I meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.

To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.

For consumers who want to organise, correct, and enhance their photos, and then share them in a variety of ways, iPhoto for iPhone is a great option.

Apple’s “sold” numbers are really its shipment numbers, according to several prominent financial analysts who obsessively follow every word and number that emerges from Cupertino. Horace Dediu, who writes the Asymco blog, told me that “Apple’s reports show shipments not sales.” He added, “All vendors as far as I know report shipment data since that is what they can record.”

If you are experiencing problems with a menu extra and can't seem to remove it by standard means, it may have a nonstandard implementation, which will take a couple of steps to root out and uninstall.

According to Apple, the update is a stability fix for Thunderbolt and Target Disk Mode. The update is a scant 1.2MB in size and requires OS X 10.8.3 or later.

What this commercial does so well is capture the human side of technology. It’s a reflection of daily life, and it’s easy to see ourselves in it. The ad shows us how essential our phones have become, enabling us to capture the people, places and images we don’t want to forget.

If a person falls asleep with the iPad2 on the chest, the magnets in the cover can “accidentally turn off” the heart device, said Chien, a high school freshman in Stockton, California, whose father is a doctor. “I definitely think people should be aware. That’s why I’m presenting the study.”

The new post-play feature will cue and then begin the next episode in the season once the currently watched one ends.