If you find a folder called Damaged Files at the root of your hard drive in OS X, it may mean nothing -- or it could be a sign that your drive is failing.

The latest $99 software amplifiers from Orange are not not a complete substitute for real amps, but they’re a decent choice for home recording.

If views in the OS X Finder shift around, you may be able to control this by a quick settings change.

If you were to lose your phone on the street, then somebody else picked it up, took it home, plugged it into their computer and fired up iExplorer, they would just see a screen telling them to plug in a device. iExplorer has no way to talk to that device until the device has been unlocked, plugged into the computer, and the keys have been exchanged.

Triage’s focus is on helping you to pare down the untamed mass of your inbox as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you have a few minutes, you can fire up Triage, and quickly deal with a few messages.

If you use the Podcasts app to listen and watch podcasts, you can also create custom stations that'll filter in podcasts based on which subscriptions you add to that section. You can think of stations as nothing more than creating playlists just like you do in the Music app.

In most aspects, Pocket is not necessarily better than Instapaper, except for in one area—it makes the visual experience of saving and reading articles more enjoyable, which is no small feat. The newcomer holds its own against the grizzled veteran.

David Green’s Classic Note brings back the System 6 and earlier Macintosh OS user interface aesthetic to the iOS, putting the days of one-button mice and 3.5″ floppy disks in your pocket, without breaking your back.

In the case of Safari’s web archives, it’s possible for a malicious web archive to not only access content stored by another site, but potentially any file on the victim’s computer.

Health care has changed dramatically since Steve Jobs first stood in front of an audience to introduce first the iPhone then later the iPad. Much of that change can be directly attributed to Apple.

Reeder 3.1 also adds support for local RSS subscriptions, which won’t sync with any web service or other device running Reeder. Supporting local RSS feeds is anachronistic, but probably the right thing to do to ensure Reeder can keep working in case more RSS services will announce a shutdown in the future.

Impressive Xamarin SDK brings native iPhone and Android development to C# programmers, Visual Studio.

Freemium, free-to-play and IAP are now entrenched in gaming for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. But is that a bad thing, or has the system just been too often abused? I ask developers whether micro- (and not-so-micro-) transactions are the future of the industry, and how that will affect the games that are made.

The bug appears to render the final word of certain messages sent from an iPhone or Mac invisible to both sender and recipient. Two phrases have been confirmed as affected by the issue, with one oddly including President Barack Obama.

Following an “unprecedented interest” in WWDC that saw tickets selling out in less than two minutes, Apple has officially announced on its “News and Announcements” developer portal that “they’ll be hitting the road” with Tech Talks this Fall.

If you rely on Dropbox to keep your files and folders accessible from all your devices, I feel confident in saying that Spotdox will eventually get you out of a self-inflicted jam.

Borrowing money to pay its shareholders actually costs Apple less than paying taxes on its massive cash piles.

Before you sell or give away your Mac, iMac or Macbook, you need to securely erase its contents and reinstall the OS. Passing on a cleanly installed Mac isn't just good manners, it's critical to your personal security. You need to ensure that you pass on only hardware and software, and not your personal data. Here's how to wipe a Mac - you'll need the install discs that came with it.

If you are tired of holding the arrow keys and waiting for your cursor to move, there are alternatives to greatly speed this up.

Triage is not looking to replace your email client of choice. It doesn't support push notifications. You can't search or sort, and you can't batch delete. Heck, you can't even compose a new message. The only thing you can do is reply, archive, or delete each message, one at a time. It seems crazy, but the method is fairly ingenious: Your electronic mail is no different than your physical mail, so why should you treat it any differently?

Pair up Bluetooth on your iPhone or iPad to the Mac. Keycard resides in the background and locks up your Mac when you step away, and unlocks it when you return.

Sequence 1.1 does this incredibly quickly—you simply drop your folder of stills onto a big import window, wait a few moments while the software renders a preview of your movie, and then watch as your time-lapse movie plays back.

Marco Arment's sold Instapaper (at least most of his interest in it). It appears, however, he didn't pull this off by finding the biggest company willing to write a check with the largest number of zeros but instead sought out a company, in this case betaworks, willing to shower love on Instapaper as he did.

The new release comes with a number of new features, including a slightly tweaked user interface, support for Macs with Retina displays, and the ability for users to upload and share photos along with their tweets. The app now also supports fourteen new languages, including Italian, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and more.

If you use Apple's Accessibility settings for those with impairments, you can toggle some of their options with a quick hot-key-invoked panel.

It's a fun memory game of the pick-up-and-play ilk, and it's kept me busy for the last week or so.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is offering one wealthy bidder a chance to have a cup of coffee with him at Apple headquarters, with an estimated value of $50,000. Proceeds will benefit the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, and bidding will end May 14th.

Drafts, the hugely popular iOS app for making quick text bits and notes, and then repurposing them in all kinds of ways, hit version 3.0 on Wednesday. The new version adds better organization options for drafts and actions, new action options, Reminders integration, and more.

Stay is an invaluable tool for anybody who goes back and forth between display configurations, helping you avoid that hair-tearing, bewildered cry of “What the heck is that window doing there?”

Apple has today announced that its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will take place in June 10-14th, 2013 at San Francisco’s Moscone West this year. Tickets will be on sale tomorrow, April 25th at 10am.

Using voice to send text messages while driving is just as dangerous as texting with fingers, with driver response times significantly delayed no matter which method was used, a study released on Tuesday showed.

I dig deeper to cover Raw+JPEG management, effect presets, and the use of AppleScripts upon import to supercharge your Aperture workflow.

I would love to try my hands on a better Mailbox iOS app, that is more secure. Until then I have deleted my accounts from Mailbox.

Designed for the more specific needs of sequential artists, it includes multiple panels, speech balloons, and pens and pencils that behave just as they would in the real world.

The Apple Store app for iPhone has been updated with a handy little feature that will notify you when you're eligible for upgrade pricing on a new iPhone. You can even buy your new iPhone directly with the app after receiving the notification since all you need is your Apple ID credentials to do so.

Cook has an optimistic outlook for the future, telling analysts that the company has “some really great stuff coming in the fall and of course in all of 2014.” Cook expressed frustration and disappointment with Apple’s stock performance, but added that the “most important thing is creating innovative products, which is still in our control.”

Text is incredibly powerful—whether you’re making a business card or a garage-sale sign, you’re sending a message. The look of that message influences the way the receiver reacts: If the message is visually pleasing, the reaction is generally positive, but if the text is hard to read, that feeling of difficulty transfers back to you, the messenger. Here we’ll cover the basics of everyday typography, font pairings that are pleasing to the eye, practical formatting tips that work with a variety of software, and common mistakes to avoid.

In a reported change to its iTunes Connect developer portal, Apple recently deprecated the use of special emoji-type characters for app descriptions, limiting app makers to standard text for submitted updates.

If your Bluetooth devices are not maintaining proper connections, then poor signal strength may be to blame.

You pull down the menu, set a stop time and an optional audio alert. Click "Start" and boom, the menu bar at the top of your screen transforms into a progress bar. A blue line moves from right to left, providing a visual indicator of the time remaining.

A new option in both the iOS and Mac/PC version of iTunes will allow a user to purchase some types of large content and then download it at a later time.

According to Apple, the option is available for TV seasons, season passes, movie bundles, music box sets, individual movies, and TV episodes.

If you want to be notified as soon as our favorite web sites are updated, Monotony is a simple, free solution for your Mac.

It also updates its Dock icon with the current time, and ticks very gently when the clock window is open. You can hide the clock window from the Clock menu to silence the clock.

Roccat is an excellent browser choice if you’re a fan of thumbnail page tabs, offering two tab options: garden variety default tabs plus VisiTabs. Both modes let you reorder tabs as you prefer and quickly switch between them.

If you haven’t been using Alfred, the amazing app launcher (and much more) on your Mac, you’ve been missing out. It started out as an app launcher, a la Quicksilver, but continued to get improvements and additions over time until now, version 2.0 can do a ton of things on your Mac, all with a quick hotkey press on the keyboard, including launching apps, issuing system commands, and more.

But the most important, and often most overlooked, is Cognitive Simplicity. This is an idea that slowly emerged as my company, Bump, tried to understand exactly why Bump is so popular, especially in the non-tech crowd. We believe product builders should first and foremost minimize the Cognitive Overhead of their products, even though it often comes at the cost of simplicity in other areas.

It’s only really Twitter users with mainstream music tastes that will find #music useful.

Both VMware and Parallels offer solid performance and useful features when running Windows on a Mac. If you need the fastest performance, Parallels still edges out VMware Fusion, although the latter is available for half the price.

The bar is higher, but the market is fine.

Here’s what happens. Whenever you speak into Apple’s voice activated personal digital assistant, it ships it off to Apple’s data farm for analysis. Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned.

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.

He was an abusive husband to an entire company. But at least he had a track record of success.

In this week’s installment, the iTunes Guy looks at renaming files, syncing iOS devices wirelessly, matching music ripped from vinyl, and a couple of questions about tags and file names.

The application includes customizable buttons for common purchases, such as one’s daily newspaper, train tickets, or lunch, and provides an elegant analysis of the user’s spending that can be viewed by week or month.

Cut the Rope: Time Travel is very much playing it safe, then, but in doing so it’s likely to enjoy some strong success among a large number of mobile gamers.

It's fast; it makes great use of your screen real estate; and video quality is phenomenal.

This isn’t going to be a huge world changing ecosystem, but there is room for one little monster to take it all.

Skitch, the image annotation and sharing tool that Evernote acquired in the summer of 2011, has today been updated on iOS to include support for PDF annotations. I have been testing the new feature for the past few months, and, while not as full-featured as a dedicated PDF annotation app, I believe it is a solid addition to Skitch.

For those who prize a simple approach with plenty of power under the hood, it might be worth it.

Things for Mac, a popular to-do application, has been updated with more robust date handling, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

Things is a delightful and easy to use task manager. It's the perfect companion for everything you want to achieve in life, offering a great balance between ease of use and powerful features.

You can still use Alfred to reliably find and launch files, apps, and Web searches without any complex configuration. But if you're willing to dig deeper, you might be pleasantly surprised by just how powerful this easy-to-use launcher can be.

You are probably familiar with the coin-counting service Coinstar, which offers cash in exchange for your loose coins. Instead of receiving a cash voucher next time you turn in change, select an iTunes gift certificate and you will receive a receipt with an iTunes redemption code.

It's just way too much money. They say some banks are too big to fail, but Apple is too big to buy.

When you view a Finder folder in both standard lists and the Cover Flow view in OS X, you have the option to sort the list by any of the view's columns.

By default, these are the item's Name, Date Modified, Size, and Kind (for example folder, picture, PDF) which you can click to sort in either an ascending or descending list. However, there are some additional ways to locate the files you need.

Cloud search is a system-wide search that allows you to find files sync'd by SugarSync, no matter which computer or device they happen to be on. And the new "Open In" feature allows you to take photos, videos and other documents from other apps on your mobile device, and open them up inside SugarSync's folders, where you can share them off to anywhere else.

I created this tutorial for developers transitioning to iOS that don’t want to deal with Storyboarding or Interface Builder. It implements the “Hello World” app from Apple’s documentation entirely in code.

Chat heads, one of the major features shown off in Facebook Home, has also come to iOS, allowing users to chat anywhere within the app.

When using only one earbud, you may miss parts of songs and other audio, but mono output will prevent this.

The affected third-generation Apple TVs have been experiencing issues that make them unable to connect to or join a Wi-Fi network or they may experience intermittent or dropped connections.

If you've got an iPhone or iPad running iOS 6 or higher, you've got Guided Access. This feature is especially great to use with small children that you don't want to have access to certain apps. Once you've launched them into the app they are allowed to be in, you can take it one step further by disabling touch for certain areas of the screen you may not want them having access to.

Anything to boost productivity and reduce time spent emailing is a big win in my book. Accordingly, the “Sent from my iPhone” signature attached to an email has become associated in everyones minds with brevity, since naturally nobody expects a lengthy email reply sent while on the go from a smartphone, right? As a result, short replies from smartphones and iPhones are not considered rude or overly brief, and you can use that expectation of a brief and concise message to your advantage when sending emails from the Mail app of OS X. This is a great way to improve your email productivity when writing and replying from the desktop, and while some people call it a brand vanity signature, I like to call it the “brevity signature”.

A script that takes an hour to write but only saves me 15 minutes may seem like a waste, but if it saves three other people 15 minutes, too, the overall accounts are in balance. I’ll get my “lost” 45 minutes back when others share the scripts they’ve written.

"What he wanted to do with his life was create tools that allowed people to work at the highest levels, and I think he did that. So that legacy is beautiful for me to live with," she said.

"Having the body of work surrounding us is actually a really beautiful reminder," she said, "and I find it touching and inspiring for me to make sure that I continue to do what I'm most passionate about, and I hope my kids feel the same way."

Some aspects of the shuffle that might be thought weaknesses turn out to be strengths, or at least not significantly different from my old iPod nano; in one or two areas it definitely disappoints, but in ways I can live with. And some features of the shuffle turn out to be better than the nano!

If you want to scrub formatted text easily, TextScrub provides a user-definable hot key that'll get rid of any styles you don't want. It'll even remove bullet points from lists and empty lines if you'd prefer to have one big block of text.

In the letter to iTunes Connect members, Apple noted that the App Store and Mac App Store are available in 155 countries with support for 40 languages, saying that "it has never been more important to localize your app and marketing material."

It’s cleanly and neatly designed, has a clear workflow and doesn’t compromise on features for the sake of usability.

Practically all apps that store documents in iCloud let you delete them from the app itself, which simultaneously removes them from iCloud and thus all other synced iOS & OS X devices. But if you’re looking to manage and remove specific iCloud documents and data, there is a better way to do it through a centralized control panel within iOS that will let you view all documents stored in iCloud, much like the same feature that is on the Mac which is accessible through OS X System Preferences.

Apple is agreeing to pay $53 million to settle a class action accusing the company of failing to honor warranties on iPhones and iPod Touches, according to an agreement obtained today by Wired.

Free iPad and smartphone games which can result in children running up hefty bills for their parents through expensive in-game features are to come under scrutiny from the Office of Fair Trading.

In the end, publishers need to be clear about what they want to accomplish with their app before deciding on Web tools or going native. If an app’s features don’t demand the extra capabilities or speed of a native app, a Web app may be the best bet. It will work on almost every mobile device, use development skills that may already exist in the newsroom, and offer a wider range of distribution options.

Apple has a number of hidden features that can be used to help manage window clutter in OS X.

Spotlight's default search is limited to user files, but if needed you can expand it to include most system files.

Fleur Pellerin, France's digital industry minister, is taking Apple to the public woodshed for pulling the AppGratis service from the App Store, saying the tech giant's "brutal" treatment had put the French startup in danger. She now plans to ask European regulators to more closely regulate digital platforms including search engines and social media.

Status Board comes ready to use, but its highly customizable nature is proving to be one of the app's greatest strengths.

PDFpenPro is the crème de la crème of PDF editing and annotating applications. While the app’s new editing bar makes the program easier to use, it’s features such PDFpenPro’s form-recognition tool and excellent PDF-to-Word conversion tool that continue to make PDFpenPro a constant companion in my daily workflow.

LiveCode is a graphical IDE based around the concepts of Apple's HyperCard, which was introduced in 1987. The IDE allows users to create desktop and mobile applications by dragging and dropping control elements and allocating code to them. LiveCode uses a natural English-based development language that is also inspired by HyperCard.

If you want a little more freedom in the way that you organize your photo collection then you could take a look at Pixa from Shiny Frog. Pixa’s interface is very similar to that of iPhoto, and allows you to import photos simply by dragging and dropping them into the program’s main workspace window. You can also create your own ‘projects’ – which are Pixa’s equivalent of iPhoto albums.

Apple confirmed to Macworld later on Wednesday that it did not block Saga #12, and Comixology CEO David Steinberger subsequently took responsibility in a post on the company’s blog.

Steinberger went on to apologize to Vaughan and his publisher, Image Comics, and to say that “our interpretation of [Apple's] policies was mistaken” and that Saga #12 would be available via the Comixology app soon; less than an hour later, it was indeed available for purchase.

Here are six tips for using a Web browser to access the stores more quickly and efficiently.

If your Mac (or any computer) is starting to feel a little slow there are a several things you can do to put some spring back into its step. Here are three to get you started.

Panic’s latest app, Status Board, takes the concept of using the iPad as a desk accessory one step further by turning it into a dashboard for a variety of data that you’d normally check in dedicated apps or websites.

Apple is free to set its own guidelines, but this isn't the first case we've seen where minor updates led to an app being pulled after years of operation.

It's that fact that points to what the Saga controversy is really about: the collapsing distinction between publishing something and distributing it, and between apps and art.

Though specialists have devised myriad systems that purport to achieve Inbox Zero. I’m not that ambitious. I just want a system that keeps the number of unread messages in my inbox as small as possible, doesn’t treat my inbox as a to-do list, and doesn’t require me to spend hours sorting and archiving my mail.

A new version of the video compression software is designed to ease use of Web video, producing HTML code for both H.264 and VP8.

Ridiculous Fishing is a fine title for this ridiculous game. But it’s also incredibly addictive, surprisingly charmingly, beautifully crafted, and insanely fun.

Sketch is an extraordinarily handy tool for drawing, interface design, logos, buttons and other web furniture.

Some Xcode challenges seem to crop up repeatedly. Today, I thought I'd share a few solutions that you might find helpful to integrate into your workflow.

Considering its ease of use and wide range of features, LastPass is a great password management solution for beginners and experienced operators alike; hopefully, the attractive pricing will be enough to convince even the most hesistant user to give this great way of managing your online persona a go.

Apple declined further comment on AppGratis’s ouster, framing the move as a standard response to guideline violations. But sources close to the company say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure. “The App Store is intended as a meritocracy,” a source familiar with Apple’s thinking told AllThingsD.

In other words, app-discovery platforms are fine as long as they’re not built on paid recommendations.

Just in time for National Poetry Month, Penguin has teamed up with app developer inkle to bring you a high-tech, enjoyable way to memorize classic poetry. Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, released this past week, features impressive artwork, smart design and solid voice recordings.

One good thing that came from testing these apps is realizing that two Finder windows next to each other seemed to be exactly what I was looking for all along.

Fantastical’s teaching isn’t punitive. It’s instant positive reinforcement that helps you learn how to use it when you’re just starting out and doesn’t get in your way when you’re an expert.

Someone, somewhere is injecting banner ads into webpages on the sly.

Here are the best alternatives I’ve found that offer similar functionality to what is available in each of Adobe’s products.

Apple will be changing how VPN On Demand for iOS works due to a lawsuit by VirnetX. iOS devices running 6.1 or later that have VPN On Demand set to “Always” will now behave as though they were set to “Establish if needed”. The device will only use a VPN On Demand connection when it is necessary. This change will be made with an update at some point this month.

I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but it strikes me that too many iOS device owners fail to act in their own best interests—both in the immediate near term and in the long term—when they scoff at the thought of spending money in the App Store.

If you right-click or hold the Command or Control buttons while clicking the document's title, you will see a menu that shows the path to the document. Using this menu, you can not only reveal the document in the Finder, but also quickly access it for loading in other programs.

Meetings is an app for iPhone and Mac by Command Guru that helps you plan, organize, and keep track of your meetings. It features a gorgeous interface and sections for participants, preparation, agenda, discussions, decisions, and tasks.

I’m surprised that users would ask for a particularly underlying technology for syncing.

Apple Inc. removed at least one mobile application from its China iTunes store for containing books banned by the government, the Financial Times reported, citing the app’s developer.

An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge.

As you’d expect from Blizzard , everything about Heart Of The Swarm is immensely polished and enjoyable. It’s a complex strategy game that will require plenty of time and patience – and a permanent Internet connection even for the single player game – but if you enjoyed StarCraft II then you won’t want to miss Heart Of The Swarm.

It could be how you order a drink in the pub or shop for clothes or even how doctors look up medical notes — all that’s needed is an iPad. There’s an iRevolution going on and London is leading the way. Here’s how the city has been iPadded out.

First, I can read my Kindle content on nearly any platform you can think of. Second, Kindle books are cheap.

Google announced today that it is forking the WebKit rendering engine on which its Chrome browser is based. The company is naming its new engine "Blink."

Linus Upson, vice president of Engineering at Google, and Alex Komoroske, product manager on the Open Web Platform team, told us that the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages. There is considerable complexity in WebCore that is there to support WebKit2 features that Google does not want or use.

Amazon has introduced file syncing to its Cloud Drive app for OS X, which essentially makes Cloud Drive Amazon's version of Dropbox.

In the face of organized crime, civilized people don’t pay up. When you pay up, you’re funding the criminals, which makes you complicit in their next attacks. I know, you’re just trying to write a little app for the iPhone with in-app purchases, and you didn’t ask for this fight to be yours, but if you pay the trolls, giving them money and comfort to go after the next round of indie developers, you’re not just being “pragmatic,” you have actually gone over to the dark side.

The updated client’s improved access to your local and Web Dropboxes makes things quicker, and the addition of the Share buttons to the menu items increases the likelihood that you’ll use this excellent but somewhat obscure feature.

Yes, it is harder to find pages to iTunes apps in Google. But no, the company says, it’s not part of some nefarious plot. Rather, Google’s having technical problems gathering iTunes Preview pages, an issue it’s working to solve.

So what can you do while waiting for Apple to support your region and mobile operator? You can still take some precautions that will secure your Apple ID account.

Timebar turns your Mac’s menubar itself into a visual timer. It overlays a translucent bar that gradually reduces as the time passes. All you need to get a sense of how much time is left is to glance up at your menubar.

U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan said ReDigi was not authorized to allow listeners to use its platform to buy and sell "used" digital music tracks originally bought from Apple Inc's iTunes website.

A number of owners of Apple's mid-2010 MacBook Pro who have upgraded to OS X 10.8.3 are noticing that systems with dual graphics cards will automatically switch to using the more powerful discrete graphics chip regularly, even when using non-graphics intensive applications like Google Chrome, Dropbox, and Growl. This does not result in crashes or other interruptions in workflow, but it does increase the drain on the systems' battery and result in a shorter working time when not connected to AC power.

在过去的两周里，我们收到了许多关于 Apple 在中国维修和保修政策的反馈。我们不仅对这些意见进行了深刻的反思，与相关部门一起仔细研究了 “三包” 规定，还审视了我们维修政策的沟通方式，并梳理了我们对 Apple 授权服务提供商的管理规范。我们意识到，由于在此过程中对外沟通不足而导致外界认为 Apple 态度傲慢，不在意或不重视消费者的反馈。对于由此给消费者带来的任何顾虑或误会，我们表示诚挚的歉意。

My theory going into this analysis is that the phenomenon of falling prices, as much as we would like to attribute this to the market around us, has largely been a self-inflicted wound. With that in mind, I set out to discover what the data had to say.