidoscope 2, a significant update to its app for identifying differences between images and text. New features include an overhauled interface, the ability to compare and merge folders, and support for source-control technology Perforce.

Pocket belongs to an emerging class of “read it later” applications that enable you to clip and keep web content for later perusal. The key feature of these tools is the ability to bookmark pages and then format text for easier reading.

As outliners go, it’s rather inexpensive but has standard features and a few extras. Yes, it does outlines for plans, projects, ideas, whatever. By using Apple’s iCloud, Cloud Outliner gets your outlines on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, which is pretty much everywhere you go. This one even syncs up with Evernote which is also cloud-driven and everywhere you go.

Set the widget to a specific date and time and it begins counting down. That’s what you’d expect from a countdown widget, right? Fortunately, there’s a bit more going on to help justify the price tag, but not too much more.

The account picture can be changed to a different built-in one, or even to a separate image altogether (including one taken by your iSight webcam) but if needed then you can also remove the picture entirely and force the account to use the generic icon, though this is not a default option in the system.

10000000 (pronounced "10 million") is a great game that arrived on iOS last year. It combines a tile-based swiping puzzle game with a fantasy-based progression system to create a very addictive mix.

To make a call to another Messenger for iPhone user, all you need to do is open a conversation with that person, tap the "i" button in the top-right corner, and tap Free Call.

The goal of Done Not done is to get you to log the fun things you want to do, like films you'd like to see, albums you'd like to listen to, or books you want to read, and then see whether any of those interests overlap with those of your friends. That way, you can buddy up and share the experience.

If you're someone with files spread across multiple cloud storage services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Google Drive, Readdle's new Documents app for iPad could be worth a look.

I found a marginal solution in GUI Scripting, which I can use to inspect the various rows of the Calendars source list, to determine whether a named calendar is enabled or not, and to toggle its checkbox based on my own criteria. If this is the kind of thing that interests you, you might want to give the solution a look.

Temple Run 2's environments are more hilly and curvy and turns and movements have a more real, natural feel. Also the game adds other improvements, like stretches where you're operating a mine car and the ability to play as four different characters.

Accusing Apple of a 'misleading' and 'illegal' AppleCare warranty policies, a Belgian consumer rights group will be taking the tech giant to court.

Apple is making the entire third season of "Downton Abbey" available on iTunes before every episode airs on PBS -- and that's just fine with PBS.

“Financing is traditionally the best route to make expensive luxury items affordable to those unable to save the cash for them, and if Apple pulls it off it will be a pioneer in consumer credit in China,” Wolf said.

Apple has used financing plans in other markets, including the U.S., Brazil and Singapore, according to its local sites for those countries.

The new, thinner, 27-inch iMacs are striking in terms of their design, but the loss of two convenient features—internal optical drives and built-in FireWire ports—dampens my enthusiasm for the makeover. The new iMac’s drastically reduced glare and generous 8GB of RAM are features that benefits every user. Enhanced FaceTime cameras, better sounding speakers, and faster processors sweeten the deal, and the optional Fusion Drive’s ability to offer an SSD’s speed with a hard drive’s capacity is a nothing short of a breakthrough in storage.

I fully expect to one day tell my awed children, “I know it’s hard to believe, but back in my day we didn’t have a database of potential dates’ STD status, sexual performance reviews and DNA analysis.”

Though each browser has its own options for making text and images more legible, there are a few approaches in Safari that are a bit uncommon and not only help you zoom in and adjust what you are seeing, but also allow you to manage tabs and other content you are viewing.

Learn to love Stack Overflow.

Apple’s virtual assistant Siri may have its roots in a Pentagon-funded artificial intelligence research project, but algorithms aren’t everything and the Cupertino company is now turning to writers to make Siri smarter.

"Your DUNS number requirement was the last straw."

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) largely removes the burden of manual memory management, not to mention the chore of tracking down bugs caused by leaking or over-released objects! Despite its awesomeness, ARC does not let you ignore memory management altogether.

Jerry McDougal, Vice-President of Retail, said goodbye to his colleagues last Friday, sources say. His departure was explained as not work-related, but rather so he could spend more time with his family.

Borderlands made its mark on the gaming world for mixing the venerable first-person shooter genre we all know and love with elements of role-playing gameplay, like tons of quests and side missions, randomized loot drops and character-building through the use of skill points. So it’s great to see Aspyr’s Borderlands 2 not stray too far from the formula, but improve incrementally on its predecessor.

So why is all this necessary? Is there really anything wrong with just wiping a Mac you’re going to give away and installing a fresh copy of the latest version of OS X it can run? I won’t tell anyone if you do, but Apple’s legal beagles have anticipated that you might want to do this and have explicitly forbidden it in the Software License Agreement.

I spend quite a bit of time writing, and I’d like to briefly share a list of the main tools I use - not just for the writing itself, but to help myself focus, resolve issues, and overcome the occasional bout of block.

Know your audience, be a calming force, and make sure you have a method for taking over the remote screen when all else fails.

Oracle released a patch for the vulnerability on Sunday and today Apple released Java 7 update 11 which addresses the vulnerability. But we may not be out of the woods just yet.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that iOS 6 righted that wrong with its introduction of Do Not Disturb (at least, when Do Not Disturb works). But you’d be wrong. Do Not Disturb can mute incoming notifications—but only when your iOS device is locked. That is, Apple offers Do Not Disturb as a way to keep your sleeping iPhone silent when you, too, are asleep; a locked iPhone with Do Not Disturb enabled won’t illuminate the screen, vibrate, or make a sound when notifications arrive.

That’s a great feature. But it’s not enough.

Although fans of the Windows version will point ruefully to multiple missing features and effects, Mac users who’ve never seen Sound Forge before will be suitably impressed by the tools on offer, the elegant workflow and the quality of the effects.

Four years ago I got my iPhone 3G. To this day it’s my daily driver smartphone and constant digital companion when I’m out and about. The world has since long moved on to newer devices with far more capacity and capabilities than my lowly little black iPhone can muster. Yet, I still use mine and haven’t really found many reasons to upgrade.

Now I find myself with 500,000 total users who have tried Tweet Marker, but no way to follow up with them to see if they are interested in upgrading to the $1/month subscriber plan. The service is, frankly, a financial failure. More like a charity experiment than a business.

The two men behind Fantastical are, in many ways, very different from each other: they work on opposite coasts and graduated college decades apart. But their laser focus and exacting standards are a good match when it comes to building great iOS and Mac software.

Parents are being warned to be vigilant with their iPhones and iPads, following increasing reports of children running up bills of hundreds of pounds while playing games such as Playmobil Pirates, Coin Dozer and Racing Penguin.

Behind all the dazzling mobile-ready electronics products on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is a looming problem: how to make the networks that support all these wireless devices function robustly and efficiently.

Aside from sync improvements and Display settings (I can now set Inconsolata as my password font), I particularly appreciate the possibility to double-tap on a tab on the iPad to go back to root view, and search in portrait mode on iPad.

But the desktop client is going the way of the dodo.

Sometimes you need to let a friend or family member use the computer, but hesitate because you don’t want them to screw anything up. Fortunately, OS X has your back. Today we’re going to take a look at the Guest Account and walk you the features that will help you limit the access and privileges of occasional users.

His approach uses a novel technique in which the target app itself is built with customized screen-capturing code compiled right in. Then the app can be driven through the iOS Simulator with WaxSim, a command-line tool for launching the simulator with various options.

Simply drag and drop your movies and TV shows into iFlicks and it does the rest, wrapping them in an Apple-friendly format, automatically pulling in art and metadata, and importing the videos into iTunes. You can add several at once, which is handy if you’re digitizing your entire library.

The main problem is that it’s very difficult to determine what type of image is best for the viewer. As the device and network ecosystems become more diverse, this problem will continue to get harder to solve.

希勒表示，市场份额并不是苹果最关心的，我们要做智能手机的领导者。苹果一直引以为豪的是，创造最好的产品。市场份额只是副产品。

Whether you are new to Evernote or are just getting around to upgrading to the latest version, you’ll find that the new iOS versions of Evernote make the experience of capturing and retrieving your notes faster and smoother.

On either iOS or Android, Pebble can receive notifications for texts, emails, and calls. On Android, you can add Google Talk and Google Voice notifications to that mix, while iOS naturally does iMessage since it's built into the SMS app. It controls music on your phone thanks to AVRCP that works just like it does on Bluetooth headsets — minus the audio, of course. The vibration motor on the Pebble felt strong enough that you won't miss an alert — it's certainly more noticeable than a vibration in your pocket.

Rather than copy the likes of Tweetbot and the official Twitter app, Twitterrific 5 makes a bold statement with its minimalist, customizable design.

An easy way to keep your Mac healthy is to keep your apps current. Why? Bug fixes, security updates, new features—need I go on? Resolve to stay on top of updates in the new year.

Apple has just released an EFI firmware update for the mid-2012 MacBook Air. The firmware update fixes an issue with colors on external HDMI displays, a problem with Windows that can stop the computer from booting properly, and an issue with Thunderbolt devices causing the computer to freeze.

A free CS2 would also go some way toward starving alternative applications of oxygen. Given the choice between a free copy of CS2 and downloading, say, the GIMP, one imagines that many users would plump for the commercial application.

Providing a solution to students who don’t want to carry a laptop while walking late at night from their dorm or off-campus housing to the library,

Originally priced at $49, the cable is now available on the Apple Store for $39. The company has also released a shorter, 0.5 meter version, priced at $29.

Today Apple announced on their Developer Portal that screenshots for submitted apps will be locked once an app is approved. Until now a developer could change screenshots for an app (the preview images you see in the App Store that help you see what an app looks like) at any time. The new rules mean that now the screenshots for an app cannot be changed until an update for the app is submitted again.

Some of these changes include a performance upgrade for displaying multiple high-velocity columns, the ability to embed a tweet from the tweet itself (great for bloggers), a new search box with Typeahead and People Search, and the ability to reduce the app window to 2 columns.

The visiting family members have left, the Christmas tree is out on the curb and the New Year’s Eve party confetti is all vacuumed up. If only sharing your holiday photos were as easy to manage.

The Internet has long been associated with generous spirits, and they are two of the best, having helped thousands of podcasters and millions of listeners along with their crew of over 200 paid and unpaid staff who worked on podcasts across the years. Let’s not be sad that ITConversations has put into the Internet Archive’s dry dock; rather, let’s celebrate that it launched a thousand new voices.

While Macs aren’t immune to malicious software (malware), and we even experienced one reasonably widespread incident in 2012, malware on Macs is still not nearly common enough to recommend antivirus software for everyone. And while antivirus tools are effective against certain known attacks, they often don’t provide the level of protection people expect.

In 2012, Apple broke its own sales records in the education market.

Understanding the concept of nothingness is as much a philosophical issue as it is a pragmatic one. We are inhabitants of a universe of somethings, yet reason in a logical universe of existential uncertainties. As a physical manifestation of a logical system, computers are faced with the intractable problem of how to represent nothing with something.

The new iteration of Hype adds support for CSS filter effects, improves the software’s action system, and introduces support for Retina-display Macs.

When the user clicks on a link, Choosy presents a list of the browsers installed on the system; it's not a text list but the regular icons of the browsers. This prompt lets you choose the browser you want.

Keycard is a new Mac app that pairs to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with Bluetooth, and when it detects that you've stepped away from your Mac (assuming you have your device with you), it locks your Mac. Once you return, or enter in the 4 digit code, your Mac unlocks.

2012 saw the official rollout of two new OS X technologies that have profoundly affected third-party software: Sandboxing and Gatekeeper.

Even two months after the adapter was finally released, there’s still confusion about what works and what doesn’t.

I constantly find myself having to delete this extra cruft that Word automatically adds to the plain-text alternative in the clipboard before I can submit my search request in the other applications that I use.

Apple is now offering the Fusion Drive as a build-to-order option when ordering the most affordable 2.7GHz 21.5-inch iMac model, a change in availability from October when the system was limited to high-end versions and the 27-inch iMac.

I can’t be the only person who thinks about this stuff. (I mean, Marty McFly’s Walkman!) So I mentioned it on Twitter and suddenly found myself in a discussion about what Apple device you’d want to take back in time from today to blow away those sci-fi writers in 1956.

Apple, in a statement on Thursday, said the company was “one of the top corporate income taxpayers in the country, if not the largest.” The statement said the company “conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules.”

Whenever you attempt to send a message using Mail, the plug-in first scans the text of that email for specific words indicating that you meant to include an attachment. If ForgetMeNot detects one of those words and the message indeed includes an attachment, the message goes through; if the message is missing attachments, you see an alert. You can then choose to cancel sending, add the attachment, or send sans attachment.

So the answer, as always, is “It depends.”

Hundreds is a very fun, though admittedly frustrating, puzzle game. It's very challenging, but in a way that keeps you coming back for more, because you repeatedly tell yourself that "you'll get it this time", and eventually you do.

Brash as its title might seem, Awesomenauts pretty well lives up to its confident billing by delivering a stellar side-scrolling take on the surging Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre, in which small teams work together to storm the enemy base while protecting their own.

Of the few dozen RSS readers for Mac users, I have three favorites. The popular NetNewsWire. The open source Vienna (one of the Top 20 Free Mac Tools Every PC Switcher Needs).

And, the one I use the most– Reeder.

If you're one of those people who forgets to turn off your Mac at night, you might be interested in a little-known OS X feature capable of automatically putting your Mac to sleep at a time of your choosing.

It's easy to dismiss the Do Not Disturb bug as trivial and in isolation it is, but over time Apple's response to problems and the number of irritating little errors that pop up in iOS could begin to mount up in the public consciousness.

Using the Facebook Messenger app, users can now record and send voice messages as an alternative to typing out a written message.

Word games reward people with a vast vocabulary and the ability to sort a jumble of letters into the most unusual concatenations. Cheating is hard because consulting a dictionary or an anagram-solving website would be rather conspicuous to the other players. Online, such obvious skullduggery would go undetected. Or would it?

I didn’t believe I could look forward to receiving a newsletter every day, but it happened with NextDraft. Dave Pell does an exceptional job in bringing quality news to me with a style that’s informative and friendly. More importantly, NextDraft is uniquely human, with no robots involved in link aggregation.

Now, to programmers who've done a lot of work with date and time handling (like me; I write airline flight systems for a living, which require a lot of heavy timezone math) "it's broken during something like the first week of the year" immediately suggests a moderately obscure problem related to the ISO week date. This is a slightly weird definition of the year that you get from many date manipulation libraries by specifying that you want the year as "YYYY", as opposed to the more common "yyyy".

Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks. Apple’s brilliant insight was that despite netbooks’ popularity, nobody really wanted a netbook per se. Instead, Apple realized that people who were buying netbooks were looking for one of two things—they wanted full-fledged laptops that were very portable, or they wanted cheap machines that allowed them to easily surf the Web, use email and do other light computing tasks. Rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly, Apple built two machines that were, each in its own way, much better than any netbook ever sold.

Anyway, yes, there is a bit of anti-iOS sentiment there, you’ll be constantly teased about Obj-C’s strange syntax and other Apple quirks (maps?) no end… But on the other hand, there’s more iOS developers at Google than you’d think, and if you wanted to I think you could make a reasonable career out of it.

...or do I just need new glasses?

Like the Apple TV remote, it takes time and effort to simplify communications to the core message.

The single-day events are aimed at improving the skills of consultants supporting Macs in SOHO and SMB environments. The company said that the curriculum has been revamped to accommodate newbies and returning attendees.

Apple says that the fix is to wait until January 7, 2013—or manually turn Do Not Disturb on and off. To do so, visit the Settings app, find Do Not Disturb, and tap to switch the slider.

It’s not helpful to beginners because it makes them feel stupid and it gives off an elitist vibe from the author. It’s also not helpful for experienced developers, who are confident in their skills but who could use some updating in their habits, because the inflammatory style is used in stead of providing actual reasoning of why these sins are something to be avoided.

A new iPhone 5 ad has just shown up on YouTube. "Dream," oddly enough, highlights the one feature of the iPhone 5 that wasn't working properly this morning -- Do Not Disturb.

With the operating system becoming less and less important for most average users there isn’t the same incentive for companies to adopt new technology these days. Well unless it saves battery life or electricity.

It’s that time again when Mac users make their New Year’s resolutions. How about a simple pledge to keep your computer clean? I’m not talking about deleting cache files or removing old apps you no longer use. I’m talking about your Mac’s screen and keyboard, or its dusty, grungy innards. It’s not difficult to do, but keeping a clean Mac can help it run smoother, and keep you from getting sick as well. Here are a few ways you can keep your Mac looking new and fresh.

Like clockwork, Apple's iOS devices are experiencing another time-related bug on New Year's Day. A new Do Not Disturb feature in IOS 6 is failing to disable itself for some today, leaving calls and notifications muted for longer than usual. Not everyone is affected, but one of our own iPad's with the scheduled Do Not Disturb feature enabled has failed to turn off at the normal time.

In celebration of the forthcoming year++, I thought it’d be fun to compile a list of some of your favorite tips and tricks of the trade–to give y’all a chance to show off some of your NSHipster cred.

This list isn't about stylistic things like which line new braces go on (new ones, duh). This list is about potential problems with the code you're writing on an objective scale.

Studiometry 10 is a business management application aimed at small businesses and designed to help track and manage projects, create quotes and invoices, and make sure you’re getting paid on time. Geared toward businesses that are anywhere from 1 to 50 employees, the program is designed to grow as your business does, making it easy to convert a standalone database into a server-based business management tool that can handle all your users whether they’re working from a Mac, PC, or iOS device.