Apple posts 2008 Proxy Materials

Filed under: Apple Financial, AppleListen up, finance nerds, Apple has just posted their 2008 Proxy Materials. Are you excited? I'm not... but that might be because I have no idea what proxy materials are (I'm just a simple blogger). Apple notes that they are posting the proxy materials in an electronic format to help save a few trees , as these statements were previously printed out.If you didn't get enough Apple financials from our liveblog of Apple's quarterly results call, this proxy...

Filed under: Apple Financial, AppleListen up, finance nerds, Apple has just posted their 2008 Proxy Materials. Are you excited? I'm not... but that might be because I have no idea what proxy materials are (I'm just a simple blogger). Apple notes that they are posting the proxy materials in an electronic format to help save a few trees , as these statements were previously printed out.If you didn't get enough Apple financials from our liveblog of Apple's quarterly results call, this proxy materials might be just what you're looking for.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • 50 Killer Mac Apps For Under $50

       Who doesn't need more for less? We present 50 Mac|Life-approved applications--many free, all under $50--that'll guarantee you get the most from your Mac without traumatizing your wallet. The Internet is full of noise--countless different applications for every occasion, with reviews everywhere that love and hate them at the same time. While that’s hardly news, it’s still a hassle that isn’t going away. Say you picked up a spiffy new MacBook Pro, and it’s time to kit it out with the leanest, meanest software. After all, Macs have that rich history of garage-roots development, of a few folks in a basement brewing up quality software that smokes the big-name stuff. So you’ve got a feeling there’s great, affordable software just waiting for you to find it--and you’re right. But how do you sift through the zillion calendar apps and jillion media players to find the gems worthy of your hard drive space? And more importantly, your time and money?We’re here to help with a compendium of essential software. It didn’t come easily--we debated, argued, haggled, and even pleaded to secure a prized position on this list for our favorite, most useful applications. But by limiting the software we’re highlighting to 50, we’ve guaranteed you the best of the best--no Internet spew here. And by capping the cost of the software we’ve selected at $50, we’ve made sure you can reasonably buy what you need. You may love your Mac already, but you’re not gonna believe how much it can do once you load up even a few of these choice applications.   Entertainment Sure, iPods and iTunes make music and movies easier to enjoy, but they're not without headaches of their own. That's where these awesome apps come in. They take the pain out of kicking back with your favorite flicks and tunes. Simplify Media Share & stream your iTunes library over the Internet.The iPod has made several portable music formats obsolete, and we sure don’t miss schlepping around fragile cassette tapes or heavy wallets full of CDs. But even the mighty iPod has its limits--namely capacity. That’s where Simplify Media (free, Simplify Media, simplifymedia.com) comes in handy. It guarantees that the size of your music library doesn’t matter by letting you stream music between computers via the Internet. Yup, this app will play your entire library on any computer (as long as the one that has your library is powered up and online).Stream your tunes from home or the next cube.Once installed, a simple login fires up your music. Simplify Media works with iTunes just like the built-in LAN sharing does, and the remote libraries appear under Shared, alongside any local shared libraries. Even better, you can add up to 30 friends’ shared libraries, and an iPhone app ($5.99) lets you pipe your music to your iPhone or iPod touch.  SuperSync SuperSync keeps multiple iTunes collections in sync. Speaking of iTunes libraries--streaming is great, but what if you want to sync libraries across multiple Macs? SuperSync ($22, SuperSync, supersync.com) makes it so. Sure, Apple introduced limited music-transfer capabilities with Home Sharing in iTunes 9, but that feature requires computers to be on the same local network. SuperSync one-ups iTunes by syncing iTunes libraries over the Internet. It’s perfect for anyone who uses multiple Macs, and SuperSync also has a bunch of other tricked-out features. In deference to the record companies, Apple makes transferring music from an iPod to a computer unnecessarily difficult. SuperSync handles the task with ease, making it a bacon-saver when the hard drive in your Mac kicks the bucket. SuperSync will even allow you to sync libraries cross-platform.SuperSync's color-coded interface helps you synchronize your iTunes tracks across multiple Macs.  VLC Media Player Never worry about video file types again. If most of your Mac video-watching happens in the form of DVDs or QuickTime movies, you probably don’t think too much about player software. But move beyond the most basic video types, and you’re asking for trouble. With the myriad formats, containers, and encoding parameters available, the simple act of playing back a cat video can become incredibly frustrating. VLC Media Player (free, VideoLAN, www.videolan.org) is like a Swiss Army knife for digital media. It’s open source and cross-platform, and the app will play back practically any audio or video file you throw at it. VLC also handles file conversions with ease, so you can use it to convert audio and video for use online or on portable devices.It plays, it converts, it makes toast (okay, maybe not that last one.)  RipIt Backup & convert DVDs with RipIt.There are plenty of legit reasons to rip a DVD. Backup copies of kids’ movies for the minivan, watching Glee on your iPod touch while you’re on the bus, or even just saving battery power on your laptop (playing back a file from a hard drive is much more efficient than spinning a DVD).RipIt's simple interface makes ripping DVDs seamless and easy.Once the domain of ĂĽbernerds, DVD ripping is a one-click affair thanks to RipIt ($19.95, The Little App Factory, ripitapp.com). And since it makes full rips, all of the menus, bonus features, and subtitles remain intact. You can play back the resulting files with DVD Player on your Mac or use a freeware tool like Handbrake to convert your rips into iPod-friendly formats.   Delicious Library We love the iTunes Store, but we still end up accumulating books, DVDs, console games, and, yes, even CDs. Delicious Library ($40, Delicious Monster Software, www.delicious-monster.com) helps catalog your collections by--get this--taking snaps of UPCs via your webcam and then automatically organizing your meatspace content onto virtual shelves for easy sorting and browsing. You can track loans to friends, post items for sale on Amazon, and publish Web catalogs formatted for your iPhone. That way, you can avoid buying another copy of John Hodgman’s More Information Than You Require.   Connect360 We’re Apple-faithful, but that doesn’t stop us from engaging in a little Modern Warfare 2 on our Xbox 360. And since the 360 is much more than a simple gaming machine, we also use it to stream iTunes tracks to our entertainment center and view pictures from our iPhoto library on our HDTV--with the help of Connect360 ($20, Nullriver Inc, www.nullriver.com), that is. It works over wired or wireless networks, and it even streams H.264 video straight from our MacBook. Sweet!   Peel Pack rats, beware: Peel ($14.95, Hjalti Jakobsson, www.getpeel.com) can get really overwhelming, really fast. But if you’re an avid follower of music blogs, Peel can automagically grab new tracks as they’re posted. So forget all that pesky right-clicking and manually adding to iTunes. Just feed Peel a list of your favorite music blogs, and then kick back as tons of new, free tunes get downloaded straight to your Mac. You may never have to buy (or pirate) music again.    CoverScout Cover Flow is one of those features that looks great in a demo but doesn’t quite translate at home. iTunes can attempt to find the album art that makes Cover Flow actually useful, but it’s limited in scope and can’t make fuzzy matches. CoverScout ($39.95, equinox USA, www.equinux.com) scours the Internet to find your missing album art and presents you with multiple options to let you choose the best images. Don’t Cover Flow without it.   TuneUp For all of those untitled and mistitled tracks in your music library, there’s TuneUp ($19.95/one year, $29.95/lifetime; TuneUp Media; www.tuneupmedia.com). Like CoverScout, TuneUp can find and download missing album art, but its best trick is cleaning up your ID3 tags--the artist, title, and album info displayed in iTunes. A quick search is all it takes to clear up all those Track 1s and Unknown Artists in your library. It sure beats cleaning up metadata by hand. Next Page: Productivity Apps >>  Productivity Takin' care of business, every day. Takin' care of business, every way. Workin' on a Mac, it's all right. This productivity software is workin' overtime. WriteRoom Blocks distractions so you can write in peace.Proving the tired adage that “less is more,” WriteRoom ($24.95, Hog Bay Software, www.hogbaysoftware.com) is a light text editor with a full-screen mode. Start a new document, and everything else fades away--your Dock, your menubar, and other windows on your Desktop. You’re left with a black screen and friendly green text for a clutter- and distraction-free experience. The Escape key toggles between full-screen mode and windowed mode, which resembles TextEdit with a live word count.WriteRoom can save your work as plain text, rich text, or Microsoft Word’s .doc format. The preferences offer tons of customization: auto-save, character counts, the appearance of text in full-screen mode, and more. But WriteRoom’s real magic is how it gets out of your way and lets you focus on what you’re doing.  BusyCal One calendar application to rule them all.BusyCal ($40, BusyMac, www.busymac.com) is iCal on steroids. It dances circles around iCal, chanting, “Everything you can do, I can do better.” And it’s right. Sharing is a snap: You can set up two-way syncing with your Google Calendar or with other BusyCal calendars on your local network or the wide-open Internet. But even aside from sharing, BusyCal offers tons of calendaring bells and whistles: customizable views, sticky notes, weather forecasts, moon phases, graphical icons, a to-do list, notes, tags, and much more. And since it uses the Sync Services built into Mac OS X, your BusyCal calendars can sync with MobileMe and your iPhone. You can even switch back to iCal anytime without losing any of the events or to-dos you entered in BusyCal.So what if iCal is free? BusyCal is better.  Things Flexible to-do list syncs with iCal and the iPhone. For busy people like us, a good to-do list is beyond essential. But some that we’ve tried are so complicated that just managing your tasks becomes a chore in itself. So the light, easy-to-understand Things ($49.95, Cultured Code, www.culturedcode.com) is a breath of fresh air. You can go the full Getting Things Done route, adding contexts, priority levels, a tickler file, and so on. Or you can keep it simple, with one-off and repeating tasks and multistep projects. iCal syncing can get your deadlines on your calendar, and Things on the Mac can sync wirelessly with Things on the iPhone ($9.99 in the App Store). We’ve tried multiple task-managment systems, from Web-based ToodleDo to iPhone apps like ToDo to Mail’s built-in To-Do list to good old paper and pencil. Things is the cream of the crop for its good looks, quick entry, and easy syncing.Things uses tags to organize your projects in a million ways--or you can ignore the tags altogether and just work.  Express Scribe Transcriptions made easy... well, easier.Transcribing an interview, lecture, or other recording is hard enough, just with the listening and typing. Toss in the extra arm movement as you frantically click from your text editor to your audio-playback application every time you want to pause the recording or rewind a few seconds, and your transcribing job just got tougher and more frustrating. Express Scribe (free, NCH Software, www.nch.com.au/scribe) lets you set system-wide hotkeys for audio playback so you can stay in your text editor, fully control the audio, and never need to reach for your mouse.Express Scribe can also slow down your audio without changing the pitch, supports video, works with lots of file types, loads recordings from analog or digital audio recorders, and more. Plus, it’s completely free. Wahoo!  NoteBook The Mac is silly with note-taking applications (Evernote, Yojimbo, ShoveBox, MacJournal…shall we go on?), but Circus Ponies’ NoteBook ($49.95, Circus Ponies, www.circusponies.com) is a standout. If you subscribe to “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” NoteBook can be the place for notes, Web clippings, bookmarks, documents, voice memos, photos, and more. It struts its flexibility with ready-made templates for planning a trip, writing a research paper, collecting recipes, keeping a journal, and so on, while its fun spiral-notebook interface is a nice touch.    TextExpander A thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could produce Hamlet a lot faster if they knew how to use TextExpander ($29.95, SmileOnMyMac, www.smileonmymac.com). This wonder app installs as a System Preferences pane and lets you define shortcuts for your most commonly used words and phrases. Abbreviate long URLs, your email signoff, even your own photo or scanned signature file. Then as you type those shortcuts, they’re automagically expanded to what you really wanted to say. Brilliant.   iFinance 3 Sure, Quicken is popular and Mint.com is free, but iFinance 3 ($29, Synium Software GmbH, www.synium.de) was built from the ground up just for Macs, and it shows. The intuitive interface makes it a cinch--dare we say a pleasure?--to track your accounts, keep an eye on your cash flow, set up a budget, and graph your expenses. It can also import from CSV and QIF files for easier data entry. Plus, a companion iPhone app lets you enter transactions on the go.  FlexTime This charming timer app ($18.95, Red Sweater Software, www.red-sweater.com) lets you set up multistep routines that run once or repeat ad nauseam. Each step can be marked by a sound, spoken text, or even running a script. Once your routine is perfect, you can export the audio to iTunes--great for following a recipe’s carefully timed steps or taking your favorite yoga routines on the road.   DEVONthink Personal Another great catch-all for storing, sorting, organizing, and searching information, DEVONthink ($49.95, DEVONtechnologies, www.devon-technologies.com) can take almost anything you can throw at it. Documents, PDFs, photos, multimedia files, bookmarks, webpages, iChat logs--all of those can be imported, sorted, and read right in DEVONthink. Searching is easy, and you can cobble together a brand-new document from items in your DEVONthink database and export it to your favorite text editor for printing or as HTML for posting.  Next Page: Internet Apps >>  Internet It's a wild place, that Interweb, so there's nothing like a few primo apps to tame everything from blogging to FTPs to Twitter and Flash banners. Transmit Traveling the two-lane FTP highway.FTP has been around forever. Social networking and cloud computing may come and go, but FTP is in it for the long hall. Fortunately, there are a wealth of great FTP clients for the Mac, and the best of those is Transmit ($29.95, Panic, www.panic.com/transmit). The client utilizes a split directory window that shows the path on your computer and the path on the FTP site. With in-app search and the ability to sync folders on your Mac and on the FTP site, Transmit helps alleviate the search and drag-and-drop blues of other clients. The sync feature is especially helpful for Web developers and designers. You can even create desktop droplets for quick uploads to heavily used sites.Two-window FTP FTW.  Mac-Journal Web-based apps suck.Blogging about your life is a faux pas. Blogging about anything else that people actually care about is the proper way of utilizing of the blogging systems available out there. The ongoing problem is that most blogging platforms are bit of a pain to use because they’re Web-based. Plus, if you’re somewhere without Internet access, you can’t start laying out your blog posts for your site. MacJournal ($39.95, Mariner Software, www.marinersoftware.com) solves that problem with an easy-to-use multiplatform blogging client. Lay out your articles offline with images, video, and audio, then save them for later posting. The app includes the ability to both write in full-screen mode so you won’t be interrupted by your Twitter friends, and to record an audio podcast in the client.Create blog posts quickly and without browser issues.  Tweetie Multi-account Twitter action.After wowing the world with its iPhone Twitter app, atebits decided to release a desktop version of Tweetie ($19.95, atebits, www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/). The app can handle multiple Twitter accounts, compose tweets in a separate window, allow you to change the account you’re sending a tweet from on the fly, and let you drag and drop pics and videos right into the Compose window. Don’t have the perfect media on your Mac for a tweet? Record a video or shoot a pic from your iSight camera directly in Tweetie. And since Twitter conversations can be difficult to follow, Tweetie displays the conversation you’re having in a timeline if you just double-click one of the pertinent tweets. The Tweetie bookmarklet in Safari also allows you to share links quickly from your browser.Have an actual conversation on Twitter with Tweetie.  Dropbox Stop, drop, and roll on home.Transferring large files can be a huge pain. Where the hell did you leave that thumb drive? External hard drives leave an unsightly bulge in your pocket, and all those cables are always getting tangled in your shoes. That’s a safety hazard, son. Dropbox (2GB storage for free, 50GB for $9.99/month; Dropbox; www.dropbox.com) is a cloud-based storage drive that you can access from any computer or iPhone. Just pop files into the Dropbox folder on your Mac, and it automatically syncs up with the online disk (which you can view on Dropbox’s website) and with any other machines you have the application installed on. You can even share folders and files with other Dropbox users. If the free 2GB box doesn’t cut it, you can upgrade to 50GB for $10 a month.Access your files from anywhere in the universe (with an Internet connection).  LogMeIn If you need to remotely access a Mac or (gasp) a PC with Windows on it, LogMeIn (free, LogMeIn, logmein.com) allows you to peer into your remote computer from anywhere. You can launch apps, move files, and adjust your preferences via a Web-based interface, as if you were sitting at that computer. For $29.99, you can get your iPhone in on the action too.   TweetDeck If you’re a Twitter power user, TweetDeck (free, TweetDeck, www.tweetdeck.com) should be in your arsenal of Twitter apps. The interface is a series of columns that displays info like your friends’ feeds, saved searches, mentions, direct mentions, and Facebook updates. You can also keep up with trending topics with just a quick glance. If there’s something you need to track on Twitter, TweetDeck can make a column for it.   Vuze Allegedly, BitTorrent steals medication from senior citizens, but isn’t it time to forget about all the evil things it supposedly does? Instead, focus on the greatness of Vuze (free, Vuze, www.vuze.com) and its ability to download legally available video files. After you’ve done the downloading, Vuze can convert your files for use on the iPhone, Apple TV, iPod, Xbox 360, TiVo, and PlayStation 3. It’ll even stream videos to your set-top boxes. Nice!   BannerZest Creating Flash banners is difficult, especially when you don’t know or own Flash. BannerZest ($49, Aquafadas, www.aquafadas.com) takes the pain out the process and gives you a simple way to create quick, beautiful Flash banners. From a standard gallery to an interactive experience, BannerZest comes with a collection of themes for different uses, and it uploads your banners to your FTP or MobileMe disk.    FileChute Sending large files over email can result in the dreaded bounced email. FileChute ($17.95, Yellow Mug Software, www.yellowmug.com) works with your MobileMe-, FTP-, or WebDAV-accessible Web server. Drop your file into the app, and it uploads it to your online server of choice and then creates a URL to add to your email. If you drop more than one file, you get an archive uploaded to your server. Adios, bounced emails!  Next Page: Content Creation Apps >> Content Creation Sure, Adobe's stuff is the gold standard, but you don't want to have to count on a good night at the poker table to pay for it, right? Cue these killer applications, which let you effectively draw, edit photos, render, animate, and even scratch for a very fair price. djay 3 Budgeted beats to grow on.You want to spin phat beats, but your slim bank keeps you from purchasing the high-end DJ equipment and software. That’s okay, young DJ-in-training, djay 3 ($49.95, algoriddim, www.djay-software.com) gives you everything you need to rock the house without losing your shirt. This surprisingly robust audio-mixing software integrates with your iTunes library and puts all the usual mixing and scratching right on your desktop. The application supports multitouch trackpad scratching and fading between tracks, so it’s especially perfect for the last few generations of MacBooks. And as you grow as a DJ, the application will grow with you thanks to its support for MIDI controllers. That means when you get the cash for those fancy digital mixers and turntables, djay will be right there with you.With your iTunes catalog at your fingertips, you'll find some pretty interesting mashups.  Audacity Free audio editor extraordinaire.Audio editing seems simple at first. Then suddenly, you’re knee-deep in samples, frequencies, and bitrates. Sound editing really is part science, part black magic, so we’re thankful that Audacity (free, SourceForge, audacity.sourceforge.net) removes one of the biggest obstacles: choosing a quality application and figuring out how you’re going to pay for it. Audacity is both terrific and free, which is kinda hard to beat. An audio-recording and -editing application, it captures up to 16 channels at once from multiple sources, features noise removal, includes a metadata editor, and supplies unlimited undos. It can handle most of the audio files out there, and it’ll work with multiple files types in the same project. Audacity is also is cross-platform, so if you’re a recent Mac arrival, you may already know about its awesome power.So many features, you'll second-guess the price: free.  SketchUp 3D for you and me.Maya, 3D Studio Max, and SketchUp--all of these will let you create magical 3D worlds. Only one will do it for free, and you probably nailed it in one--it’s Google’s SketchUp software (free, Google, sketchup.google.com) that brings the world of 3D to the average Joe. You can create your own items or utilize Google’s 3D warehouse to find models created by other SketchUp users. With all those models at your fingertips, you can create floor plans for your home, build a level for your favorite FPS, or export the files to animation software or Photoshop. The application includes tutorials that’ll get you up and rendering in no time at all… so now nothing stands between you and virtual-world domination!Build a virtual man-cave for you and your stuff.  Ringer Wham-bam ringtone, ma'am.We get tons of people asking us, “How do I make a ringtone for my iPhone?” Until recently, we told them to launch GarageBand, cut a ringtone, and export it to iTunes. Now we recommend Ringer ($15, Pixel Research Labs, pixelresearchlabs.com/ringer) as the quickest and easiest way to create ringtones from your favorite songs and audio files. Ringer has access to your entire iTunes library and works with MP3, AAC, MOV, MP4, M4V, and QuickTime files. Yeah, you can make a ringtone from a video file. A super-simple editor with waveform information makes it a snap to select the perfect section of audio, and you can fade in and out of the file and preview the ringtone before cropping it and sending it to iTunes for a sync with your iPhone.   Acorn Using an image editor doesn’t have to cost you hundreds of dollars. In fact, with Acorn ($49.95, Flying Meat, www.flyingmeat.com/acorn), you’ll get features like layers, AppleScript support, 64-bit support, drawing, and filters in a package that’s easy on the wallet. This easy-to-use software strips away most of the features most people don’t use and gives you a clean image-editing tool.   Inkscape While raster-based image editors like Photoshop are great at pushing pixels around, the vector-based drawing programs are where all the real action happens. The open-source application Inkscape (free, Inkscape, www.inkscape.org) is similar to powerhouses like Illustrator and CorelDraw, but with one important difference--it’s free. The app utilizes the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format and includes a nice 3D drawing tool that allows you to set your vanishing points.    Screenflick With Snow Leopard, Apple introduced screen-capture into QuickTime, and it’s a nice feature if you’re looking to make a quick full-screen screencast. But if you want something that has features like fixed location output at up to 60 fps, Screenflick ($25, Araelium Group, www.araelium.com/screenflick) is an application you can get behind. It’ll highlight mouse clicks and keyboard events, adding a nifty visual cue into your screencasts that highlights what you’re doing.   Bracketeer While your eye can take in an amazing range of light to dark, your camera cannot. In order to help create images that include a tonal range that the average camera can’t capture, HDR applications and plug-ins have appeared on the market. These applications take a series of images that have been bracketed from dark to light and combine them to include the darkest darks to the lightest lights in one HDR image. Bracketeer ($29.95, Pangea Software, pangeasoft.net/pano/bracketeer) is a standalone application that does just that. Adjust the saturation, the contrast, and exposure from within the application. The application will even auto-align your images in case you got the hiccups while taking your pics.   iStopMotion 2 Home Most animators’ first animation was probably a stop-motion piece with Star Wars action figures. And whether those childhood lightsaber battles have you hoping to become the next Brad Bird, or you just love the look of stop-motion, iStopMotion ($49, Boinx Software, www.boinx.com/istopmotion/overview) is a quick, easy way to create simple stop-motion animations. Use your iSight or connect a camera to your Mac and start making your own Wallace and Gromit short. You’ll feel the Force, Lu… sorry.  Next Page: Utility Apps >> Utilities Slick utilities can add crucial functionality to your Mac, so we've selected the best options for everything from secure password managers and system-troubleshooting tools to an app that will let you play Windows games on your Mac... without Windows! AppZapper Completely trash applications.Unlike using Windoze, installing and uninstalling apps on a Mac is painless. Drag an application’s icon into your Applications folder, and you’re pretty much good to go. Deleting them is just as simple--just grab them and toss them into the Trash. But if you’ve ever dug around Library or System folders on your Mac, you’ll see that even after you Trash an app, many of them leave crumbs in different parts of your machine. For cleaning up those last little bits, AppZapper ($12.95, Austin Sarner and Brian Ball, www.appzapper.com) is a must-have utility that’s also great for troubleshooting problems. Wiping out all of an application’s preferences and other random files can often turn a troublesome app into a perfectly behaved one after a clean reinstall. Completely remove unwanted applications with a simple drag and drop.  Hazel Clean and organize your Mac--automatically.Hazel ($21.95, NoodleSoft, www.noodlesoft.com) is kind of like Rosie the Robot for your Mac. Or it’s like OS X’s Folder Actions… if they were super-awesome, easy to use, and perfect for helping you keep your Mac’s folders and files organized. Hazel installs as a pane in System Preferences, monitoring locations that you choose, and performs actions on files based on your criteria. By creating simple rules, you can delegate repetitive and annoying file-management tasks to Hazel--for example, automatically add downloaded MP3s to iTunes or move DMGs to an archive on an external drive. Hazel can delve deep into metadata for complex actions like copying images into subfolders by ISO settings or reorganizing music files according to bitrate. You can even set up simple rules for auto-deleting items that have been in the Trash longer than a certain amount of time.  1Password Keep all your confidential info on lockdown.You’ve heard it before--secure, unique passwords are the way to go. Yet there you are, still using the same password for everything from your maclife.com login to your Gmail and your bank account. Do we even have to tell you again why that’s a colossally bad idea? 1Password ($39.95, Agile Web Solutions, agilewebsolutions.com) can help clean up your online act, creating and managing complex passwords for every online account and then logging you in with a keyboard shortcut. The app can also be used to securely store personal information like credit card numbers and addresses for use in Web forms. And since all of your passwords are unique, you won’t have to worry about your banking info being compromised because of a data breach at that sketchy Russian website you used to download MP3s for a penny.1Password securely stores Web passwords, logins, software licenses, and other important information.  iPhone Explorer Store & browse files on your iPhone.Breaking tradition with the iPods of yore, Apple doesn’t provide the ability to use your iPhone as a USB drive. iPhone Explorer (free, myPod Apps, www.mypodapps.com) is a simple app that will let you drag and drop files onto your phone for easy portability. The app itself is lightweight, and all it takes is a USB cable to view your iPhone’s folder structure. In addition to storing files, iPhone Explorer can be used to restore iTunes tracks from your iPod to a Mac or to rescue photographs from the depths of your iPhone’s memory. No jailbreaking is required, but more adventurous users with jailbroken phones can also recover contacts, messages, email, and other data. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s simple to use for the careful novice.  AppleJack AppleJack (free, The Apotek, applejack.sourceforge.net) is one of those things you’ll install once and never think about again—if everything goes right. But if, god forbid, your Mac starts acting weird one day--or stops acting, period--it’ll be AppleJack to the rescue. It’s a command-line utility for diagnosing and repairing problems with your computer. Use the menu-driven system to repair permissions, validate preferences files, and remove screwy cache files.  SuperDuper With Time Machine built into OS X, there’s really no good reason not to have an automatic backup. But Time Machine has its limits--a big one being the lack of bootable backups. SuperDuper ($27.95, Shirt Pocket, www.shirt-pocket.com) easily handles creating and updating bootable clones of your Mac’s hard drive so you’ll be ready to go when disaster strikes. Just plug in your clone, restart, and you’re up and running again.   CrossOver Games PC fanboys like to slag the Mac for having fewer games, but with CrossOver Games ($39.95, CodeWeavers, www.codeweavers.com), Mac users--and Linux fans too--can easily play games coded for Windows machines. The list of officially supported games is hundreds deep, and since CrossOver is based on Wine, you don’t even need a copy of Windows just to play Team Fortress 2.   Clean My Mac Hard drives are never big enough. Whether you have a MacBook Air or a Mac Pro, there always comes a point when there’s just not enough space on your internal disks. Clean My Mac ($29.95, MacPaw, macpaw.com) can help with that problem, scouring your Mac’s drive and tossing out all sorts of gunk you don’t need. Use it to toss unneeded language files, scrub extraneous code from universal binaries, and thoroughly clean up after deleted applications.   rooSwitch OS X’s Fast User Switching is handy for juggling multiple user accounts and their corresponding settings, but rooSwitch ($19, Rocket, rooswitch.com) allows you to maintain different settings on a per-application basis. Use it to manage Home and Work browser profiles, for example, or to have different profiles in your word processor for writing or editing documents. rooSwitch works with nearly any application, and it supports Automator and AppleScript for the ultimate in customizability.  Next Page: Wild Card Apps & Staff Picks >>  Wild Cards Not all Mac apps fall into your neat little categories. These five break the mold and completely deserve a place on your hard drive. Bricksmith Virtual bricks you can't lose or step on? Sold!Legos are the official plastic brick of Mac|Life--we’ve had many discussions about the empires we built in our childhood bedrooms and how much we miss “playing Legos” as the soulless adults we are today. Bricksmith (free, donations accepted; Allen Smith; bricksmith.sourceforge.net) lets you recapture the magic in a highly geeky way. It’s a 3D Lego-model creator, offering drag-and-drop construction using thousands of parts in every color of Lego’s rainbow. Tutorials and the one finished model that’s included show you the ropes, and once you’re done with your virtual creation, you can export step-by-step instructions to build it for real. There’s even a mini figure generator where you can design and outfit a matching Lego man and insert him into your model. This software couldn’t be cooler.We can't believe an application this sweet is donationware.  CameraBag Desktop Give your photos a new identity or some old-timey charm.We named the iPhone version of CameraBag one of our “101 Essential Apps for 2008,” and now the same fun can be had on your Mac, thanks to CameraBag Desktop ($19, Nevercenter, www.nevercenter.com). You drag in a digital image, and the app re-creates the look of a real film photograph--choose from Helga, Lolo, Mono, 1962, 1974, Instant, Magazine, Cinema, or Colorcross.For more variations, click the Reprocess button, and all the options will change their look and coloring just slightly. Or check the Multi-filter box and experiment with adding multiple filters to a single photo. Of course, you can export your altered images back to your hard drive without affecting the original file. The novelty of taking an everyday digital snapshot and making it look like a Polaroid image or washed-out 1974 photograph never gets old.Your digital photos, plus extra personality.  SousChef Recipe database + shopping list + cooking assistant = one kitchen lifesaver.SousChef ($30, Acacia Tree Software, acaciatreesoftware.com) edges out MacGourmet ($49.95, www.marinersoftware.com) in the cooking-assistant category for its cloud database of recipes. Every time a SousChef user enters a recipe (133,000-plus at press time), it’s synced to the cloud, and you can search those and import them into your own library. You can also opt out of sharing your own recipes so Aunt Erma’s secret matzo ball soup stays in the family.Once a recipe’s in your library, you can edit, print, email, or blog it--or even add its ingredients to your grocery list. Click the Cook button for a full-screen view of the instructions that you can read from across the room, keeping your Mac out of the splatter zone. The Mac’s built-in speech recognition lets you advance the recipe’s steps with your own voice, or you can use the Apple Remote or a Keyspan Front Row Remote.  Temporis Attractive, drag-and-drop timelines make it easy to "show, don't tell."Everyone loves a good infographic, or at least geeky types like us do. (And the geeks shall inherit the earth, don’cha know?) Temporis ($24.99, Bartas Technologies, www.bartastechnologies.com) makes it easy to create neat-looking timelines on your Mac, which you can then print or export as PDF or TIFF files that are ready for importing into your presentation software, word processor, or page-layout app.Adding new events is just a Command-click away, and it’s a snap to drag the start and end dates around on the timeline. The Arrange button will automatically stagger your timeline’s events into the most logical and easy-to-read order, and the Inspector lets you tweak fonts, colors, titles, labels, and your timeline’s span and intervals. You can even export the event data separately as an XML or CSV file.  Manga Studio Debut 4 Create your own comics and manga, and even manga-fy your photos.Manga Studio Debut 4 ($49.99, Smith Micro, my.smithmicro.com) is a must-have for fans of Japanese manga or anyone who wants to make their own comic books. Its ingenious Beginner’s Assistant groups together the tools by processes so you can intuitively wind your way through a typical manga workflow: sketch, panel, draw, tone, and add character dialogue.You can scan or draw your own art (graphics tablets supported, natch), play with the included samples, purchase manga content from www.contentparadise.com, or even import your own digital photos and watch Manga Studio make them all comicky-looking. Draw speed lines, add dialogue bubbles, move your pages around, and then print or export your finished comic book. Manga Studio Debut 4 is the younger brother to professional-level Manga Studio EX 4 ($299.99), but Debut has plenty of advanced features too, including layers, templates, customizable patterns, and more. Mac|Life Staff Picks  Bass Tuner I’m a beginning bass player--like, very beginning. So it’s a huge help that I don’t have to worry about staying in key. This terrific, simple, and streamlined little app ($9, www.rustykat.com) lets me quickly get in tune in front of my MacBook using the built-in mic. With that necessity sorted, I can fire up some tracks and tablature and focus on struggling to play along.   Multiwinia Multiwinia ($19, www.ambrosiasw.com) offers crazy replayability. You devise a strategy for your stick-figure army, then watch them take on up to four other teams in six game types on 40 vector-graphic maps. Online multiplayer against Mac and Windows players works flawlessly and keeps me coming back for more. No Napoleon complex necessary.    MetaX If you need to tag a large amount of MP4 files, you could use iTunes’ painfully slow process. Instead I found MetaX (free, www.kerstetter.net) for all my tagging needs. The app will search the IMDB catalog and plug the information into the appropriate fields, then share that info via tagChimp. You can even scan DVD barcodes via iSight!    Bean For a word dork like me, word processors are a big deal. Bean (free, www.bean-osx.com) is a lightweight, open-source word processor. It’s missing many of the blinky lights and thingamajigs of the big boys, and that’s exactly the point. Fewer distractions equals better writing, faster. And for anyone who needs to hit a certain length, the live word count rocks.    Fluid I often find that Firefox has the tendency to crash when I have too many Web applications running. But Fluid (free, fluidapp.com) lets me create a site-specific browser out of my most essential websites, like Google Docs and Flickr. Simply plug in the URL, and voilĂ ! You have a separate application running that won’t go down if something else does.   Next Page: More Gaming Bang for 50 Bucks >>  More Bang for 50 Bucks Some of the Mac's best games are also its cheapest? Sweet!Fifty bones won’t buy you even one new Xbox 360 or PS3 game, but on the Mac, you can snap up a stack of premier games for less than that. Or at least, that was our theory when we gave Florence, our new associate online editor, 50 whole American dollars and asked her to max out her Mac with the best gaming that short stack of money could buy.  Man, did she score--check out the results of her diligent “research.” Plants Vs. Zombies $16, amazon.comLine up perilous peashooters and sun-soaking sunflowers against an abominable horde of zombies in Plants vs. Zombies.This animated tower-defense favorite pits you against a horde of zombies with one thing on their (decaying) minds--invading your home for brains! Pit your arsenal of zombie-fighting plants, each with their own spectacular organic weaponry, against 26 zombies and 50 levels of adventure. Fair warning: Once you start playing this excellent game, it’s incredibly hard to stop.  World of Goo $10, amazon.comStack up adorable globs of goo to build structures and watch them band together as you help transport them across various levels.World of Goo is another addictive and totally adorable puzzle game. Created around the idea that circular goo balls make adequate building materials (naturally), the game has you solving puzzles by dragging and dropping goo to create all kinds of crazy structures that enable you to transport your goo across the level. The oh-so-cute googly-eyed blobs pack the game with charm, and you can also connect online and play against other Goo architects around the world. Braid $15, playgreenhouse.comBraid's aesthetically appealing backdrop and profound storyline will keep you engrossed until the very end.Some games defy description, and Braid might be easy to pass over because it appears to be just a mix of platforming and time control set against a gorgeous backdrop. But it subverts and transcends those two well-worn clichĂ©s with brilliant design and an absorbing story that packs a twist that you’ll never see coming. Watch the YouTube videos if you need help solving its puzzles, but just make sure you see this masterpiece through to the end. Balcassa $8, openplanetsoftware.comBalcassa has a mountain of exciting brainteasers for the puzzle fiend.Balcassa feeds off those nightmares you still have about attempting to master that archaic, rainbow-colored Rubik’s cube. And while most of you probably never cracked the damn thing (we didn’t!), Balcassa gives you a second chance. The objective of the game is to slide the cubes into a specific sequence, pattern, or orientation. It may sound like a simple task, but much like fiddling with a Rubik’s cube, figuring it all out is the real reward. Freeware Fun If you’re interested in first-person shooters and MMORPGs, Quake Live and Second Life can give you hours of entertainment at our favorite price: $0.00. Both games perform smoothly on Mac OS 10.4 or later. Quake Live doesn’t require beefy hardware because it runs through your Web browser. But that doesn’t stop it from delivering all the fast-paced action of the classic first-person shooter. Second Life, while not as packed with storyline as World of Warcraft, offers a similar massively multiplayer world where you can meet people, customize your character’s look, and participate in a virtual world that’s just like our own. You don’t even have to watch the clock to make sure you’re on time for a player-versus-player raid!You don't need fancy computer hardware to frag your way through this beloved shooter. Vital Statistics on Our 50 Killer Apps Total cost if you bought all 50 apps: $1219.83Number of apps that are free: 13Apps that have an iPhone counterpart: 15Whaddaya waiting for? (apps that have a free demo): 39Number of countries these apps were born in: 7Apps named "iSomething": shockingly... just 3!Apps that require Snow Leopard: 1Apps that require Leopard: 14Apps that promise "iLife integration!": 9 

  • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

    Unemployment set to top 9%. Today's markets will be focused on the monthly U.S. nonfarm employment report, which often sets the tone for the coming month. Economists predict the workforce declined by 520,000 in May, the smallest decrease in seven months. But unemployment is expected to jump to 9.2%, the highest level in 26 years. While many think the worst may be over for the economy, it's unlikely firms will begin hiring aggressively until recovery goes from being a possibility to a well-rooted certainty. Earlier this week, Fed chief Bernanke warned "sizable" job losses may still occur. Peter Morici does a good job of summarizing expectations for and potential ramifications of this morning's report. Rio scraps Chinalco deal. Rio Tinto (RTP) scrapped a controversial $19.5B investment from Chinalco (ACH) and will instead raise $15.2B from a share sale and $5.8B from an iron ore venture with BHP Billiton (BHP). The new agreements will allow Rio to pay down some of its $38.9B in debt, and deal a blow to China's plans to secure access to raw materials crucial for its economic growth. FDIC gets tough on Citi. The FDIC is pushing for a management shake-up at Citigroup (C), and recently tried to lower the government's confidential ranking of Citi's health in a move that would give regulators greater control over the firm. Among FDIC concerns are the slow pace of change at Citigroup and the lack of senior executives with commercial banking experience. Officials have reportedly reached out to Jerry Grundhofer, former CEO of U.S. Bancorp (USB) and a recent addition to Citi's board, to see if he'd be interested in taking over CEO Vikram Pandit's position. Citigroup officials say the FDIC has overstepped its bounds, and several government regulators disagree with the FDIC's stance as well. Obama to create 'Pay Czar.' The White House plans to appoint a 'Special Master for Compensation' who will make sure companies receiving federal bailout funds abide by executive-pay guidelines. The administration is expected to name Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw the government's compensation fund for 9/11 victims. Feinberg's appointment could be announced as soon as next week. Breezy times for Intel. Intel (INTC) agreed to buy Wind River Systems (WIND) for around $884M. The surprise move nets Intel a significant software business and makes it a direct competitor with Microsoft (MSFT) in certain areas. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is looking forward to continuing its long-term collaboration with Intel, but is also "working with Intel to evaluate what impact today's announcement has on our partnership." GM uses cash to fund Delphi buyout. General Motors, flush with $30B in bankruptcy financing from the government, is putting up over $2.5B to finance a private-equity firm's buyout of bankrupt auto-parts company Delphi Corp. Separately, GM is expected to announce today that it reached a preliminary deal to sell its Saturn division to mega auto dealer Roger Penske, who runs the Penske Automotive Group chain of dealers, for $100-200M. GM executives also said the company is considering a senior management shake-up but declined to provide details. AIG selling Transatlantic stake. AIG (AIG) may raise almost $1B by selling part of its stake in Transatlantic Holdings (TRH). According to a statement released yesterday, AIG offered 26M shares at $38 each. The sale will bring AIG's stake below 20% from 59%. Icahn wins Biogen board seat. Biogen Idec (BIIB) held its annual meeting this week and activist investor Carl Icahn claims he won two seats on the board. Biogen said Icahn won one seat, and the second is 'too close to call.' The showdown over the remaining board seat is the culmination of a months-long proxy fight. Icahn's victory, even if only partial, suggests shareholders are frustrated with Biogen's stagnant share price and the gap in its pipeline of new drugs. Countrywide CEO charged in subprime mess. The SEC charged Countrywide Financial's former CEO Angelo Mozilo with securities fraud and insider trading, winning Mozilo the distinction of most-prominent executive targeted to date in connection to the subprime crisis. Mozilo pocketed over $139 in profits in 2006-2007 while knowingly selling risky subprime loans and failing to disclose the deteriorating quality of the company's assets. Two other former Countrywide executives were also charged with fraud. Hartford to get TARP money, new CEO. Hartford Financial Services (HIG) CEO Ramani Ayer will step down from his post by the end of the year, following through on a departure originally planned for 2008. Ayer, who has been CEO for twelve years, was responsible for crafting the aggressive growth strategy that led to some of the insurer's current troubles. The company is expected to receive as much as $3.4B in TARP funds in the next few weeks. Jobs returning to Apple. Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs is on track to return to the company this month after a medical leave, possibly in a surprise appearance at Apple's annual software developers' conference next week. Some analysts thought Jobs' sudden departure six months ago and the limited disclosure of his illness would hurt the company, but the stock has risen 68% since Jobs announced his leave vs. a 24% increase in the Nasdaq. Even after Jobs returns, it's unclear whether he'll resume his full set of duties immediately. Jobless claims dip. Initial Jobless Claims came in at 621,000 vs. last week's 625,000 (revised) and consensus of 620,000. Continuing claims dipped by 15K to 6.74M. Productivity higher than expected. Q1 Nonfarm Productivity of 1.6% was better than the 1.2% economists expected, and sharply higher than initial estimates of 0.8%. Unit labor costs grew 3%, slightly above consensus (+2.9%), but lower than previous estimates of 3.3%. Manufacturing sector productivity fell 2.7%, its fourth consecutive decline. Earnings: Thursday After Close Guess? (GES): Q1 EPS of $0.35 beats by $0.06. Revenue of $441M (-9.8%) vs. $437M. (PR) Today's MarketsOverseas markets edged higher Friday and futures are also up. All eyes will be on the nonfarm payroll report at 8:30.

  • Customize Your Home with Your Mac

    You already use your computer to make your own music, edit your own photos, and create your own movies--so why pay someone else to decorate your home? Your Mac is the perfect tool for giving your interior space a dash of 21st-century modernism. Follow along and we'll show you how.Photography by Mark Madeo I’m not a thrifty man by nature, but after cobbling together enough money to buy my first single-family home, I wasn’t about to take out a second mortgage just to get the place decorated. In fact, the very concept of hiring an interior designer or color consultant strikes me as frivolous on an intestinal level. Color theory and design inspiration is free online, and at the end of the day, what looks right is right--because perfection in home decor is in the eye of the beholder. That last thing I need is some woman named Astrid telling me my walls would look better in “Butter Crème.”But that isn’t to say that even I, in all my brazen hubris, couldn’t do a better job with the help of my MacBook Pro. If the Mac can help me in other creative pursuits, why not put it to use in snazzing up Casa Philippe? I did my research, put in a bunch of nights at the keyboard, and came up with an interior design that suits me just perfectly. And now I’m going to show you how you can do the same for your own home.First we’ll look at how you can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to make informed color decisions--by painting Pantone swatches directly on your walls. Next, we’ll explore photography. I’ll explain how inkjet technology can turn your shots into art prints and how to use photos to inspire digital illustration. From there, we’ll run through my favorite iPhone apps and websites that can streamline, enhance, and inform your design process. Finally, we end our tour with a look at Mac-oriented tchotkes and accessories that are interior-design elements all on their own. So even if you don’t want to use your Mac to create a living space with all the bold, iconographic simplicity that Apple is known for, you can still buy your way into Apple’s 21st-century modern aesthetic. Painting in Pantone Color You don’t have to be a print designer to play with Pantone colors--and we’re not just talking about leafing through those swatch books for kicks and giggles. Pantone’s Fashion+Home library contains 1,925 vibrant colors, and every color is available in different exterior and interior paints from Fine Paints of Europe (FPE). Whether you’re color-matching your walls to Pantone-spec’d furniture or simply using the Pantone system to make informed color choices, your final results will have the designy flair that richly pigmented Pantone reproduction is known for. The paint from FPE--imported from Holland--is relatively expensive, but as my independent painting contractor said, “You get what you pay for.” Completely unprompted, he said FPE paint lasts longer, requires fewer coats, and is probably the best paint available.To choose your Pantone paint, you can finger-swipe through the myPantone app (see page 4) or peruse a printed Fashion+Home swatch collection for absolute color accuracy. You can also create a close approximation of how your colors will look in (or on) your actual home by “painting” them onto your walls using the Color Replacement Tool in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. This tool lets you reskin a surface, all while retaining the shadows and highlights of your original photo content. Here’s how to do it:>> Load the Pantone swatches from Pantone’s Fashion+Home Digital Color Library CD (it retails for $50 MSRP).>> Load a photo of your interior into Photoshop or Elements, and use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to define an area of your walls that you want to paint over. In Image A, my “before” photo, I’ve lassoed over the middle sawtooth wall panel. Creating a lassoed selection isn’t absolutely necessary, but helps in confining your paint strokes to a specific area. Image A - Notice how the glass blocks shine natural light that's reflected on the walls. These highlights will be preserved by Photoshop's Color Replacement tool. >> Now choose a Pantone color from your Swatches palette, select the Color Replacement Tool, and begin painting the wall within your selected area. Create a new lassoed selection for every portion of wall you want to cover--it’s like using digital painters tape that keeps your brush strokes off of areas that shouldn’t be painted.>> To paint on unadorned walls that aren’t covered by any objects or obscured by furniture, I choose the largest brush diameter possible with the following tool settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Contiguous; Tolerance: 100%. Then I tap a single time inside the selected area, and the entire area becomes Pantonified.>> To paint in areas covered by other objects (like the sawtooth wall panel behind the tripod lamp in Image B), I use these settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Find Edges; Tolerance: 15%. With these settings and a small-diameter brush (about the size of the one pictured over the antique scale), you can paint between objects quite effectively, rarely painting over framed photos, furniture legs, or anything else that should remain unpainted. This process allows you to retain your original shadows and highlights--note the tripod shadow on the left sawtooth wall panel and the light shining through the glass blocks at the top of the middle panel. Image B - The Color Replacement tool does a very good job in automatically replacing only the color you've identified for substitution. Still, when painting over a wall with lots of objects on it, it helps to use a small brush diameter to prevent "paint" from going in the wrong places.Be aware that unless your monitor is perfectly calibrated, it won’t display the Pantone swatches with absolute accuracy. Also, it helps to use photos shot in flat lighting in order to reduce hot spots and reflections (in Image B, you can see how the white picture frames picked up a yellow cast from the original wall paint). Regardless, my Photoshop color replacement process, used in conjunction with real-world Pantone swatches, will give you a fantastic head start in making color choices.In Image C you can see my final color decisions. From left to right, I used 13-0002 (White Sand), 16-1406 (Atmosphere), 17-1506 (Cinder), 18-1306 (Iron) and 18-1434 (Etruscan Red). The hallway is also painted White Sand. The codes of my colors actually bear strong relevance to one another, and knowing the coding system can help you make color choices.Image C - Understanding Pantone's numerical codes helped me quickly choose warm gray tones based on reddish hues. The codes helped me choose three grays--Atmosphere, Cinder, and Iron--that would create a perfect graduated grayscale-branding effect.The two numbers before the hyphen refer to a color’s relative lightness on a scale from 11 (lightest) to 19 (darkest). The second pair of numbers specify different hues on a 64-step color wheel; 01 is yellow-green, 64 is green-yellow, and all the other colors of the rainbow are represented in between. The third pair of numbers represent the color’s chroma level--the intensity and saturation of the hue itself. The chroma scale is divided into 65 steps, with 00 being neutral and 64 being maximum saturation.Using Pantone’s system, I was able to make some informed decisions on paint. Notice that Iron and Etruscan Red, the two colors separated by my hallway entrance, share nearly the same code--only the saturation levels of their chroma differ dramatically. Also notice that the hues of my four main accent colors range from 13 to 15, putting each one squarely in the red portion of the color wheel. Finally, I deliberately chose one-step lightness increments for my sawtooth wall panels, creating a very graphic-designy grayscale-banding effect.There’s a method to Pantone’s numbering madness! So learn the system, and your paint choices will develop quickly and elegantly. The Pantone System  Next Page: Fun with Photos >>Fun with Photos: Go Big, Go Historic, Go Pop Now that you have paint on your walls, it’s time to put down a third layer--in the form of dazzling art photography. Fine-art photo printing is within the reach of most consumer-grade inkjet photo printers, and it becomes absolutely spectacular when done by those printers’ professional-grade cousins. The key to art photography is, of course, your photo’s contents. Your shot of the Brooklyn Bridge in twilight is artsy; the photo of cousin Jerry holding his Budweiser up to the camera is not. In a previous Maclife.com article, we delved into the secrets to great shooting and photo editing, but here we’ll focus on print media, which can unlock a photo’s final degree of finesse. For this article, I used Epson media, but Canon offers a comparable lineup in the prosumer desktop space. Image A - Printed on canvas, this 3-foot giclĂ©e print of a Mark Madeo photograph has tricked a lot of people into thinking it's a photorealistic painting in the style of Richard Estes and Ralph Goings.First off, throw glossy paper out the door. For most images, you’ll want to be printing on softer, nonreflective matte paper and even stretchable canvas. Lately, I’ve been using the Epson R2880 printer, which supports the full range of Epson’s fine art media in sheets up to 13 by 19 inches and rolls sized 13 inches by 20 feet. On the “low” end of Epson’s lineup, I like Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte and Watercolor Paper Radiant White. The first one is bright white with a flat matte finish, providing great highlight and shadow detail without any reflections. I love it for black-and-white prints produced in the R2880’s special Advanced B&W Photo mode. The second option (despite its name) isn’t quite as radiantly white, but it has a textured surface that imbues your photo with a more artistic, painterly appearance.On the ultra high end, you can opt for Epson’s Velvet Fine Art Paper, which is 100 percent cotton rag, features a luxurious textured grain, and purports to offer the densest blacks of any cotton-based inkjet paper around. This is beautiful media, and I have found its blacks to be superior as advertised, so don’t hide it behind a piece of glass unless longevity is a big concern. Finally, you might consider Premium Canvas Matte, a polyester/cotton blend with a pronounced woven texture. Because it can be stretched on wooden frames and has exactly the same canvas grain you’d see on hand-brushed paintings, this material is ideal for not just photos but also giclĂ©e prints of digital illustrations and painting reproductions (“giclĂ©e” is just a fancy term for inkjet-based fine-art printing).Image B - These three prints represent just a fraction of the wonderful (and insanely high-res) images I've downloaded from the Library of Congress. Once you start sifting through the archives, you won't be able to stop.The R2880 supports Premium Canvas Matte, but with a maximum roll width of 13 inches, you can’t output anything of breathtaking size. You can, however, send your digital files to a production house that has one of Epson’s (or Canon’s) wide-format inkjet printers. The photo you see in Image A (a piece by Mac|Life staff photographer Mark Madeo) was printed on the Epson Stylus Pro 9880, which supports media of widths up to 44 inches. Mark’s photo is 36x24 inches wide, and a piece this size--printed and stretched on a wooden frame--would run you about $220. This isn’t inexpensive, but the results are spectacular and elevate your photography hobby--and home decor--to a new level. For more info on pricing and how to prepare your digital files, check out www.photoworkssf.com.Image C - Unlike photographic images, vector-based art files are very, very small. The 54x36-inch print you see here was generated from a 1MB file--and could have been blown up to the size of a building if I had the printer to do that.If 13x19-inch prints suit you fine, a printer like the Epson R2880 or Canon Pro9500 Mark II is all you need to create wall-ready, museum-quality artwork at home. There are various ways to mount and display your prints, but one of the easiest (and most durable) methods is to use preassembled, UV-protected glass frames. All the photos shown in Image B were downloaded from the Library of Congress website (see page 3) and mounted in Artcare “archival protection systems” (www.nielsen-bainbridge.com). These framing kits include 4-ply, precut beveled mats and UV-protected glass and come in a wide variety of sizes supporting print areas up to 10.5 by 13.5 inches. If you can’t find prefab frames in the right sizes or don’t want frames at all, you can mount your images on acid-free foam core with 3M Photo Mount spray, which is also acid free. Finish off these projects (especially canvas prints) with a protective spray like PremierArt Print Shield to protect against UV rays and scuffs.Image D - For a thorough explanation of using Illustrator's Pen tool, go to Youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME.If you want to take your photography into another dimension entirely, you can use it as the source material for digital illustration. The Roy Lichtenstein–style pieces shown on page 32 and in Image C were created by tracing over photos of my living room using the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. After outlining all key elements using BĂ©zier curves (Image D), finishing the drawing is a simple matter of filling objects with solid colors, slanted lines, and Ben-Day dots, which can be found in Illustrator’s Swatch library under Patterns > Basic Graphics. I went the pop art Lichtenstein route, but remember that any digital illustration can be printed on fine-art media, and vector-based line art reproduces particularly well. And if you use Premium Canvas Matte, you can even paint directly on top of your inkjet prints with acrylics to create a mixed-media masterpiece (Image E).Image E - If you want to paint in colors yourself, make sure to use Canvas Matte, not Canvas Satin. (NOTE: That's Flo's hand--not Jon's!)  Next Page: Design Online >>Design Online: Linking Your Way to a Stylish Home 18 websites for incredible high-res photos, supercool interior products, and daily design inspiration. Photography Your tax dollars help pay for maintaining the amazing bank of photo archives at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), so consider making a few withdrawals. Many (if not most) of the photos in our national archive can be freely downloaded and printed out for display in your home. Just look for restrictions, if any, under “Rights Information” in each photo’s bibliographic details. You’ll find B&W shots of cityscapes, rural life, historical figures, and other photographic expressions of the American experience. Many images are huge high-res TIFF files ranging from 20 to 150MB, and some date back to the very earliest days of photography--like the 1851 panoramic photo of San Francisco Bay shown here.(click to enlarge) This 10MB TIFF from the Library of Congress is one of the archive's smaller files.To get a clear idea of the archive’s best material, go to Shorpy.com, a vintage photography blog that seems to pull its finest entries from the Library of Congress. Also check out Stockvault.net and Morguefile.com, which keep searchable archives of modern high-res photography that can be used for personal, noncommercial use. Much of the material is quite wall-worthy. Products A storefront for some 800 antique and mid-century modern dealers, 1stdibs.com will blow your mind with its range of furniture, lighting, artwork, and curios. It’s the first place to look if you need a George Nakashima end table, a Cold War–era naval searchlight, or a circa-1920s beekeeper’s helmet. Prices on 1stdibs run quite steep, so if you’re looking for mid-century industrial chic at relatively affordable prices, go to AmericanFurnishings.com, which is where I picked up my antique red metal shop wheelbarrow (illustrated on the previous page). For much more contemporary (and Mac-y) design elements, check out the thoroughly groovy-modern Nova68.com, as well as lighting from Lumens.com and Ylighting.com.Captivating art or antique beekeeper's helmet? It's both, courtesy of Radio Guy, which sells its curios via 1stdibs.com. Daily Inspiration The web is lousy with blog-style sites that showcase slick interiors, hip new products, and one-of-a-kind curios. Here’s a list of my favorites in alphabetical order:Apartmenttherapy.com: Aesthetic is thoroughly hip with a slant toward affordable and modern. Includes a technology section.ApartmentTherapy.com brought Matthew Borgatti's cosmonaut lamp to the attention of the hipster masses.Betterlivingthroughdesign.com: Lots of blogs showcase cool decor elements, but this one organizes better than most. Love the dropdown menus.Design-milk.com: Extends its savvy design eye from architecture to art to interiors to technology. Lots of cool stuff here.Dezeen.com: A bold, simple architecture and interiors blog with a well-trained eye for cool.Inhabitat.com: Neato architecture and products geared toward environmentally friendly lifestyles.Mocoloco.com: Confusing page interface, but whoever runs this blog has an eye for incredibly unique architecture, interiors, lighting, furniture, and more.If not for Mocoloco.com, we never would have discovered the decidedly Apple-like Andrea Air Purifier.Remodelista.com: The bloggers have a sophisticated eye for classic modernism. Nothing too wild here. They find stuff that would actually work in most homes.Trendir.com: New home products galore. Focuses on stuff you can buy and leaves all the art and architecture posts for the other blogs.Yankodesign.com: With the tagline “Form Beyond Function,” the folks at Yanko showcase some of the most modern, futuristic interiors and lifestyle products you’ll ever find. A very slick and well-executed design site. Next Page: Pocket-Size Design Consultants >>Pocket-Size Design Consultants Six iPhone apps succeed in the world of design--but two Mac applications fail. When I began my research in Mac-assisted home design, I fully expected to review two applications that claim to help one quickly and easily create 3D models of home interiors--rooms, surface materials, furniture and all. But after three vexing hours spent with Microspot Interiors and Punch Home & Landscape Design Studio, I decided it would be a poor use of magazine pages to review either package. Both applications are extremely frustrating to use, particularly Home & Landscape Design Studio, which has an awful, non-intuitive interface (and I’m someone who jumped right into Adobe Illustrator, an application that leaves many confused).If you’re already comfortable with 3D modeling software, these interior design apps might have something to offer. But if you’re looking for a genuinely easy-to-use room layout program, consider Home Interior Layout Designer, detailed below. It’s one of six iPhone apps that has something worthwhile to offer the DIY decorator. Colorsnap  This free app lets you grab an iPhone photo, extract color info from any portion of it and then find the closest Sherwin-Williams paint match, along with two complementary colors. Sadly, you can’t see the full swatch collection in one fell swoop, but if you’re committed to the paints offered by Messrs. Sherwin and Williams, this app is an invaluable tool. Ben Color Capture Benjamin Moore’s free app includes color extraction tools that trump Sherwin-Williams’, and you can also swipe your finger across a color wheel to view the full Benjamin Moore swatch collection. Pick a swatch to see harmony groupings and graded saturations of the color you’ve chosen. It’s a must-download pocket partner for anyone investing in Benjie Moore color. myPantone  Pantone’s app costs $9.99, but you get nine virtual Pantone swatch collections, nifty color-extraction tools, and the largest selection of color-harmony options we’ve seen on the iPhone. The Fashion+Home collection maps directly to Pantone wall paint colors, and I used the app to email my final palette (see page 35, Image C EDIT THIS LINK) to friends. Search Maclife.com for “myPantone” to read the full review. mySurface  Message to all major paint, tile, countertop and window covering manufacturers: Distribute a free app that lets prospective customers quickly peel through your catalog. With mySurface, Dupont does just that for its Corian and Zodiaq lines of kitchen and bath countertops. Search via a color slider, tap a swatch for a larger image, then call an 800 number for a sample. Home Interior Layout Designer  This $2.99 app may not let you design in 3D, but it’s easy to use, and provides most everything you’ll need for deciding “what goes where” in an empty room. Just define your room size and shape, and then begin tapping to add furniture, appliances, and architectural elements from various menus. Includes nifty measuring tools for accurate room planning. We’ll do a full review in a future issue. Art Envi Deluxe  This $3.99 app turns your iPhone into a handheld art gallery, helping you decide which reprints of timeless classics might look best in your home. Browse by periods or by specific artists in alphabetical order, then create a thumbnail gallery of their pieces. Works can be viewed individually or in slideshows. Includes biographical info, and images can be saved to your Camera Roll! Geek Chic When it's time to accessorize your home, think different with Mac-inspired decor and high-tech, high-style iPod docks.A. These iSteam Mac and iSteam iPhone posters ($15, www.isteammac.com) by artist Kevin Tong are inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and HG Wells–style steampunk. Also available as T-shirts! B. Graphic artist Susan Kare designed icons and interface elements for the early Macintosh, as well as these removable wall graphics from LTL Prints ($39.95 and up, www.ltlprints.com).C. The Icon Collection of pillows by Throwboy ($29 each, $149 for the set of six, www.throwboy.com) includes handcrafted, fleece pillows shaped like the icons for Photo Booth, the Finder, Dashboard, iChat, iTunes, and iPhoto (not pictured).D. These handmade fleece pillows by MySuiteStuff ($15 each, $80 for six, $130 for 10, www.mysuitestuff.com) are right out of an art director’s Creative Suite dreams.E. Roth’s Music Cocoon MC4 tube amp (ÂŁ395, $629 at press time, www.rothaudio.co.uk) warms the sound from your iPod, iPhone, CD player, or other device, and looks good doing it. Just BYO speakers. F. The limited-edition Pantone Flight Stools ($549, www.pantone.com) were designed and made by London design team Barber Osgerby.G. The Multipot ($199, www.multipot.com/en/) is a multiuse charging station and lamp. You can plug up to five devices into sockets under the lid, and the cords are neatly hidden by the pot. H. Rotaliana’s Diva lamp (360 Euros, $515 at press time, www.rotaliana.it/en/) has an extendible iPod dock, a pop-up arm with LED lamp, built-in speakers, FM radio, audio inputs, and a remote. 

  • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

    Even more firms may gain access to TARP. Sources say the Treasury may use some of its $700B rescue fund to buy stakes in financing companies such as GE's (GE) GE Capital and CIT Group (CIT). Presently the program only includes publicly-traded banks and insurers, although the Treasury is already mulling opening the door to some privately-held firms. The U.S. government could eventually own even more of the American financial system than first envisioned. Yahoo, Google tone down ad tie-up. Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) submitted a revised version of their search-ad pact to the Justice Department in the hope gaining approval. New provisions limit the scope of the deal, including shortening the agreement to two years from ten, and capping Yahoo's revenue from the deal to 25% of its search revenue total; previously there was no cap. The revised plan also gives Google advertisers the ability to opt out of having their ads displayed on Yahoo sites. It's unclear whether the changes will suffice to appease regulators who worry the deal will allow Google (GOOG) to monopolize online advertising. Separately, Yahoo said Monday Microsoft (MSFT) executive Jeff Dossett will take the lead position in its online media properties after veteran Scott Moore left "for other opportunities." UBS posts earnings, warnings. UBS (UBS) confirmed a Q3 profit of 296M Swiss francs ($256.3M) helped by credit and tax gains, with outflows of 49.3B francs from its wealth management unit and 34.4B francs from its asset management unit. The world's largest wealth manager, UBS had already reported much of its Q3 results last month when it announced a capital injection of 6B franc from the Swiss government and said it would unload $60B of risky assets into a central bank fund. UBS noted some positive client money flows in October, but warned 'difficult' market conditions would hurt fee-earning businesses and Q4 results would be weighed down by the accounting effects of transferring risky assets. Shares -2.6% premarket. Outlook sours for RBS. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) abandoned its full-year profit forecast after it wrote-down ÂŁ1B in October against assets connected to Lehman Brothers and Icelandic banks and as bad loans rose. It also posted ÂŁ1.4B of markdowns in Q3 before new accounting rules allowed it to claim back ÂŁ1.2B. CEO Stephen Hester said the latest writedowns, coming in addition to ÂŁ5.9B in H1, show the bank has too much risk and could face a full-year loss. RBS is in line for a U.K. bailout, and the government could own up to 60% of the bank unless investors buy some of the ÂŁ20B of stock to be issued later this year. Shares -14.9% premarket. Goldman hedge fund down $1B. A flagship Goldman Sachs (GS) hedge fund - Goldman Sachs Investment Partners - has lost almost $1B of its $6B since its launch in January, further evidence of the crisis facing the industry. "We anticipate that these results will lead to net outflows from the hedge fund industry," managers said, although GSIC itself imposed a two-year lock-in at inception. More than half of its 13% Q3 loss was on positions in commodities, basic materials, metals, mining, energy and agriculture. Tough 2009 for JPMorgan. JPMorgan (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon told employees the firm faces "highly challenging conditions" in 2009, but sees a possible "strong recovery" in 2010. JPM's recent acquisitions of Bear Stearns and WaMu will improve performance in the "longer term," he said. Dimon warned Asia is "going to get worse than you think" as the tidal wave that began with a collapse of the U.S. mortgage market washes over it. Still, longer-term, he sees "very substantial natural growth" in the region. iPod master leaves Apple. Tony Fadell, one of the fathers of the iPod, is leaving Apple (AAPL) for personal reasons, sources say. Former IBM (IBM) executive Mark Papermaster will take his place. During Fadell's tenure, the iPod grew from a curiosity into a major cash cow; Apple sold 54.7M iPods during its most recent fiscal year. But growth has cooled off as saturation becomes a factor in many countries. Still, Apple shows no signs of giving up any of its 70% U.S. market share. Dismal October for automakers. General Motors (GM) said October was likely the auto industry's worst month since WWII after its sales plunged 45%, Ford's (F) fell 30%, Nissan's (NSANY) declined 33%, Honda's (HMC) dropped 25%, while Toyota's (TM) declined by 23%. GM marketing chief Mark LaNeve said he believes there's plenty of pent-up demand, "but until the credit markets open up and consumer confidence improves, the entire U.S. economy, and any industry like autos that relies on financing, will suffer." U.S. auto sales are now down 14.6% YTD. "It's weaker than we were anticipating," J.D. Power's Bob Schnorbus said, warning leaders should take heed: "The auto industry is important to the economy and it should not be taken too lightly." Manufacturing paints bleak picture. The ISM's Manufacturing index fell to 38.9 in October, its lowest level since 1982, and worse than the expected 41.5. The only industries reporting growth were apparel and leather & allied products. Petroleum & coal and nonmetallic mineral products led the laggards. The weaker than expected data increases the risk the current slump will outdo the recessions of 2001 and 1991. Companies are cutting back on investments and hiring as Q3 consumer spending plunged by 3.1% - the biggest decline in 28 years. The survey "indicates a significantly faster rate of decline in manufacturing when comparing October to September," ISM director Norbert Ore said. "It appears that manufacturing is experiencing significant demand destruction as a result of recent events." Prices also rose at a much slower rate: the price index plunged to 37 from 53.5 in September - the lowest level since December 2001. Export orders dropped for the first time in 70 months. September Construction Spending fell 0.3% from August's revised numbers, better than the expected 0.8% drop. Residential private construction -1.3%; non-residential +1.2%. Earnings: Before Open Ameren (AEE): Q3 EPS of $1.17 misses by $0.08. Revenue of $2.06B (+3.2%) vs. $2.29B. Sees full-year EPS of $2.80-3.00 vs. $3.01. Shares -5.3%. (PR) Archer Daniels Midland (ADM): FQ1 EPS of $1.63 vs. consensus of $0.69. Revenue of $21.16B (+65%) vs. $15.98B. (PR) Autodesk (ADSK): Sees Q3 EPS of $0.53-0.55 vs. $0.55 consensus and revenue of $604-607M vs $624M. "The sharp downturn of the global economy is substantially impacting our business... Demand for our products fell dramatically in October in all geographies as the financial crisis worsened. (PR) Cimarex Energy (XEC): Q3 EPS of $2.19 misses by $0.07. Revenue of $576.5M (+67.7%) vs. $568M. (PR) Dean Foods (DF): Q3 EPS of $0.28 misses by $0.03. Revenue of $3.19B (+2.5%) in-line. (PR) Emerson Electric (EMR): FQ4 EPS of $0.88 beats by $0.02. Revenue of $6.7B (+11.1%) in-line. (PR) GrafTech (GTI): Q3 EPS of $0.55 beats by $0.10. Revenue of $316M (+25.7%) vs. $303M. Shares +6.7%. (PR) HCP Inc. (HCP): Q3 FFO of $0.71/share beats by $0.05. Revenue of $270M vs. $242M. Sees full-year FFO of $2.38-2.42 vs. $2.29. (PR) Holly (HOC): Q3 EPS of $1.00 beats by $0.13. Revenue of $1.72B (+42.3%) in-line. (PR) Louisiana-Pacific (LPX): Q3 EPS of -$0.38 misses by $0.08. Revenue of $390M (-17.5%) in-line. (PR) Magna International (MGA): Q3 EPS of $0.17 vs. consensus of $0.90. Revenue of $5.53B (-9%) in-line. (PR) Marvel Entertainment (MVL): Q3 EPS of $0.64 beats by $0.19. Revenue of $182.5M (+47.7%) vs. $146M. Sees full-year EPS of $2.45-2.65 vs. $1.93 and 2009 EPS of $1.00-1.35 vs. $1.94. (PR) Myriad Genetics (MYGN): FQ1 EPS of $0.30 beats by $0.16. Revenue of $74M (+52.4%) vs. $70M. (PR) NiSource (NI): Q3 EPS of $0.03 in-line. Revenue of $1.42B (+11.8%) vs. $1.36B. (PR) PPL Corp. (PPL): Q3 EPS of $0.45 misses by $0.15. Sees full-year EPS of $2.00-2.05 vs. $2.29, and 2009 EPS of $1.60-1.90 vs. $2.17. "Many of the pressures that affected our results in 2008 also are expected to continue into 2009..." (PR) Rowan (RDC): Q3 EPS of $1.00 beats by $0.13. Revenue of $527M (+5%) vs. $540M. "Continuing weakness in capital markets and commodity prices will, eventually, affect customer demand for our products and services, though we have experienced little impact thus far." (PR) St. Joe (JOE): Q3 EPS of -$0.12 misses by $0.12. Revenue of $32.8M (-57.6%) vs. $47.3M. (PR) Talisman Energy (TLM): Q3 EPS of $0.72 beats by $0.08. Revenue of $2.82B (+50.9%) vs. $2.89B. (PR) Tenneco (TEN): Q3 EPS of $0.01 misses by $0.22. Revenue of $1.5B (-3.8%) in-line. (PR) Tenet Healthcare (THC): Q3 EPS of -$0.06 misses by $0.03. Revenue of $2.14B (+5.2%) vs. $2.21B. Shares +14.1%. (PR) W&T Offshore (WTI): Q3 EPS of $0.79 misses by $0.03. Revenue of $290M (+13.6%) vs. $276M. (PR) Earnings: Monday After Close Automatic Data Processing (ADP): FQ1 EPS of $0.54 beats by $0.04. Revenue of $2.18B (+9.5%) in-line. Shares -2.5%. (PR) Coldwater Creek (CWTR): Sees Q3 sales of $225M vs. $265M consensus, and EPS of -$0.07 to -$0.09 vs. $0.03 consensus. "The overall macro-economic environment has proven to be substantially more challenging than anticipated." Shares -5.9%. (PR) Comstock Resources (CRK): Q3 EPS of $1.20 beats by $0.20. Revenue of $169M (+103.7%) vs. $158M. (PR) Embraer (ERJ): Q3 EPS of $0.32 misses by $0.07. Revenue of $1.55B (+8.1%) vs. $1.63B. (PR) EOG Resources (EOG): Q3 EPS of $2.34 beats by $0.10. Revenue of $3.22B (+226.5%). Shares +1.9%. (PR) Forest Oil (FST): Q3 EPS of $1.26 misses by $0.12. Revenue of $474M (+51.5%) vs. $465M. (PR) Herbalife (HLF): Q3 EPS of $0.89 beats by $0.03. Revenue of $M in-line. Sees Q4 EPS of $0.65-0.70 vs. $0.91, and 2009 EPS of $3.50-3.55 vs. $3.71. Shares -13.5%. (PR) MasterCard (MA): Q3 EPS of $2.47 beats by $0.22. Revenue of $1.34B (+23.7%) vs. $1.27B. Gross dollar volume rose 12.3%. "As we are not immune from the long-term effects of the current economic environment, we have significantly accelerated the focus on our cost structure..." Shares +8%. (PR) Mohawk Industries (MHK): Q3 EPS of $1.10 misses by $0.02. Revenue of $1.76B (-9%) in-line. (PR) Open Text (OTEX): Q3 EPS of $0.53 beats by $0.03. Revenue of $183M (+11.4%) vs. $179M. Shares -1.1%. (PR) Pepco Holdings (POM): Q3 EPS of $0.59 misses by $0.11. Revenue of $3.06B (+10.4%) vs. $2.73B. (PR) Pitney Bowes (PBI): Q3 EPS of $0.67 misses by $0.03. Revenue of $1.55B (+2.6%) vs. $1.6B. Sees full-year EPS of $2.75-2.82 vs. $2.85. (PR) St. Mary Land (SM): Q3 EPS of $1.20 beats by $0.08. Revenue of $324M (+31.4%) vs. $329M. Shares +1.2%. (PR) Viacom (VIA): Q3 EPS of $0.62 beats by $0.07. Revenue of $3.41B (+4.2%) vs. $3.32B. Shares +1.5%. (PR) Today's Markets Asia closed mixed Tuesday. Tokyo was the standout, +6.27% to 9,115. Shanghai -0.76% to 1,707. Hang Seng +0.28% to 14,384. BSE Sensex +2.84% to 10,631. European markets posted strong morning gains. London +1.75%. Paris +2.1%. Frankfurt +2%. U.S. futures are markedly higher at 7:00 AM. Dow +1.88% to 9506. S&P +1.96% to 988.50. Nasdaq +2.18%. Crude +1.16% to $64.65. Gold +1.49% to $737.60. Tuesday's Economic Calendar 7:45 ICSC Retail Store Sales8:55 Redbook10:00 Factory Orders5:00 PM ABC Consumer Confidence Index Notable earnings before Tuesday's open: ADM, AEE, AMSC, DF, DNR, EMR, ENTG, EXPD, FE, GTI, HCP, HL, HNT, HOC, JEC, JOE, LPX, MAC, MGA, MYGN, NI, NNN, NXG, PPL, PQ, RDC, TDC, TEN, THC, TLM, VNO, WTI, XEC Notable earnings after Tuesday's close: AMMD, BRE, CBL, DCT, FCH, HRP, JKHY, ME, NHP, PXD, UPL, USU, VTR Seeking Alpha editor Rachael Granby contributed to this post. Get Wall Street Breakfast by email -- it's free and takes only seconds to sign up. After you finish reading Wall Street BreakfastSeeking Alpha's Market Currentswill keep you current all day long.

  • Apple posts first quarter 2008 results

    Filed under: Apple Financial, AppleWe are in the process of liveblogging Apple's financial conference call, but Apple has already posted their quarterly results for all to read. Here's what Apple sold this quarter: 2,319,000 Macs (44% more than last quarter) 22,121,000 iPods (5% more than last quarter) 2,315,000 iPhones Revenues clocked in at $9.6 billion and a net profit of $1.58 billion.Best. Quarter. Ever.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • Dear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1

    Filed under: Features, iPhoneA week ago we asked you, the TUAW reader, to help us tell Apple what you want in the next iPhone: the OS, the apps, the hardware. Within two hours, I had over two hundred emails in my inbox. Within four days, the email total topped 1,100. As I was shifting and sorting through all your suggestions, one thing became clear: you love the iPhone, but you want to see it better, more intuitive, and more versatile - and you know how the iPhone can accomplish those goals. This is the first of a series of letters to Apple on your behalf, telling the gang in Cupertino what would make their wonder-phone even more wondrous. This letter strictly focuses on the iPhone OS in general - the home screen, navigation, and settings. Future letters will deal with hardware and applications. There were so many suggestions, I needed to whittle them down. To do that, I tabulated how many times a feature request was made. If more than 50% of you mentioned it, it made it into the letter. If you guys want to see the others (most were one-offs or had less that 15% of you requesting it), perhaps I'll add an extra letter onto the series at the end of its run. Remember, if you made suggestions about any of Apple's built-in apps (Mail, Maps, Stocks, Calendar, etc) or hardware, you won't see those here, but in an upcoming letter dealing specifically with those areas. I hope Apple is listening, because the readers of TUAW have spoken, and this is what they have to say: Dear Apple, While it's clear the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market right now, you have a lot of competition creeping up. We want to help you blow them out of the water with the iPhone OS 4.0. Here are our suggestions: 1. The lock screen needs to change. 90% of us want a new lock screen. We think the current screen that only shows the date and time, and only the most recent missed call or SMS, is not particularly helpful. If you get a text message, then a calendar alert, and then a push notification, the only one you see is the push notification message. Being able to swipe through them or have a table list would be far more useful. But even then, we still have to enter our four-digit unlock code to see if we've received any new emails. From the new lock screen we want to see all the calls we've missed and the number of new emails and texts we have. We want to see which apps have sent us push notifications, and what appointments are coming up. We want a brief overview of all the new data we've received to be presented to us before we have to enter our unlock code. Let's extend the features of that new lock screen to ... 2. A new home screen. The iPhone is the smartest phone on the market. Make is smarter. Introduce a location-aware home screen. Over 90% of us also want a new home screen - and we want it location aware. Let's say we live in London, but travel to continental Europe many times a month. We'd love to turn on our iPhones in the country we just landed in and see the local weather, currency, transit maps, and news displayed right on our home screens. Not only would it save us time and money, it would save something just as valuable to an iPhone owner - battery life. If all these things were displayed on the home screen the first time you turn on your phone, you wouldn't have to open five different applications to get what you want. Imagine a 'Genius Location' feature as well: the iPhone would show you (through an app like Yelp - or a new Apple-branded app) what restaurants or businesses are around based on your 'likes' in your home town. We know you were granted a 'Transitional Data Sets' patent for a location-based home screen back in February 2008 - let's hope this sees the light of day in iPhone OS 4.0. 3. That new home screen? Let us access it by vertically swiping. Imagine this: no matter what home screen page you're on, if you swipe up you are presented with a 'feeds screen' that works much like an RSS page. This feeds screen could be set based on in-app preferences so we could fully customize it. Ours might show our latest Facebook posts, last five emails received, our To Do notes, our Mint.com balance, missed calls, text messages, and upcoming iCal events. The guys at teehan+lax have a pretty cool mock-up of this feeds screen, but the killer feature would be how you could access it from any app page - by vertically swiping. 4. Overhaul app navigation. 85% of us think it takes too long to swipe through all our pages of apps. Even though iTunes 9 made a step in the right direction by allowing the user to organize apps and home screen pages visually, there has got to be a better way. Swiping through ten screens to get to the last apps page is tedious. Wouldn't it be cool if you could press the home button and see all the home pages on one screen? The guys at Ocean Observations think so. Check out this concept video of what this feature would look like (their 'Cover Flow Multitasking' concept is quite cool as well). Don't want to do it their way? Give us stacks, give us folders, give us App Store-like category views. Just give us something that makes it easier to get around our deluge of apps. 5. 85% of us want multitasking and 3rd party background apps (but not at the cost of battery life). There's not much more to say on this matter, but Palm does it, and if you can find a way around their battery drain, we want it! 6. Almost 80% of us want Flash, even if it's a bad idea. No, not camera flash (we do, but that's for the next letter). We want Adobe's Flash Player, though Flash on the Mac is a giant performance and stability headache. Get your heads together with Adobe and make it happen (and fix the Mac version while you're about it, please). 7. We love that you introduced landscape mode across virtually all apps in iPhone OS 3.0, but 70% of us want the ability to selectively turn it off. Give us a setting to switch off the automatic "turn to landscape mode" when the device is turning. Why? When we lay in bed on our side we can't read our mail. The app is always turning and that's really annoying. A system-wide 'ignore orientation' switch would be a good start; app-by-app options would be better. 8. When we leave an app, we want it to remember where we were. If we click on a link in an app that takes us to Safari or if we switch apps to copy/paste, 70% of us want the app to remember where we were in it when we come back to it. Some apps do this, some don't. Make this an OS-level feature so they all do it. 9. 65% of us want the ability to remove Apple-branded apps. That Stocks app? Cute, but the Yahoo! Finance [iTunes] app is so much better. We don't need both on our phones. 10. 60% of us want a universal "documents" folder. We want one location, accessible to all apps, to store documents on the iPhone. Whether we need to send that PDF via IM through Nimbuzz or via email through the built-in Mail app, it's no problem. Either one can do it because the docs are all stored in one place, accessible to all apps. (We realize this breaks the sandboxing model that prevents one app from blowing away data belonging to another one, but we have every confidence you can make it work.) 11. Better Support for Codecs and Add-ons. It's not just Flash, you know. WMV and AVI still rule on lots of sites. Let us see them (60%). 12. The iPhone is a hard drive with a screen, so.... Give us Disk mode in the OS. 50% of us want to use our iPhone as an external USB/Wi-Fi hard drive. FYI, Apple, this is just the start. We've got so many more thoughts to share with you about the next iPhone's hardware and apps. So get ready, and thanks for listening. You'll soon be hearing from us again. Sincerely, The loyal readers and iPhone owners of TUAW. TUAW Readers: The next letter will be published one week from today on Sunday 1/17. We'll be telling Apple what we want from the next iPhone's hardware. Want a different enclosure? Camera flash? RFID? OLED? Email me at tuawiphone [at] me dot com (by mid-day, Friday, January 15th at the latest)! A big thanks to the 1100+ of you who contributed to this article. iPhone homepage sketch by reader 'Fab.' TUAWDear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments iPhone - ITunes - AppStore - Apple - Yelp

  • Apple: "the iPhone is a gaming console"

    According to extremely reliable and embarrassingly handsome Engadget sources, at an iPhone event held today, John Geleynse (AKA Director of Technology Evangelism at Apple) made some statements regarding the iPhone platform that should seriously raise a few eyebrows. During an ADC "iPhone Tech Talk" in San Jose, Geleynse apparently waxed excited about the potential for the handheld as a viable threat to the DS (and the PSP by proxy), calling the iPhone a "gaming console" and claiming that "it's not a phone, it's a console experience." Pretty bold talk about a device that has yet to really prove its gaming mettle, but nothing new from the Apple camp as far as we're concerned. Considering these comments alongside those from a recent interview in which Greg Joswiak compared the touch to the DS, it seems clear that the company is making a noticeable effort to push this angle. Adding some fuel to that fire is PR that just went out announcing a series of EA "sneak peek" events at Apple Stores around the US. In their words:Throughout the month of December Apple Stores in New York, LA, San Francisco and Chicago will host special "EA Games Sneak Peek" events where Electronic Arts will discuss why the iPod touch and iPhone are amazing platforms for mobile gaming...While there's no question the iPhone and touch have made inroads when it comes to gaming, it still isn't clear that there's going to be anything beyond a casual interest for these devices. Then again, if the Wii's success has proven anything, it's that there's plenty of cash in casual if you can make it appealing enough. And you know how Apple feels about appealing products and money.Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, HandheldsApple: "the iPhone is a gaming console" originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

    Shareholder sues BoA. A Bank of America (BAC) shareholder has filed a legal suit against the company, seeking class action status on behalf of all shareholders eligible to vote on the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. The suit names Kenneth Lewis and John Thain as defendants and faults the two for failing to disclose the full extent of Merrill's losses; the Dec. 5 vote to approve the merger was based on an Oct. 31 proxy statement that hadn't been revised to reflect Merrill's poor Q4 performance. Sony slips. Sony (SNE) warned it will post a Ą260B ($2.9B) annual operating loss on falling demand, a strengthening yen and restructuring costs. The forecast is down from an earlier projection of a Ą200B profit, and far worse than earlier consensus estimates of a Ą100B loss. It will be Sony's first operating loss in 14 years, and its biggest loss ever, as the company has fallen behind Apple (AAPL) in portable music, Nintendo (NTDOY.PK) in video games and is losing money on its flat screen TVs. As part of the restructuring plan, Sony said it may consolidate TV production in Japan into one plant, but analysts call for more drastic steps to turn the company around. Shares -2.8% in Japan (7:00 ET). Rescue buyout for Satyam? Media reports say Indian firm Larsen & Toubro, which holds around a 4% stake in Satyam (SAY), is considering presenting a rescue plan to Satyam's board. Investment banking and government sources said L&T would put a price on its bid once KPMG and Deloitte, Satyam's new auditors, release updated audit results. L&T denied the reports. Satyam's board will begin a two-day meeting today to discuss how to secure emergency funding. AIG selling prized business. AIG (AIG) has begun the sale of its prized Asian life insurance unit, and hopes to pull in as much as $20B on the unit to help repay its government loans. The unit boasts 20M policyholders across 13 countries, employs 200,000 tied agents and last year made an aggregate operating profit of around $2B. AIG has expressed an interest in selling 49% of the unit, but would consider a complete sale, and could be willing to accept shares as acquisition currency. Potential bidders include HSBC (HBC), Prudential Financial (PRU) and China Life (LFC). Apple regains some shine. Apple (AAPL) posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings yesterday (more details below), giving depressed shares a healthy boost with gains of over 8% after hours. Overseas demand for iPods, Mac computers and iPhones offset a slowdown in U.S. sales, pushing quarterly sales past $10B for the first time vs. consensus estimates of the first profit drop in five years. The company posted a cautious outlook for FQ2, forecasting EPS of $0.90-1.00 vs. $1.13 consensus and revenue of $7.6-8B vs. $8.2B. Germany's 'Bad Bank Light.' The German government is working on a new 'Bad Bank Light' rescue plan that could help the industry get hundreds of billions of euros of bad assets off its books. According to media reports, the government would take on the bad assets of banks and absorb associated losses, and would also get a claim on future gains. A similar model was successfully used with East German banks after reunification in 1990. The government could take as much as €300B-€400B in bad assets, though the banks themselves would choose which assets to divest. BoJ forecasts deflation. Bank of Japan voted unanimously to maintain interest rates at 0.1%, and lowered its assessment of the economy. BoJ now sees a longer contraction until recovery starts to kick in by the second half of fiscal 2010. Japan will slip back into deflation during the contraction. Retail sales. Retail chain store sales rose 1.1% from a week ago, ICSC reported, and fell 1.8% Y/Y. "Being a low volume month with little incentive to spend will continue to make January a tough month for retailers." According to Redbook, national chain store sales fell 2.5% in the first two weeks of January, worse than the expected -2.2%, noting retailers don't tend to read too much into January. Shops are building very cautious inventories for the spring season. Housing index drops. NAHB's Housing Market Index came in at a record low of 8 vs. 9 consensus. However its index of prospective buyers rose to 8 vs. 7 in December, while its index of home sales for the next six months inched up to 17 from 16. "Clearly, conditions in the nation's housing market aren't getting any better," said NAHB chairman Sandy Dunn, "and they aren't going to get any better until the federal government takes substantial action to encourage qualified buyers to get back in the market." Earnings: Thursday Before Open AmerisourceBergen (ABC): FQ1 EPS of $0.73 beats by $0.04. Revenue of $16.9B (+4.6%) vs. $17.2B. (PR) AU Optronics (AUO): Q4 EPS of -$0.95 misses by $0.42. Revenue of $1.80B (-62.5%) vs. $1.81B. (PR) Baxter International (BAX): Q4 EPS of $0.91 beats by $0.02. Revenue of $3.13B (+4.1%) vs. $3.15B. (PR) Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB): Q4 EPS of -$3.82 misses by $3.83. Tier 1 capital ratio of 10.59%. Net loss of $2.2B from goodwill impairment, credit actions, higher credit costs and market valuation adjustments. (PR) KeyCorp (KEY): Q4 EPS of -$1.13 misses by $1.11. Revenue of $1.045B (-15.6%) vs. $1.176B. (PR) Knight Capital Group (NITE): Q4 EPS of $0.56 beats by $0.18. Revenue of $330.2M (+28.2%) vs. $261.8M. (PR) Lockheed Martin (LMT): Q4 EPS of $2.05 beats by $0.13. Revenue of $11.1B (+2.7%) in-line. (PR) Nokia (NOK): Q4 EPS of $0.26 misses by $0.02. Revenue of $12.7B (-19.2%) vs. $13.1B. Shares -10.4% premarket.(PR) Potash (POT): Q4 EPS of $2.56 beats by $0.28. Revenue of $1.87B (+30.7%) vs. $1.85B. (PR) SunTrust Banks (STI): Q4 EPS of -$1.08 misses by $1.15. Revenue of $1.93B (+8.8%) vs. $2.16B. (PR) Taiwan Semi (TSM): Q4 EPS of $0.07 in-line. Revenue of $1.96B (-32.1%) vs. $1.95B. (PR) UnitedHealth (UNH): Q4 EPS of $0.78 in-line. Revenue of $20.45B (+9,4%) vs. $20.35B. (PR) Earnings: Wednesday After Close Amdocs (DOX): FQ1 EPS of $0.55 in-line. Revenue of $754M (+1.6%) vs. $792M. Sees FQ2 EPS of $0.47-0.51 vs. $0.57 and revenue of $700-720M vs. $793M. (PR) Apple (AAPL): FQ1 EPS of $1.78 beats by $0.39. Revenue of $10.17B vs. $9.75B. Gross margins 34.7% vs. 31.9% consensus. Macs 2.52M in line. iPhones 4.36M vs. 4.6M. (8-K) Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI): Q4 EPS of $1.79 beats by $0.05. Revenue of $4.37B (+3%) in-line. Commits $2.7B in capital expenses for 2009, $150M lower than 2008. (PR) eBay (EBAY): Q4 EPS of $0.41 beats by $0.02. Revenue of $2.04B (-6.5%) vs. $2.12B. Sees Q1 EPS of $0.32-0.34 vs. $0.40, and revenue of $1.8-2.05B vs. $2.1B. Skype growth 26% to $145M. Active users +1% to 86.3M. Gross merchandise volume +1% to $11.47B. (PR) F5 Networks (FFIV): FQ1 EPS of $0.40 in-line. Revenue of $166M (+7.4%) in-line. While some sales are being pushed into later quarters, others are postponed indefinitely. (PR) Kinder Morgan Energy Partners L.P. (KMP): Q4 EPS of $0.24 misses by $0.29. Revenue of $2.29B (-6.4%) vs. $3.41B. (PR) Polycom (PLCM): Q4 EPS of $0.42 beats by $0.02. Revenue of $263M (-0.1%) in-line. (PR) Seagate Technology (STX): FQ2 EPS of -$0.23 misses by $0.18. Revenue of $2.27B (-33.6%) vs. $2.46B. Sees FQ3 revenue of $1.6-2B vs. $2.19B. (PR) Today's Markets Asia markets closed lightly up. Nikkei +1.9% to 8,052. Hang Seng +0.6% to 12,658. Shanghai +1.0% to 2,005. BSE +0.4% to 8,814. In Europe at midday, London +1.2%. Paris +0.8%. Frankfurt +1.0%. U.S. futures: Dow -0.6%. S&P -0.6%. Nasdaq +0.3%. Crude +1.4% to $44.18. Gold +0.01% to $850.20. Thursday's Economic Calendar 7:00 MBA Mortgage Applications 8:30 Housing Starts 8:30 Jobless Claims 4:30 PM Money Supply Notable earnings before Thursday's open: ABC, AUO, AVT, BAX, BBT, BEN, CIT, CMA, CY, EAT, ESI, EXC, FITB, HBAN, IGT, JNS, KEY, LMT, LUV, MTB, NITE, NOC, NOK, ORI, POT, SHW, STI, TCB, TSM, UNH, UNP, UST Notable earnings after Thursday's close: AMD, CBST, CNI, COF, ED, FII, GOOG, ISRG, MSCC, MSFT, PBCT, SNV, SYNA, TPX, WERN, WFR Seeking Alpha editor Eli Hoffmann contributed to this post.

  • Apple releases 2009 proxy statement

    Filed under: Apple FinancialYesterday, Apple released a proxy statement detailing the financial compensation that executives enjoy as part of their participation on the board of directors. Steve Jobs retained his $1 salary for 2008, but has over 5.5 million shares of Apple stock, which is worth over $500 million on paper. Jobs is worth about $5.7 billion, thanks largely to the fact that he's Disney's largest individual shareholder. Fidelity Investments continues to be Apple's largest investor with over 46 million shares of stock. There are five shareholder proposals up for voting this time around: Proposal 1 asks to re-elect the board of directors, consisting of Steve Jobs, William Campbell, Millard Drexler, Al Gore, Andrea Jung, Arthur Levinson, Eric Schmidt, and Jerry York. Proposal 2 asks for more transparency surrounding Apple's political contributions. Proposal 3 asks the company to adopt a statement supporting universal health care for everyone, and not just employees. Proposal 4 asks the company to release a report on corporate strategies surrounding climate change and greenhouse gas emissions before July. Proposal 5 asks to adopt a policy that gives shareholders more input on executive compensation. (Thanks, Scott!) The board of directors, perhaps not surprisingly, recommends approving the first proposal, and rejecting the other four. The proxy statement is available from Apple's Investor Relations website, and will not be mailed to shareholders unless requested. [Via MacDailyNews.]TUAWApple releases 2009 proxy statement originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • Apple's new "green" notebook ad

    Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple, Macbook Pro, MacBookApple aired a new television ad here in the US earlier tonight. It touts the MacBook's low power consumption, recyclable enclosure and lack of some of the toxins present in other computers.Activist group Greenpeace has been pressuring Apple to adopt more environmentally-friendly production methods and materials over the last couple of years, and last month responded favorably to Apple's efforts to go green. Additionally, Apple has posted a page to their website describing not only their efforts toward environmental responsibility with the MacBook, but their overall efforts as a company. At the risk of sounding like a tree-hugging hippie, let me say, well done Apple!TUAWApple's new "green" notebook ad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

The Comments Go Here

Software Releases