Swedish Apple promotional art goes up for sale

Swedish artist Erik Saxen is looking to sell a series of Mac SE promotional paintings to collectors or museums. Painted in 1987 for the Mac SE's launch in Sweden, the six oil and mixed media paintings are in the style of other artists, but feature the Mac SE, and were used for newspaper and poster campaigns. Read More...

Swedish artist Erik Saxen is looking to sell a series of Mac SE promotional paintings to collectors or museums. Painted in 1987 for the Mac SE's launch in Sweden, the six oil and mixed media paintings are in the style of other artists, but feature the Mac SE, and were used for newspaper and poster campaigns. Read More...

  • 10 Reasons Why You Can't Have an iPad Right Now

       Love it or hate it, despite its lack of Flash compatibility, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a pulse who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to spend some quality time with Apple’s latest piece of technology. So, there’s a pretty good chance Apple would have racked up a few thousand impulse buys had it offered iPad for sale following its dramatic introduction in January.So why is Apple insisting that we wait 60 to 90 days? Let’s review:   Communications breakdownAt the bottom of every iPad page and at the conclusion of the promotional video, you’ll find the same phrase: “This device has not yet been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.” Much like the iPhone, Apple unveiled the iPad several months before its on-sale date to avoid being scooped by an FCC filing. Any telecommunications device is obligated to go through the FCC approval process, which often takes a month or so and is likely responsible for the extra 30 days of wait time tacked onto the 3G-enabled iPads.While likely just a formality, Apple also doesn’t want to cut its target date too close to the end of the FCC process, just in case it needs to tweak any of iPad’s internals and resubmit. So, 60 to 90 days hits the sweet spot between not-too-long and not-too-short of a wait. It took us seven months to get our hands on an iPhone, so surely we can wait another 60 days.   A bug’s lifeWhile Steve did his best to keep everything running smoothly during his big iPad demo (‘cept for those nasty blue boxes where Flash videos were supposed to be), he couldn’t hide every bug and disabled feature from the intrepid reporters invited to test-drive the new gadget. Suffice to say, the earliest iPadders found more than a few flaws in the new iPhone OS, and we’re quite sure Apple’s developers are already hard at work fine-tuning apps (particularly iBooks) and rewriting code to get everything in tip-top shape.And tip-top is the shape it most certainly needs to be. Apple may be enjoying a spate of unparalleled success, but there's still quite a bit riding on its first truly new product in three years. From the iMac to the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad, Apple’s creations are as much about their place on Apple’s roadmap as the products themselves. Had the iPod flopped, we might not have the App Store or iPhone; if the iPad fails, who knows what we’ll miss out on.    Critical conditionSteve Jobs would like us to think he pays little mind to critics not named Walt Mossberg, but truth be told, he’s probably read as many iPad reviews as we have. And while we don’t foresee an iPad-was-my-idea ad campaign anytime soon, we have little doubt that at least some of those criticisms have planted seeds in Steve’s brain. A select few may find their way into the final shipping product and others will get shelved for future revisions, but Steve will pay close attention to our gripes and grumbles over the next 60 days. Don’t believe us? Just shoot him an e-mail. Though we’re pretty sure Flash won’t make the cut, 60 days is more than enough time for Steve to make some serious changes--even cosmetic ones--to the iPad prototype. Remember, back in 2007, Apple surprised would-be early iPhone adopters by tacking on two extra hours of talk time and upgrading its display to “optical-quality glass to achieve a superior level of scratch resistance and optical clarity.” But if you’re holding out for a battery or a thinner bezel, don’t set your hopes too high.   Believe the hype--it's a sequelIt hasn’t all been as positive as the viral video of Steven Colbert pulling one out of his oversized jacket pocket at the Grammys, but iPad has dominated headlines, Google Trends, Twitter and water-cooler talk, and it’s unlikely to die down anytime soon.Apple’s new device might have fallen short of its impossible expectations, but we doubt Steve’s too concerned about all that negative press. We've already been through this with the iPhone: It’s not so much about sales as it is getting the iPad name on as many lips as possible; once people know what it is, they’ll surely want to find out what it does and how it works. And once they see one under the lights at their local Apple Store, something tells us they’ll forget all those jokes about its name.With weeks of rumors and a few tantalizing words by Steve himself, all eyes were trained on Apple during the days leading into the iPad introduction, as its strategic hype machine whipped the industry into a frenzy. And once Apple starts sending out e-mail notifications that the iPad’s ready for pre-order, it’s sure to start all over again.   Third-party timeSince the App Store changed the face of the iPhone as we knew it, Steve knows the success of the iPad is inexorably tied to its developers. Sure, Photos and iWork are nice, but Apple has left the creation of the first killer app to one of its third-party developers. So it’s only fair that they get some time to do it.Apple wasted little time getting the iPhone SDK 3.2 into the hands of their developers, who in turn wasted little time celebrating the iPad’s potential. Even before the United Kingdom’s Northern Film & Media launched a 40,000-pound iPad investment fund, Omni Group promised to bring all five of its popular productivity apps to the new tablet; Firemint divulged that an iPad-style version of Flight Control had actually been in development before the gadget even landed; and ex-Facebook app developer Joe Hewitt could hardly contain himself: “Seriously, if you're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.”Simply put, iPad is only as strong as its weakest app. By getting the SDK into developers’ hands a full two months ahead of iPad’s launch, Steve’s hoping his investment in strong is handsomely rewarded.   Read between the linesYou can argue that Apple would have been better off recycling the “iBook” name for the device rather than its e-book store, but it’s hard to argue that iPad’s reading experience is by and large the tablet’s most compelling feature. With a built-in store, virtual page turning and a promise that titles will be priced “the same” as the Kindle, Apple clearly intends to hit the ground running with iBooks.There’s just one small problem: It’s not quite ready for prime time. When eager journalists launched the iBooks app on those first prototype iPads, they were met with a padlocked store and a sparse bookshelf containing just 17 titles; add an unworkable search field to the mix, and you’re looking at a long road to completion.Apple’s already won its first battle with Amazon--the dot-com giant opted to “capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms” of higher e-book pricing, presumably after Apple applied some pressure to the publisher--but there’s a major war looming once the iPad lands on shelves. And you can rest assured that the iPad and iBooks will be locked, loaded and ready for the fight when these 60 days are up.   Fantastic 4GIt only took about a week after the iPad introduction for speculation to resume regarding the next generation of the iPhone, sparked by the purported discovery of an early image of the handset. iPhone has followed a predictable early June upgrade path, but with all iPad models expected to shipping by May 1, Apple might tweak that schedule this year.After spending a few minutes with the iPad, we can’t help but notice the potential for synergy with its little brother. From file sharing to photo beaming, we think Apple’s got some tricks up its sleeve for the new iPhone that’ll make it virtually inseparable from its taller twin.At a closed Town Hall meeting late lat month, Macrumors.com reports, Steve Jobs uncharacteristically talked tough about the 2010 iPhone 4G release, calling it an “A+ update” designed to keep Android developers on their heels and promised “aggressive updates” to the iPhone that will leave competitors in its dust. With some 60 days until the first iPads begin appearing in stores, Apple’s iPhone team has more than enough time to perfect its new device as the ultimate accessory to its new tablet.   Fab 4With no killer app to speak of, the iPad’s reception has been lukewarm at best, with detractors picking on its lack of camera, multi-tasking and Flash support. Now, we’re not expecting to see a camera until at least next year--and if you’re holding out for Flash, you should probably look elsewhere--but we also don’t think the version of iPad Apple showed us is complete.We weren’t surprised to see iPad running a version of the iPhone OS instead of OS X proper, but Apple’s decision to incrementally update OS 3 piqued our curiosity. With no iPhone-specific enhancements to speak of, Apple clearly has a major iPhone software update waiting in the wings, most likely slated for a standalone press event in early spring. And we think it’s going to make iPad a whole lot better.For starters, the elusive multi-tasking that everyone’s clamoring on about is rumored to make an appearance, and 60 days gives Apple plenty of time to fine-tune a solution that will enable apps to run in background without draining the battery or taxing the CPU. Also possibly on deck are improved gestures and synching, UI changes (many of which we’ve likely already seen on iPad) and a tactile, motion-aware interface, all of which will bring iPad to the level we expected at its launch.     It’s the economy, stupidApple may be navigating the recession with skill and ease, but expecting customers--even devoted ones--to drop several hundred dollars and another $30 a month on a brand new toy is a lot to ask when times are tough. But Uncle Steve cares so much about us, he’s given us three whole months to find ways to save:1) Cutting out those daily trips to the coffee shop will save about $15 a week, or approximately $130 over 60 days, enough to splurge on a 3G model.2) Bagging a lunch (or dinner) instead of ordering in at work will put about 200 bucks back in your pocket, even more if you include movie theaters and sporting events.3) Stop buying scratch tickets, CDs, DVDs, magazines (except Mac|Life, of course) and candy bars, quit downloading music and movies, and unsubscribe to those “special interest” Web sites.4) Stop going to see “Avatar.” That alone will be good enough for a keyboard dock.5) Want a case, too? Cut back on a few premium cable channels. More storage? Cancel your underused gym membership. Flash? Save even more and buy a netbook.   photo from EngadgetLines, lines, everywhere there’s linesThere’s no better advertisement for a hot new product than a giant, snaking line outside every Apple Store across the country. Whenever iPad is released, it’s a pretty safe bet that fans will begin camping out a few days before its sale date, piquing people’s interest without an ounce of effort from Apple’s marketing department.And the longer Steve makes us stare at its revolving homepage gallery, the more we want the damn thing. Just wait until there’s a 10-foot one hanging in the store window.  

  • The Mac Users Guide to Cool Things You Can Do With Steam

    This is the moment we've all been waiting for: Steam is finally coming to the Mac, and bringing the entire library of Valve games with it. The popular application is King of the Games on Windows, but now it has expanded its reign to include Mac OS X, too.Steam is a digital games distributor, a social networking platform for gamers, a multiplayer host for huge frag fests, and one of the most essential pieces of software for computer gamers everywhere. And if you still have no idea what we're talking about, think of game titles like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life, Portal, and Counter Strike--these gems will finally be available for Mac heads everywhere. The availability of Steam for Mac gamers means that we'll finally be able to kick the butts of our PC brethern, without investing in a pricey gaming console, or a Windows PC. Additionally, game publishers will be able to distribute all of their latest game titles via digital downloads, and we'll be able to play all the various Valve titles across a multitude of different computers, regardless of operating system. We don't doubt that the Mac versus PC debate won't continue on for generations to come, but at least there's finally some common ground. The Steam client for Mac beta will be available in April. To prepare you for the inevitable long nights of multiplayer game playing and trash talking, we've put together a comprehensive list of the most essential things you'll be able to do with the Steam client. Think of it as, a beginner's guide to a whole new world. Create a personal gaming profileThe avatar you choose is the first important step to becoming an integral part of the Steam community. Choose wisely, and your future as an elite computer gamer will flourish. However, if you choose poorly, you may be susceptible to a variety of cruel gamer jokes. See what your friends are up toValve has managed to virtually emulate those treasured times during our childhood, when you’d head outside just to see what the neighborhood kids were up to. In this instance, Steam shows you what everyone else is up to on your friends list. Your buddies can even invite you into the game they’re currently playing, so you can both engage in some Heavy against Scout combat in Team Fortress 2. And, in the new beta UI being currently tested with Windows Steam users, the story homepage now lists what your friends have bought or have been playing lately, so you can purchase games knowing your friends will be playing with you.  Join community groupsMaking friends online is no longer limited to the confines of social networking, and now you can connect with people who enjoy playing the same games as you!‹‹Get the latest Steam news on the goThis unofficial Steam iPhone app links to aggregated news from the official website, so you can always check when it’s time to update a game, if the Steam store is having a big sale, or if an essential patch has been released for your favorite title. For best results, begin the download process early in the morning so the game will be ready to play after a long day of school or work.   View community gaming events in your RSS feedSteam allows you to schedule gaming events and publish them to an RSS feed, so you can have your friends follow along in their Google Reader and make note of the next frag fest. View gaming achievementsThere’s more to those online multiplayer first-person shooters than a simple game of Capture the Flag. Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and the Half-Life series all have a strong replay value because of their unlockable achievements, and Steam keeps track of these itty bitty medals of honor for as long as you keep your account active.  Digitally purchase games and downloadable contentGone are the days of trekking to the brick and mortar video game store to pick up the latest copy of the next big first-person-shooter. With Steam, you can purchase your game directly from its publisher and the game code stays tied to your username, as long as you can remember your login password. You can also re-download any and every game you’ve ever played when you switch computers, so you never have to worry about keeping track of hard copies and key codes written down on loose pieces of paper. And, if you purchase a game for a friend, it’s also eternally tied to their Steam account. Download demos and watch trailersJust like Apple.com is the definite source for high definition movie trailers, so is Steam the go-to for previews and teasers of upcoming game titles. Stay in the know by watching a promotional video or download the demo and play it with your friends.  Add games to your library that aren't sold on SteamEven if you’re knee-deep in a game that isn’t offered on Steam, you can still share that you’re playing that non-Steam game with your friends list. Simply link the client to the game's app and launch the game from inside Steam to have it show up as your status. Search game serversSometimes, it gets a little boring playing with the same group of friends all the time. So, you can use Steam's dedicated server search to find other minions to dominate. Think of it as also getting some target practice for future gaming sessions with your pals. Host chat rooms for text or voice chatIf Chatroulette isn’t doing it for ya, then host a voice chat through Steam and get all of your friends ramped up about weekly game night.  Set up a Steam server‹‹Create your own self sponsored servers and host gaming events for you and all of your friends. But be forewarned: this can be a heck of a bandwidth sucker.   Check your gameplay statsKeep in touch with your inner gamer by checking up on your statistics, how often you play and every Pyro achievement you’ve received in Team Fortress 2. Then, share stats and compare between your teammates.   Play games in "offline" modeSteam allows you to play games in "offline" mode, so you don't have to deal with crowds. All you get is some good, unadulterated play time in.Read PDF and web versions of a game manualIf you end up purchasing most of your games as digital downloads, Steam offers download links to web and PDF versions of game manuals.  This way, you’ll never have an excuse for not knowing which key engages your weapon.   Play Steams Mods and create your own using developer toolsMods and Devs tools allow you to basically create a likeness of your least favorite person in the world, port it over to  popular game like Left 4 Dead, and then repeatedly pulverize the character. Get syndicated news on your favorite gamesThis feature is being specifically heralded in the current UI beta release of Steam for PC users. Game lists enable you to syndicate news about your favorite game titles not just from Steam, but from around the Internet. Each game has a dedicated news channel of its own that you can even view while you’re in game. Watch HuluSteam overlays act a lot like Mac OS X’s Dashboard widgets. In the PC version, you can shift-tab to bring them up while you’re in the middle of a game. With the Hulu overlay, you can watch a few minutes of It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia as you wait to respawn back into Team Fortress 2. Listen to PandoraGame soundtracks and the blast of gunshots aren’t usually on your iTunes playlist, so why should you be held susceptible to them during a rousing game with your friends? Use the Pandora overlay with Steam and crank up some of that Hootie and the Blowfish, instead.    

  • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

    Towering list of troubled banks. The FDIC's watchlist of potentially problematic banks grew by more than a third to 416 in Q2, the highest level in fifteen years and equivalent to around 5% of the country's banks. The deposit insurance fund, which protects more than $4.5T, fell to $10.4B from $13B in the previous quarter (though that news should perhaps be less troubling to investors than some headlines suggested). Bank loan loss provisions rose to $66.9B from $60.8B, while the U.S. banking industry posted a net loss of $3.7B after a profit of $7.6B in Q1. FDIC's Sheila Bair acknowledged the heavy costs of rising bad loans and falling asset values, but noted "banking industry performance is, as always, a lagging indicator." (Read the FDIC's press release) Fed may trim planned MBS purchase. The Federal Reserve may not need to buy back the full $1.25T in mortgage-backed securities the bank is authorized to purchase by the end of the year. Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said the bank will evaluate “whether we need or want the additional stimulus” from buying the full amount, while St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said "it might not be necessary." However, even if the Fed chooses to stop short of the full $1.25T of purchases, Bullard said total spending would still be close to that target. (Read Lacker's speech) GDP shrinks less than expected. GDP fell an annualized 1% in the second quarter, in-line with an estimate released last month but better than the 1.5% contraction economists expected. Business inventories fell a record $159.2B, worse than the $141.B estimated earlier. However, analysts believe the fall in inventories has likely reached its bottom and, excluding inventories, GDP rose 0.4%, its first gain in a year. Personal consumption was down 1%, better than the -1.2% prior estimate and consensus of -1.3%. (Read the BEA's GDP report) Sweden goes negative. Swedish Riksbank became the first central bank in the world to introduce negative interest rates on bank deposits. Riksbank is hoping the move will encourage banks to lend more. The move will be closely watched by other central banks, and Bank of England's Mervyn King has already hinted he may follow Sweden's lead to avoid a liquidity-trap in the U.K. Benmosche helps AIG rally. Shares of AIG (AIG) continued to rally yesterday, gaining nearly 27% after new CEO Robert Benmosche said he's been in contact with former chief Hank Greenberg, hoping to draw on his advice about problems at the bailed-out insurer. Benmosche also reiterated his intent to take a slower approach to asset sales, giving the market a chance to recover first because "if we sell too soon, everyone loses." Separately, a recently obtained draft of a Treasury document called the government's investment in AIG 'highly speculative,' a phrase later omitted from a final version of the document. Google News faces antitrust probe. Italian antitrust regulators have opened an investigation into Google News (GOOG), concerned the service may be an abuse of the company's dominant position on the internet. The investigation marks the first time Google News has faced a complaint on competition rather than copyright grounds. China iPhone in Q4. China Unicom (CHU) said Apple's (AAPL) iPhone will go on sale in China in Q4, and both the original iPhone and a 3-G model will be available. Apple will face competition for Chinese marketshare from Research in Motion's (RIMM) Blackberry and smartphones powered by Google's (GOOG) Android software. Dell doesn't disappoint. Dell (DELL) posted better-than-expected Q2 results yesterday (see details below) after cutting costs by contracting out more production. Dell, which is trying to save $4B annually, managed to raise gross margins to 18.7% by farming out as much as 40% of the company's manufacturing. The company said it's seeing "seasonal demand improvements" in both its consumer and government businesses. U.S. jobless claims dip down. Initial Jobless Claims registered 570K, down 10K from a week ago (revised) but worse than the 565K consensus. Continuing claims fell 119K to 6.133M. Japan's joblessness rises. Japan's jobless rate rose to a record 5.7% in July, threatening to undermine the country's recovery efforts and a punishing blow to Prime Minister Taro Aso ahead of elections his ruling Liberal Democratic Party will likely lose. Consumer prices dropped a record 2.2% compared to the previous year. U.K. GDP contracts. U.K. GDP contracted 0.7% in the second quarter, slightly better than the previous estimate of 0.8%. The economy shrank 5.5% from a year ago, the most since records began in 1955. Earnings: Friday Before Open Tiffany (TIF): Q2 EPS of $0.46 beats by $0.13. Revenue of $612M (-16%) vs. $602M. Sees full-year EPS of $1.65-1.75 vs. $1.58 consensus. (PR) Earnings: Thursday After Close Aruba Networks (ARUN): FQ4 EPS of $0.03 beats by $0.01. Revenue of $53M (+11%) vs. $49M. (PR) Bebe Stores (BEBE): FQ4 EPS of $0.00 misses by $0.01. Revenue of $130M (-24%) vs. $129M. Sees Q1 EPS of -$0.05 to $0.00 vs. $0.04. (PR) Cost Plus (CPWM): Q2 EPS of -$0.90 misses by $0.06. Revenue of $183M (-13%) vs. $186M. Same-store sales down 10.9%. Sees Q3 revenue of $177M-186M vs. $190M. Sees Q3 same-store sales down 6-11%. (PR) Dell (DELL): Q2 EPS of $0.24 beats by $0.01. Revenue of $12.8B (-22%) vs. $12.6B. "We have been reducing complexity in our organization and significantly lowering operating costs," said CEO Michael Dell. If demand trends continue, expects 2H revenue stronger than 1H. "We are expanding our capabilities in enterprise technology and services and investing in our core business." (PR) J Crew Group (JCG): Q2 EPS of $0.29 beats by $0.14. Revenue of $358M (+6%) vs. $347M. Same-store sales down 5%. (PR) Novell (NOVL): FQ3 EPS of $0.07 in-line. Revenue of $216M (-12%) vs. $217M. (PR) Marvell Technology Group (MRVL): Q2 EPS of $0.18 beats by $0.04. Revenue of $641M (-24%) vs. $620M. (PR) MICROS Systems (MCRS): FQ4 EPS of $0.36 beats by $0.04. Revenue of $224M (-13%) vs. $215M. (PR) Solera Holdings (SLH): FQ4 EPS of $0.17 misses by $0.21. Revenue of $144M (-1%) vs. $139M. (PR) Today's MarketsAsia markets were mixed Friday, with moderate gains in Japan offset by hefty losses in Shanghai. Europe markets are up about 1%, and U.S. futures are trading near overnight lows.

  • Explore Carrie Bradshaw's MacBook Pro

    Filed under: Multimedia, Cult of Mac, Macbook ProLike many women (and men), I'm pretty excited about the upcoming Sex and the City movie. While the show was awesome for a myriad of reasons (the humor, the fashion, the catch-phrases), what often gets overlooked is that Carrie Bradshaw was a Mac girl. From 1998 through 2004, Carrie almost always started and ended each show typing on her Mac. It makes sense; can you really imagine someone that fashion and style conscious using anything else?In season one, she used the original Powerbook G3, if I'm not mistaken (it was either Kanga or the 3400c), but she moved up to a WallStreet and then a Pismo until the series concluded its run. The official website for the movie has added a new feature, "Carrie Bradshaw's MacBook Pro" that allows fans to "explore" the virtual desktop of our favorite fashionista, answer trivia questions in "chat" windows with other SATC characters, based on clues found on the desktop, to unlock bonus content/videos and for a chance to win a Sex and the City movie poster.I'll admit, the whole thing is a total novelty, but it's still kind of cool. I especially like that the default browser on the "desktop" is Camino. It's always fun to see Apple products integrated into other promotional campaigns.(New Line Cinema, like TUAW, is ultimately part of the same media conglomerate, Time Warner).Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • Why Dan Frommer and Scott Moritz Are Wrong on iPhone Sales

    Daniel Eran DilgerSilicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer says Apple's announcement of reaching its million mark goal in iPhone sales three weeks early is actually bad news for Apple and is convolutedly "below plan." He also says the announcement only props up the speculative conjecture by Scott Moritz of the Street that Apple's iPhones sales are somehow woefully below expectations. They're wrong, here's why.The PremiseFrommer wrote that Apple isn't selling iPhones as fast as planned and is set to only sell around half of its 2008 goal.His premise revolves around the idea that if Apple were selling iPhones at "a constant rate," a million phones in 74 days would be five million per year. However, because it sold over a quarter of those in the opening day and a half at the end of June, Frommer calculates that sales of the remainder in the 72 days since the first of July mean that Apple is only hitting a "3.6 million annual run rate."By the end of 2008, that would only result in 5.8 million units instead of the ten million goal Apple. [Silicon Alley Insider: Apple's iPhone: 1 Million Is Below Plan]Strike One: The Run Rate Myth.The most obvious problem with that idea is the fact that devices don't sell at a constant “run rate." Apple's iPhone sales took off at launch much faster than the original iPod due to the fact that a swell of early adopters were ready to buy it after being convinced over six months of anticipation. At the same time, many potential buyers held off on plans to buy the iPhone until they could read reviews and get a real sense of how it worked. Many were also locked into contracts with Verizon or Sprint. With only six months of advanced notice, it will still be a few more months before the majority of buyers who want an iPhone even get the chance to buy one without having to pay outrageous fees to cancel their existing mobile contract. iPhone sales are also now taking on the network effect of the iPod, as early adopters show their friends. All these factors have difficult to estimate impacts upon sales that make trying to figure a static “run rateâ€? a very simplistic and pointless exercise.However, there is another factor that simply blows the entire idea of a static “run rateâ€? out of the water. Last November, I predicted that sales of the Zune would bomb that winter because Microsoft had failed to critically examine Apple's historical sales patterns. Sure enough, the Zune was thrown against the rocks by Apple's riptide. Frommer's idea ignores that same reality by imagining that iPhone sales will schlep along at a linear pace. Had Frommer tried to calculate an "annual run rate" for the iPod based on a portion of third quarter sales at any point over the last half decade, he would never have been close to accurate. That’s because Apple’s iPod sales roughly triple every winter quarter.In 2002, it sold nearly as many iPods in its winter quarter as it did the first three quarters combined: 219,000In 2003, it actually sold more iPods in its winter quarter than in the first three combined: 733,000In 2004, it again sold more iPods in its winter quarter than in the first three: 4,580,000In 2005, it sold more than 4 million units every quarter, but still sold nearly three times as many in the winter: 14,480,000.In 2006, it sold more than 8 million units every quarter, and then sold over 21 million in the winter quarter.In 2007, it has maintained quarterly sales between 10.5 and 9.8 million per quarter.[Strike 3: Why Zune will Bomb this Winter]Strike Two: The Have it Both Ways Myth.One particularly annoying bit of analysts' talk about Apple's expectations is that they can't seem to decide if Apple's projections are bad because they are conservative lowballs, or if they are bad for being overly enthusiastic figures the company won't be able to reach. They often try to describe them as both, loading contempt on both sides of the scale. This makes them look very foolish. Do they think we have no memory, or are they just changing their stories back and forth in sheer desperation?Frommer tried to argue both sides at once in the same article. Recall that Apple only ever gave two iPhone sales goals: one million by the end of the first quarter of sales, and ten million by the end of 2008. In his piece, Frommer suggests Apple will only be able to sell 5.8 million iPhones by the end of 2008, based on that fallacious "run rate." That would be just over half of Apple's ten million goal. However, he then says that Apple's immediate short term goal was an unimpressive low ball, no doubt because Apple reached it three weeks early.Apple's stated goals must be a greatly frustrating logical conundrum for Frommer, because even at a “run rate" of one million in a quarter, Apple could only ever hope to sell six million iPhones by the end of 2008, another five quarters later. No wonder he's faced with trying to say that the immediate goal was too low and the longer term one is too high! Frommer needs to stop trying to pound round facts into square holes just so they can be stacked up like bricks the way he would like them to be.Strike Three: The Market Bearing Price Myth.While Frommer and Moritz are enamored with the idea that iPhone prices could only be cut if sales were in crisis, a variety of obvious market realities don't support that simpleton idea. Between now and the end of 2008, Apple has just two holiday seasons. If it wants to dramatically exploit its historical potential for selling roughly three times as many gadgets during the winter season, it makes sense to trade off unit pricing for volume sales, even if it could perhaps sell fewer at a higher price and make more short term profits doing so.Such a strategy isn't unique. Microsoft and Sony currently lose money on their new game consoles in desperate bids to establish their gaming and HD video playing platforms. Even so, this year they both cut prices again to accelerate volume demand. Nintendo purposely aimed low to capture volume sales using a more attractive price point. Given high demand for the Wii and extremely constrained availability, Nintendo "should" seemingly raise its console price and profiteer. It hasn't. While prices are clearly linked to demand, it is a common fallacy to think that the "right price" is always the highest the market will bear. Jobs' 99 cent pricing in the iTunes store is clearly not the top price consumers will pay for downloads. Music labels are fuming that other licensees such as Verizon will collect $2.50 or more for portions of a song sold as a ringtone. Jobs wants media prices low to induce volume sales and attract buyers to the legitimate market for music and movie downloads. Labels and studios want "market pricing," in part so they can jack up the price of popular music to exploit consumers, and in part so they can exploit artists by threatening to release their work at lower tiered prices and signal to the market that their careers are over.[Universal vs Apple in the iTunes Store Contracts][Nintendo Wii vs Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PS3]This All Happened Before.Dial back the clock twenty years, and you'll discover that Steve Jobs also fought with Apple CEO John Sculley over the price of the original Macintosh. The desire to use an expensive but pioneering amount of RAM and a futuristic new processor had inflated the price of the Mac, but the design team was still able to deliver it at a fairly attractive price point of $1,995. Scully determined that the Mac would still sell at $2495, delivering high profits to fund splashy advertising. Nothing on the market was really similar to the Mac apart from Apple's $9,995 Lisa. VisiOn for the PC similarly cost nearly $10,000 and did far less. Sculley thought that the market would bear anything Apple might charge. Andy Hertzfeld recalled on Folklore.org that in October 1983, "Steve Jobs strode into the software area one evening, looking angry. 'You're not going to like this,' he told us, 'but Sculley is insisting that we charge $2495 for the Mac instead of $1995, and use the extra money for a bigger marketing budget. He figures that the early adopters will buy it no matter what the price. He also wants more of a cushion to protect Apple II sales. But don't worry, I'm not going to let him get away with it!'"Jobs fought Sculley over the price increase, but Sculley prevailed. Sure enough, Macs did sell well out of the gate to early adopters at the higher price, but sales then began to stall. While Jobs couldn't cut the price for the original Mac to induce wider adoption in the mid 80s, he could choose to cut the price of the iPhone early and use interest in the iPod Touch to ramp users toward the iPhone. That price cut will dramatically boost sales this winter, just as iPod price cuts and feature refreshes do every year.Apple will earn less profit on individual hardware sales of the iPhone, and may even earn slightly less money overall this quarter than it might have selling the iPhone at $599. However, a $399 iPhone will dramatically boost the company's sustainable subscriber revenues and devastatingly cut into stationary rivals like Palm and the Windows Mobile licensees, giving them little opportunity retool and strike back with copycat products.  [Price Fight - Folklore.org][Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly]Strike Four: The Myth of Unlimited Availability.Another problem with idea that iPhone sales were in crisis--and that a price cut is a conspiracy to hide the truth--is that Apple sold out of iPhones in many of its retail stores throughout the first three weeks on sale.Carl Howe of Blackfriar's Communications tracked iPhone availability every day through July, and then animated the results in a movie that depicts just how constrained iPhone inventories in Apple's retail stores were. So not only did Apple meet its 94 day goal 20 days early, but it did so despite having no or few iPhones to sell in many of its stores during the first 21 days. Price isn't just related to demand, but also to supply.That also demonstrates the fallacy of Scott Moritz' assertion that Apple secretly planned to sell a million iPhones in a day and a half, and was sorely disappointed after failing to do so. How could Apple have planned on selling a million units in one day when it didn't even have a million units on the shelves of its stores during the first month? Remember, Moritz wasn't saying Apple had a delivery problem in getting enough units to stores as Nintendo is experiencing with its constrained supplies of the Wii. Instead, he tried to suggest that interest in the iPhone was far below Apple's estimates, and buyers were leaving it on the shelf like Windows Vista. The result, he claimed, was that "rivals were rejoicing."The only real rejoicing by rivals was that Moritz was volunteering to repeat the talking points handed to him by Verizon shill Roger Entner of IAG Research. Just hours before Apple announced it had sold a million units, Moritz tried to get some traction out of the idea that Apple had dropped the price in desperation to find another half million or so customers over the next three weeks. Apple isn't the typical tech company being run by visionless bean counters. It it were, it would have continued selling $600 iPhones at least through the end of September and then announced that it had sold its million. Apple had to push out new iPods in early September and fit the iPhone into the price range because next month it will be rolling out Leopard and a series of new software updates. Apple feeds the press in small, consistent, and regular feedings so reporters know what to write. If Apple were a big stupid company such as, say HP, it would parade out a mix of dozens of consumer and business products all together in one big event, and nobody would ever hear about any of it. HP did.[Why a million iPhones in 74 days is better than you think- Blackfriars][HP's marketing this week: fashionable but ineffective - Blackfriars][Unraveling Anti-Apple Panic: the iPhone Launch Success] [More on Scott Moritz and the Jim Cramer Misinformation Engine]Strike Five: It's Too Late to Deny the iPhone.The most comical part of Frommers’ analysis is that he’s trying to stuff a cat back into a bag and explain that there was never really any cat, long after everyone in the room heard the purr and pet the thing. Sorry, but the windows of opportunity to doubt the iPhone have long since closed.Real Windows Enthusiasts were aware of the need to deny the iPhone well before its release. They all chimed in with reasons why the iPhone wouldn't work, wouldn't offer what consumers want, and wouldn't sell well, all hoping that their non-stop misinformation campaigns would act as a self-fulfilling prophesy. They failed miserably.John Dvorak began his smear campaign immediately, appearing on CNBC to say that the iPhone was "trending against what people are really liking in phones nowadays, which are those little keypads.â€? He explained, “The BlackJack, the Samsung, the BlackBerry obviously pushes this kind of thing. The Palm, all of these. I guess some of these stocks went down on the Apple announcement, thinking that Apple could do no wrong. But I think Apple can do wrong, and I think this is it." Reader Jim Barrow sent in a link to a MarketWatch article from March, where Dvorak scribed a rambling diatribe entitled "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone." He offered no factual basis for worrying that the iPhone might not work out apart from the offhanded comment that "there is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive," words which echoed Dvorak's 1984 observation that "the Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."In April, Dvorak inflamed his 'pull the plug' rhetoric further in a TWiT podcast, where he reported to an audience of hundreds of thousands that the iPhone only delivered "40 minutes of talk time" and "the interface fouls up constantly.â€? Dvorak said that his inside information on the iPhone came from a "guy at Cingular who’s testing the product," adding, "he’s telling me confidentially and I shouldn’t be telling anybody."[John Dvorak: How Wrong Can One Guy Be?][Readers Write: Don't Write About John Dvorak Anymore]It'll Be the Death of You.Dvorak was joined by Rob Enderle, who called the iPhone “damnedâ€? and “not a very good phoneâ€? at every opportunity in the months before its launch, despite not really knowing anything about it, or even ever offering any rational criticism. Instead, Enderle appealed to fantasy fears of sexual assault, murder, and the violent death of children, all of which he suggested might somehow be related to the iPhone. Unaware that a password protected iPhone--or even a unauthorized unit without a configured service plan--can still be used to make emergency phone calls, Enderle wrote about, "an emergency situation where, say, a woman was being raped and couldn’t call for help because she didn’t remember her iPhone password." As I understand, with a Windows Mobile phone, even if the unit crashed while trying to place the call, at least the victim could use it like a brick as a blunt weapon. Enderle also feared that being unable to take out the battery would somehow making recharging it impossible, resulting an a scenario where one might end up on “the wrong side of townâ€? with a dead iPhone and be murdered because of it. Being on the wrong side of town was apparently the source of most murders prior to the arrival of the cell phone, which somehow made it safe to be in bad neighborhoods. For those who unfazed by the prospect of one's own own grizzly death in relation to the iPhone, Enderle appealed to his readers to please think of the children, particularly the potential for their brutal decapitation in an iPhone-related collision. "If you are buying this phone for a child or another member of your family," Enderle warned, "please emphasize that entering data on this phone while driving is dangerous." In contrast, operating the slide out keyboards of an HTC brick phone, or using both hands to thumb type on a BlackBerry may or may not save your children as they drive off an embankment, but at least you'll know they didn't die at the hands of Apple's "damned" iPhone.[SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1970s][Mac OS X vs Linux: Third Party Software and Security]Pure Concentrated Evil with a Multitouch Screen.Brian Lam of Gizmodo published an impassioned plea to boycott the iPhone shortly before its launch, due to the fact that Cingular had purchased the AT&T name, a brand Gizmodo's writer correlated with "monopoly tactics" in the late 70s. Gizmodo hasn't ever called for the boycotting of Verizon Wireless, which is well known for its anti-consumer tactics and which shares just as much blood with the old AT&T as its Baby Bell sibling Cingular, nor has it ever urged the boycott Microsoft products due to "monopoly tactics." Gizmodo also failed to boycott any other GSM phones that are tied to AT&T.Gizmodo's Lam and Enderle then teamed up with Slate's David Sessions in an article purporting to expose Apple's rated battery life for the iPhone. Sessions complained about the attention the iPhone was getting, and tried to dismiss Apple's announcement of a two fold increase in battery life over what was originally advertised. Unbelievably, Sessions and friends could only explain away the iPhone's jump in talk time by crediting its glass screen, saying that "glass transmits light more efficiently than plastic." That and some witchcraft.However, all of these individuals sharply reduced their squirt rate of false information after the iPhone's successful launch. In day and a half, Apple sold 270,000 iPhones compared to the 500,000 Palm OS Treos, 1.03 million RIM BlackBerrys, and 1.51 million Windows Mobile phones that were sold worldwide in the first 90 days of 2007.Apple has since nearly matched highflying RIM in sales during July, despite being limited to a single carrier and only offered for sale in the US. At this point, denying the iPhone is like saying the Earth is flat. It might be fun to do at a Renaissance Faire, but pretending to seriously doubt reality is not a good career move unless you work for the Street--or perhaps Rupert Murdoch, as Dvorak does.[Secret iPhone Details Lost in a Sea of Hype and Hate][iPhone Sales vs Zune, Palm, RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile]And Now: a Warning.Let it be known that anyone who publishes further misinformation or blows out similar inanity will risk being instantly awarded a Zoon on the spot. No complicated voting, no tedious application process. New Zoon nominees will be rubber stamped with the same effortless fast tracking as the ECMA declaring Microsoft technology as an international standard.In fact, I’m going to totally Zoon Dan Frommer and Scott Moritz right now, as well as John Dvorak, Rob Enderle, Brian Lam, David Sessions, and even Roger Entner. And John Sculley. And while I’m handing out an intellectual property construct that costs me nothing to distribute, I will also award Steve Jobs with a Zoon for the whole two month “just kiddingâ€? iPhone pricing situation, although I might take half of it back if I get a $100 coupon that doesn’t force me to spend $500 to actually use it. So let that be a warning to you out there on the Tubes thinking about how to linkbait an article at the expense of the progress of technology. I have a rapid firing gun full of Zoons and I’m not shy about cranking them out. Be sure to post any nominees.What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

  • Leaked file might be the first promo list of iPad books

    Filed under: iTS, Rumors, App Store, iPad The authors include Stephen King, Timothy Ferris, Malcolm Gladwell, Dubner & Leavitt, Kennedy, Agassi, Palin and Beck. There's bestselling fiction (The Lovely Bones), fact (A History Of Modern Britain) and autobiography (Wishful Drinking). The prices range from $14.99 (for Too Big To Fail) all the way down to the magic of free (Heat Wave). It's an eclectic list... and it might be the first round of books to be highlighted on the iBooks app in a few weeks. These titles are sampled from a list of ebooks that one of our tipsters turned up; we were then able to confirm that it was sourced from Apple, and it was found with other assets used to populate the iTunes store UI. It's not immediately clear whether the 112 titles listed are truly destined for sale on the upcoming iPad book store; we thought it might be a list of titles used for the device's launch demonstration, but there are books seen in the video that are not on this list, and vice versa. The books list includes the pricing information, the associated audiobook ID (a possibility for cross-media sales), the genre and a brief description of the title; the list appears to include the New York Times bestsellers as a separate category. The list of included publishers is as seen here; notably, the overzealous McGraw-Hill is still not present in the mix. We've asked Apple for comment on this list; what do you think? If this is the promotional list for the iBooks store launch with 100+ core titles -- including a lot of freebies -- is that going to spark your ebook spending appetite? Or would you rather use the presumptive Kindle app for the iPad and keep all your ebook eggs in one basket? Thanks to Ryan for the tip.TUAWLeaked file might be the first promo list of iPad books originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments App Store - Apple - McGraw-Hill - iTunes - Stephen King

  • 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 ĂŒbernerds, 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 

  • Swedish developers vie for Steve Jobs's attention

    Filed under: Apple Corporate, Software, Odds and ends, App Store The App Store approval process has been criticized, in part, for being too slow with approval decisions. Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller recently defended the process, saying, "You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works." That's all well and good, but most developers just want to get their app out. To that end, a group in Sweden is trying something unique. Dearstevejobs.com was built to win Steve's attention and ultimately approval for an app called SVT Play. SVT is a public television broadcaster, and SVT Play is their shows' home on the web (think Hulu). The iPhone app works as you'd imagine: With a few clicks, users can watch popular shows right on their iPhones. The promotional site is cute with live streaming video of eager developers, Facebook and Twitter integration plus an opportunity for Steve to use his Mac's built-in iSight to record a quick video of himself saying, "Ja!" Good luck, SVT! Thanks to everyone who sent this in! TUAWSwedish developers vie for Steve Jobs's attention originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Steve Jobs - Apple - IPhone - AppStore - Facebook

  • iTunes Power Tips Every Mac Owner Should Know

    Your quick-and-dirty guide to the world's most popular digital media app. It’s been more than eight years since Apple released the first version of iTunes. And although it’s expanded to incorporate many smart features since its January 2001 debut, it still looks remarkably similar to the way it did when it first appeared, running on OS 9. Back then it was just a jukebox, but over the years came enhancements like CD burning, the iPod, smart playlists, the iTunes Store, video support, and, most recently, the iPhone.Apple has gradually turned iTunes into a hub for managing and playing all the music and movies on your Mac and mobile devices, while continually adding support for new devices and services like the Apple TV, movie rentals, and much more. In 2003, Apple made the smart move of developing a Windows version of iTunes, opening up the iPod market and the iTunes Store to a much wider audience. iTunes remains one of Apple’s most important applications, and it’s capable of far more than just playing music.Whether it’s converting movies to watch on your iPod, building party playlists, getting album art online, buying music, renting movies, or backing up your iPhone, there’s an awful lot under the surface--and even more than ever with the release of iTunes 9 in September. Many of the tips and tricks we show you throughout this feature will save you time and even reveal a few things you didn’t know you could do. Master Your Music Take control of your music collection with these time-saving tips and tricks. Use smart playlists to manage music on the fly. Apple introduced smart playlists in iTunes 3, and it’s one of those features that, once you make using it a habit, you’ll never go back to plain-vanilla “dumb” playlists again.To create a smart playlist, go to File > Smart Playlists (or press Option-Command-N). You’re presented with a dialog in which you’ll set the “rules” for your smart playlist. When you’re first starting out, it’s best to keep it relatively simple. But once you have the hang of it, you can go bigger, creating much fancier smart playlists to capture only specific types of content, weed out other content types, and so on.Smart playlists take the manual drudgery out of creating dynamic playlists out of iTunes media libraries of any size--and they're not limited to music.If you specify that the playlist should show all songs with the Artist tag “Rolling Stones,” for example, all tracks in your library by the Stones will appear in the playlist. You can go a step farther and add all Rolling Stones tracks that have certain star ratings. By using the Match Any Rule option plus other options, you can have playlists that display different sets of tracks--a playlist, for example, where the genre is both blues and rock, as well as a bit rate greater than 128kbps. Be sure to check Live Updating, so iTunes will watch the library and automatically add any new files that meet the criteria you’ve specified. Use Genius to find new music--or rediscover music in your library. With more music than ever available in the iTunes Store, it can be time-consuming to find new artists and albums you might like. The Genius feature in iTunes sends information about your musical tastes to the iTunes Store and recommends new music based on similar artists and other people’s listening habits (if you haven’t already, you need to turn Genius on by choosing Store > Turn on Genius). If you select a track from your library and click the Genius button in the lower-right corner, iTunes will create a list of recommended albums and tracks that you can buy from the iTunes Store to complement your chosen track. Then you can preview and buy these songs directly from the sidebar. Since it knows what music is already in your library, Genius won’t recommend anything you already have.By activating the Genius feature you can have iTunes recommend new music based on your listening habits.With iTunes 9, Apple expanded Genius to include mixes using songs already in your iTunes library. To get the Genius Mixes feature to appear in iTunes 9, turn on Genius if you haven’t already, then update Genius by selecting Store > Update Genius. Now, to see what Genius Mixes iTunes recommends for you, click Genius Mixes in the left-hand pane (under Genius) in the iTunes window. You’ll see a grid view of album cover-style graphics. When you mouse over one, you’ll see a name for the mix and a brief explanation of what it’s based on--for example, “Rock/Pop Mix 6: based on: The White Stripes, Weezer, Red Hot Chili Peppers & others.” Mouse over each mix and click the Play button to hear the mix. We just wish that once the Genius Mixes are created you could do more with them than just sit and listen--once a mix starts playing, there’s no way to tell what song is coming next. And, most frustrating of all, there’s no way to capture the mix as a regular or smart playlist.Genius Mixes in iTunes 9 auto-create mixes using songs in your own library on the fly. Share iTunes libraries. You can duplicate an entire consolidated iTunes library by simply copying the Music folder on your Mac. But with libraries frequently running into many gigabytes in size, this is a slow, inefficient method. iTunes can share your library over a local network, so it can be accessed by anyone on your Ethernet or wireless network. Go to Preferences > Sharing and turn on sharing of the whole library or specific playlists. You can password-protect access and also tell iTunes to look for other shared libraries. Since the music is streamed--not copied--it takes up no disk space on the machines of those who tap into your library.iTunes can share selected playlists or your whole library, including videos, over a local network, with optional password protection. Automatically rip and import music CDs. Go to Preferences > General and select “When you Insert a CD, Import CD and Eject.” As long as this setting is active, whenever you insert an audio CD, it will capture track names, encode tracks based on your import settings, and your Mac will then eject the disc. Next click the Import Settings button and choose the quality setting you want iTunes to use to convert the CD tracks as it imports them (192kbps AAC or MP3 files will offer good sound quality at reasonable file sizes). When you insert an audio CD, iTunes will now retrieve all track names and artwork from the Internet and import the tracks using the quality settings you chose.To set the bit rate for the AAC encoder, in the Import Settings dialog, choose 192kbps, leave the other options on Auto, and click OK. Next Page: Video Tips: What You See is What You Get...  Video Tips: What You See is What You Get iTunes is just as good with video as it is with music. Manage playback settings for the best viewing experience. iTunes can display videos from your library in many ways. If you go to Preferences > Playback, you can tell it to play back videos in the small artwork viewer, in iTunes’ main window, in a separate window, or in full-screen mode. You can have anything from a small, unobtrusive window to a full theater presentation, blanking out additional displays. When it’s in a floating window, video can be resized during playback, and if you right-click, you can select any preset size. If you have more than one screen, move the floating window onto the display you want to use as the main screen. This is handy if you have a digital TV connected as a second screen.Use the Playback settings to control how video screens are arranged on your main monitors or multiple displays. Convert video for playback in iTunes & on your iPod. iTunes is picky about what video file formats it can read and play back. It doesn’t like AVIs, WMVs, or other non-Apple formats, for example. If you have a movie that’s already been digitized into one of these incompatible formats, the best course of action is to convert it with QuickTime Pro ($29.99, www.apple.com/quicktime) into an MP4 or M4V file using the File > Export > MP4 or Apple TV options. You will also need to install Perian (free, www.perian.org) to enable QuickTime to open the videos in the first place. You should be able to drag the converted movies into your iTunes library, holding down the O key if necessary to override automatic copying of the file. Then choose Advanced > Create iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV version, and iTunes will convert the video using the optimum quality and screen-size settings for the device that you plan to view the video on.Combining QuickTime Pro and Perian, you can convert video formats that iTunes doesn't favor (such as .AVI) to .M4V files, so you can watch them on your Mac, iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. Export your home movies to your iPod or iPhone. If you use iMovie ’08 or ’09, you can export a project directly into iTunes using the Share menu. Or, choose Media Browser and check the iPhone and iPod options. For each option you check, a different version will be compressed and exported.However, if you’re still using iMovie HD 6 or your movie has come from another source, such as straight from a camera, you can use a third-party compression tool like ffmpeg (homepage.mac.com/major4/) to convert most kinds of video files.If you have QuickTime Pro and Perian installed, you can opt to export directly for iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV within QuickTime Pro. Next Page: How to Digitize Your DVDs...  How to Digitize Your DVDs There are, of course, legal issues with ripping a commercial DVD. To keep the feds off your back, only use this how-to for digitizing a commercial DVD movie or other content that you have purchased. This, according to the MPAA, is legal. Making 100 copies of I Love You, Man and selling them for $5 each at your cousin’s garage sale--not so much.Before you start, download and install Handbrake (free, handbrake.fr) and VLC (free, www.videolan.org/vlc). 1. Get to the source.Load the DVD into your Mac and launch HandBrake. The software needs you to select your video source. Navigate to your DVD and select it. Now it should appear under Source.2. Get inside the source.HandBrake doesn’t make it easy to figure out which file on the DVD is the movie. In the Title section in the main interface, you get a pull-down menu showing the available files on the DVD. The files are identified by time length, so if you’re ripping a movie, you’ll probably want to select the file with the longest running time. (It can get tricky if you’re ripping a DVD with a commentary track or extra features that run the same length as the featured video.) If you’re selecting a TV show, look for running lengths of about 24 to 45 minutes. Under Destination, pick a place where you want to save the converted file.We identified our Lawrence of Arabia movie file by its length of 2 hours, 19 minutes, 16 seconds.3. Output settings.If you want to convert a video for iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, you can use one of HandBrake’s presets. Click the Toggle Presets button at the upper-right to open the Presets window (if it’s not already open). To create a video to play on your Mac, select QuickTime.We're taking a cross-country plane trip and plan to watch Lawrence on our iPhone to while away the hours in flight.4. Tweak video and audio settings.The bottom half of HandBrake’s main window lets you make adjustments to the video settings. For example, lowering the frame rate can help reduce the file size. The Quality settings also influence file size. If you select a target size, HandBrake will rip the video based on your setting; the smaller the setting, the lower the video quality. If you go with an average bit-rate setting, enter a setting between 400 and 600 (though you can go much higher or lower if you want). Constant quality reduces the quality based on a percentage. Click on the Picture Settings button to adjust the pixel size of the video.Selecting 2-pass encoding will improve video quality, but it takes longer to create the file.Click on Audio & Subtitles to tweak the audio settings. Make sure the language you want is selected in Track 1. You can also adjust the sample rate, bit rate, and activate subtitles.5. Hurry up and wait.When you have your settings settled, click on Start, and go do something else. It can take a while to rip a DVD. Fortunately, HandBrake is a Universal application, so Intel Mac folks will get much faster results. Lawrence of Arabia took 1 hour, 12 minutes to rip on a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.6. Drop into iTunesWhen HandBrake is done, navigate to where you saved the file. Drag and drop the file into iTunes, then connect your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, and sync. iTunes will transfer the file to your device. Or, if the movie was converted for your Mac, just double-click the file to watch it. Next Page: Sync and Swim...  Sync and Swim Better ways to manage music, video, and apps between your Mac and your iPod or iPhone. Manage apps on your iPhone or iPod touch. Hallelujah--iTunes 9 brought the option to more effectively manage which Home screen’s apps appear on your iPhone or iPod touch. Now when your device is connected and you select it in the sidebar, click the Applications tab to see a visual representation of where app icons will appear on the 10 possible Home screens. Although we’d love to see the option to name each screen rather than having them be numbered, the new management option is miles ahead of the old way of doing things.We created a screen just for the news apps we use most. Automatic syncing saves time and space. iPods and iTunes have always had the ability to automatically sync with each other--sharing exactly the same music files. For some this is great, as it maintains an exact copy of your music, photos, and contacts on your iPod or iPhone and on your Mac. Others, though, prefer more flexibility. With your iPod selected, go to its Summary tab and click Manually Manage Music and Videos. Then you can add or delete tracks from the iPod’s music library by hand. Just drag and drop tracks from your iTunes library to add them.In each subsequent tab you can choose to manually sync contacts, calendars, ringtones, videos, applications, and more. This is a great way of syncing some data without performing a full sync, which can be slow and puts you at risk of accidentally overwriting data.  Use Senuti to get music from an iPod to your Mac. Being able to copy songs from an iPod to a Mac is incredibly useful, and no, we’re not talking about pirating. If you keep distinct iTunes libraries on more than one Mac, your iPod can carry them back and forth. If your hard drive crashes, or you get a new Mac, restoring iTunes tracks via an iPod is a great trick to have at hand.FadingRed’s Senuti ($18, www.fadingred.com) lets you do exactly this--a simple operation you’d think iTunes would allow but doesn’t.You can drag not only songs and videos, but whole playlists, right to your iTunes library.Senuti supports the iPod touch and iPhone, as well as all the iPods. When you connect your device, its library and playlists appear at the top of the sidebar, while your iTunes library and playlists are listed on the bottom. Blue dots next to the tracks show you which songs on your iPod already exist in iTunes. Drag songs from your iPod’s library and drop them onto your iTunes library, or select songs and click the big green Transfer button. Senuti can copy the songs anywhere on your hard drive for you to back up, or it can even add the songs directly to iTunes--just choose iTunes Music Folder as the default download location in Senuti > Preferences.Senuti can also rebuild playlists from your iPod in iTunes. Smart playlists on your iPod become regular playlists in iTunes, however, preserving the list as it was on your iPod, without adding in more qualifying songs from your iTunes library, as a smart playlist would. To copy a playlist to iTunes, you drag the whole playlist name from the iPod area of the sidebar and drop it on top of the word iTunes in the bottom half of the sidebar. Pump up iTunes with AppleScripts We have long been fans of Doug’sAppleScripts for iTunes, a huge--and we do mean huge--catalog of AppleScripts created by Doug Adams and available to the iTunes-loving masses for free at dougscripts.com/itunes.You can laugh, but we would never have taken the time to manually compare the similarities of these playlists. Thanks, Doug's Scripts!One particularly useful script--though it’s very hard to pick just one--is the Compare Two Playlists script, which compares the contents of two playlists and creates a text file on your Desktop listing the tracks they have in common and the ones that are exclusive to each. This comes in handy if you make a lot of playlists for parties and want to easily tell them apart. Download the script, unzip it, and copy the scripts to the your usernameLibraryiTunesScripts folder, creating the Scripts folder if necessary, as directed in the instructions.  

  • 50 of the Most Burning Apple Questions Answered

    You asked for help with the thorniest problems facing Mac, iPhone, and iPad owners, and we answered, providing 50 foolproof solutions that’ll come in handy for anyone who uses Apple gear. For months now, we’ve been asking you to send us your most burning Apple questions, and to put it mildly, you came through. The queue in our inbox looked longer than the lines that curled around NYC’s 5th Avenue Apple Store for the launch of the very first iPhone. And when we dug into the meat and potatoes of your queries, we could only marvel at the insightful list of vexing technical issues and twinkle-in-your-eye trivia tidbits that you challenged us with. We distilled all those inquiries down to the 50 best, most burning questions about Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple itself. Then we put our crack team of experts on the job of coming up with this ultimate answers guide for all things Apple. Struggling with iTunes syncing? iPhone backups? RAID cards? iPad printing? Or just wondering exactly what Steve actually wears every day? The answers await, backstopped and bulletproofed by the pros at Mac|Life. 1. Duplicates in iPhoto I can’t find any options in iPhoto for removing all duplicate pictures in one fell swoop, and I don’t want to find and delete them all myself. Any ideas?iPhoto lacks iTunes’ duplicate-deleting prowess, but the shareware app Duplicate Annihilator can fill this gap and free your photo library of clutter. Despite the name, it identifies and tags duplicate pictures with a keyword so you can collect them in a Smart Folder to review and annihilate at your leisure. 2. Wi-Fi DropoutsSince upgrading to Snow Leopard, my Wi-Fi connection randomly drops for no reason. I still get Wi-Fi reliably on my iPhone, and my wife gets it on her PC. Any advice?This problem seems to be affecting many Snow Leopard users, so we’ve come up with a series of steps that should resolve it. Start with the first and work down until the problem goes away:» Update to Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later.» Restart your modem and router.» Upgrade your router’s firmware to the latest version, particularly if it’s a non-Apple router.» Turn AirPort off then on again from your menu bar.» In your Network System Preference, create a new location and delete all of the previous locations.One of our best tips for troubleshooting Wi-Fi connection problems is to create one brand-new location and then delete all of your previous locations.» Within your new location, drag AirPort to the top of the service order by clicking on the gear icon and choosing “Set Service Order.”» Delete all of your preferred networks. To see your preferred networks, click on AirPort in the left margin, then the Advanced button, then the AirPort tab.» Within that Advanced area, click on the TCP/IP tab and turn off IPv6. Then, go into the DNS tab and make sure that your DNS servers are correct. If in doubt, try Google’s DNS servers of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.» Run Keychain First Aid in Keychain Access, which is located in your Utilities folder.» Manually change your router’s wireless channel to another channel to avoid interference with other wireless networks. See which channels are being used by other networks with a utility like AirRadar ($20, koingosw.com).» Turn off 802.11n mode on your router, leaving it in 802.11b/g mode only.» Change the security settings on your router from WEP to WPA/WPA2.» Zap the PRAM on your Mac (get instructions here). 3. Multitouch Gestures Why can’t I do the one-finger double-tap to open documents in Snow Leopard?You can absolutely use the one-finger double-tap on your Multi-Touch trackpad to open documents in Snow Leopard. Simply go into your Trackpad System Preference and make sure that “Tap to Click” is checked. Your confusion may also stem from the fact that your Multi-Touch trackpad is capable of understanding many gestures. So if you’ve enabled “Dragging” or “Drag Lock,” you might be holding down your finger too long after the second tap. If you’ve enabled “Secondary Click,” you might be tapping in the wrong area of your trackpad. 4. Syncing iPhone Photos When I sync my iPhone, all 6,000 of my MacBook Pro’s photos move to the iPhone--very uncool! How do I remove them from the phone and ensure one-way photo transfers to the Mac in the future?That’s at least 5,950 pictures too many. Just connect your iPhone to your MacBook, then select the iPhone in the iTunes sidebar. Click the Photos tab, where you can choose to transfer none of your pictures or just specific iPhoto Albums, Faces, and Events to your iPhone. Re-sync to apply your new settings and get back a few gigabytes on your iPhone. 5. Uninstalling My Mac still runs processes from a program I deleted. How do I delete an application entirely and prevent this from happening?Unfortunately, there’s no standard way to remove a program from your Mac, but some developers simplify the job by including an uninstaller with their application. It may lurk in the main folder of the app you want to terminate--check those subfolders!--or it might be in the original installer itself. Launch the installer and proceed through it carefully. An uninstall feature may be obvious, or it could be hidden among options to customize the installation process. Be sure to quit the program you want to delete before uninstalling it.If an application didn’t come with an uninstaller, then the only way to delete it is to drag it to the Trash. However, this won’t remove preferences and other support files left behind on your Mac. You can use Spotlight to search for the deleted application’s name to find these strays, but if you have a lot of applications to remove, consider investing in a dedicated uninstaller like CleanApp, AppZapper, or AppCleaner. These programs automate the process of zapping unwanted programs--and their stuff--off your drive for good. 6. File Compression I’d like to save hard drive space with the Finder’s Compress command, but I’m not getting useful results. I recently compressed a 117.4MB file to just 116.7MB. Am I doing something wrong?Not all file types can be compressed with the same space-saving results. For example, compressing a ZIP archive won’t make a significantly smaller ZIP file. Some files, such as JPEGs, MP3s, and other media formats, have a certain level of compression already built in, but the sizes of text files and uncompressed image file formats can be dramatically reduced with ZIP compression. 7. Remote Control When I use my iPod touch as a remote for my Apple TV, it appears to only give me access to the Apple TV’s library as if it were an iPod. Is there a way to use the iPod touch like the traditional Apple remote? For example, can I use the touch to navigate to the YouTube app and search for videos, or to browse the movie rentals?Apple’s Remote app for the iPhone and iPod touch lets you control the playback of media that you’ve already purchased or downloaded. But for content that doesn’t live on your Apple TV, such as YouTube videos or the iTunes Store, you’ll still need your traditional Apple remote to navigate to those screens. However, the good news is that whenever an onscreen keyboard appears on your Apple TV, the Remote app will display its own keyboard, which lets you quickly type what you’re searching for. 8. Photo Migration Can Faces and Places data in iPhoto ‘09 be moved to another Mac, or do I have to click on all those faces and enter all those locations again?All your vacation sites and friendly faces will transfer to another Mac with OS X’s Migration Assistant, or you can drag your iPhoto library file from your Pictures folder to the same location on a new Mac. When you launch iPhoto on the new machine, you’ll be told the locations of pictures containing GPS data must be retrieved again, but custom locations you’ve entered yourself (for pictures taken with older cameras, say) will remain intact. 9. Gmail, Behave! I sync Gmail with OS X’s Mail, but when I delete a message from Mail, it remains in Gmail’s All Mail folder in the sidebar. What’s the right mailbox setting to move a message deleted in Mail to Gmail’s Trash?All your Gmail goes into the All Mail folder, whether or not it’s been recently deleted and no matter which Gmail folder label is attached to the message. Google’s default IMAP Mail settings (available here) are correct, but to send a Mail message directly to Gmail’s Trash, you’ll have to drag it to the [Gmail]/Trash folder in Mail’s sidebar. 10. Crash-Tastic It always happens at the worst possible time: I’ll be using my PowerBook G4 when the screen suddenly dims and shows a Rosetta Stone’s worth of languages telling me to restart the computer. Why does this keep happening, and how can I stop it?Ouch. What you’re describing is a kernel panic, a cute name for a not-so-cute problem. An operating system’s kernel acts as a bridge between applications and the computer’s hardware, and kernel panics are the last-ditch efforts of the operating system to recover from serious conflicts between them. The chief causes of kernel panics are faulty RAM and software incompatible with the operating system you’re running. Unfortunately, that range could include any number of bad things that may be happening on your poor PowerBook.Happily, even a kernel panic isn’t the end of the world, and we can offer some pointers to help you figure out what’s wrong. The first step is to look at your Mac’s history. Was there a time when it didn’t get kernel panics? Think back to any (and we mean any) new hardware or software you installed before the panics began. Update or uninstall them one item at a time to isolate the panics’ cause until you narrow down the trouble. Also note which hardware and software you’re using just before they strike--there may be a pattern. Whatever the issue, your Mac isn’t happy, so be sure to back up important files and verify your hard drive with Disk Utility regularly.Next page: Answers Guide continued >> 11. Get Zippy iPhone Backups How can I speed up iPhone backups so I’ll never have to cancel mid-backup again? They seem to take forever when a couple minutes really should do it.A. First off, keep your iOS software current. Not only will the latest updates squash bugs and add features, they can improve backup times. To update, sync your iPhone, select it in the iTunes sidebar, then go to the Summary tab.B. Pare down the number of applications on your iPhone. Application data like in-app purchases, saved games, and new documents are all backed up when you sync, and that can add up to a long wait while the backup progress bar creeps by. To start cleaning house, connect to iTunes, select the Apps tab, then delete your most infrequently used applications. You’ll lose the data saved in these apps, but you’ll gain speedier backups.Ask yourself this: Are those apps you never use on your iPhone really worth slowing down your backups?C. Sync often. If you sync at least once or twice a day, fewer applications will have new data to back up when you reconnect to iTunes. If you can’t bear to part with any of the applications on your Home Screen, making multiple faster backups will let you keep all your favorite apps at your fingertips.D. Keep Camera Roll clean. While the contents of your iPhone’s photo library aren’t backed up during a sync, the photos, movies, and screenshots in Camera Roll are. Transfer this media to iPhoto as soon as you begin a sync, and delete the files from Camera Roll when the transfer is complete to get this data copied onto your Mac while excluding it from being backed up in iTunes.More photos = slower backups.E. Connect to a USB port on your Mac instead of an external USB hub. Not all USB ports are created equal, and connecting to a powered, full-speed USB port that’s built into your Mac will ensure the fastest possible transfer speeds during backups. That means you can be off to your next port of call quickly, secure in the knowledge that your iPhone data is safe on your computer.F. Before you sync to iTunes, purge unnecessary SMS messages, old call histories, and non-essential files downloaded by apps that store data on your iPhone. For example, if you regularly copy files to your iDisk app or productivity apps like DocsToGo, make sure you’re only carrying what you need before a backup. Odds are these files live elsewhere on your Mac or iDisk, so there’s no need to back them up again.Junk your old, unused files, too. 12. Time Travel I’ve been running Time Machine for months in Mac OS 10.6.3, but I’ve never seen instructions about how to go back in time and retrieve information. Help!Mount your backup drive, then launch Time Machine from your Mac’s Applications folder. Your desktop will be replaced by a timeline and Finder windows showing your Mac’s contents as they were in the past. Just click a Finder window (or click within the timeline) to return to a specific date. You can also search within Finder windows for specific filenames, and more. When you find a missing file, select it and click Restore to return to the present with your document. 13. Rip Encrypted Movies I want an easy way to download a DVD to my computer so I can put it on my iPod or iPad. I used to use HandBrake, but that no longer works for encrypted DVDs.HandBrake (free, handbrake.fr) is still the quickest and most reliable tool for directly converting DVDs into video files that will play on your iPod or iPad. But you’ll also need to install VLC (free, videolan.org) if you want to decrypt commercial DVDs. Place both HandBrake and VLC into your Applications folder, and you’ll be able to convert encrypted DVDs with HandBrake once again. 14. Dump Discs I want to go disc-free on my MacBook, but a few of my games require a CD or DVD to play. Is there any way to make OS X think the disc is in the drive when it’s not?OS X’s Disk Utility can make a duplicate of your game’s CD or DVD and save it to your Mac as a file called a disk image. Once created, disk images can be double-clicked to open and mount on your desktop just like a conventional disc (you’ve already seen them in software installers downloaded from the internet). But there are two things to remember: copy-protection schemes on the disc may prevent duplication, and you should have plenty of room on your MacBook’s hard drive before you begin. A DVD’s disk image will take up several gigabytes.To get started, insert the disc you want to dupe, then launch Disk Utility from your Utilities folder. Select the disc in the sidebar, then click New Image in the Disk Utility toolbar, set the image format to DVD/CD Master in the resulting sheet, and save the disk image to your Mac. Next time you want to play your game, double-click the image file, then launch your game normally once the virtual game disc mounts. When you’re finished, you can drag the mounted disc to the Trash to eject like any conventional media, leaving the disk image on your Mac for the next time you want to get your game on. 15. Branching Out Which operating systems—and I mean all of them, not just Mac versions—will run on a PowerPC-based Mac?The PowerPC processor has become something of a museum piece since Apple abandoned it for Intel’s chips, but these Linux distributions can help you breathe new life into G5- and G4-powered Macs. Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, and Fedora all maintain builds that run on PowerPC hardware. When you’re looking to run a worthwhile alternate operating system on older Mac hardware, the penguin has you covered. 16. The $1M Question When will Adobe Flash content be viewable on iPhones and iPads?Never. In April, Steve Jobs had this to say about Flash on Apple’s website: “Flash was created during the PC era--for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces, and open web standards--all areas where Flash falls short.” 17. iLife Oops I accidentally deleted iMovie and the Apple Loops that came with GarageBand. Can I reload them from the original disc without losing all my other iLife files?Sure! First, launch the iLife ‘09 installer from your disc. At the bottom of the final screen is a Customize button that lets you install iLife components individually. Click it, then select the items you want to reinstall. The installer will insist on installing GarageBand along with your missing loops, but your missing applications and files will return to your Mac without affecting other iLife applications and documents, including GarageBand preferences. Just remember to run Software Update afterward to ensure that everything’s up to date. 18. iPad Printing What are the best ways to print from the iPad?Until Apple decides to build printing into iOS, there unfortunately isn’t a “best” way--although there are several apps in the App Store that might meet your needs.Canon’s Easy-PhotoPrint for iPhone runs on the iPad and will print photos to certain Canon printers. And the App Store is full of plenty of third-party apps that promise printing from your iPad, although in our experience the results are decidedly mixed. PrintBureau ($12.99) searches your network for shared printers. It reliably printed to one--but not another--of the printers on our home network without any intervention. There’s an optional free helper application you can run on a Mac to give PrintBureau access to your printers (a solution common to several iPad printing apps), but we’d hardly call that true iPad printing.We also had success with Air Sharing HD ($9.99), which is packed with features for moving and sharing files with your iPad. It didn’t work immediately with our Wi-Fi–enabled printer, but turning on Printer Sharing on our Mac made all our printers visible to the app. But--like using a companion app--that also requires that you have a Mac running. Ultimately, the least fiddly solution often ends up being emailing yourself a document and printing from a computer. Hopefully Apple has something better in the pipeline
 19. Tame Bookmarks I have tons of Safari bookmarks on my Mac. I don’t want them all on my iPhone, but Apple only allows syncing of all or none. Is there a fix?It’s almost elegant. Xmarks (xmarks.com) syncs bookmarks across multiple browsers, and its profiles let you decide which bookmarks appear on specific devices, including your iPhone. Best of all, you can view (and even search) them in a layout formatted for Mobile Safari. Just sign up for Xmarks, follow their instructions, and disable iPhone bookmark syncing in iTunes. Unfortunately, Xmarks doesn’t sync new bookmarks made on your iPhone back to your Mac. Like we said
almost elegant.Next page: Answers Guide continued >> 20. Stay Safe How can I tell if someone is using my Wi-Fi? Elementary, my dear Wi-Fi user! The mystery’s solution lies in MAC (Media Access Control) addresses, which are unique codes that identify network devices. Different routers have different ways of showing which addresses (and thus, devices) are accessing your network. If you have an AirPort router, launch AirPort Utility from your Utilities folder, double-click your router’s icon, then click the Advanced icon in the resulting window. Click Logging and Statistics, then Logs and Statistics. In the Wireless Clients section, you’ll see a graph showing the address of each device connecting to your network. The list will include your Mac, the AirPort router itself, and any other computers, iPhones, game consoles, or other devices using your Wi-Fi connection. Next, match the MAC addresses to your network devices. We’ll get you started: your computer’s address can be found in the Network section of System Profiler. When you’re finished, you’ll know the addresses of devices you want on your network, so you can tell when something with a foreign address is using your Wi-Fi. Then the game’s afoot! 21. Sim-plify I have a 1G iPhone that I want to use as a simple iPod touch, leaving aside the phone features entirely, but I don’t have the original SIM card. What are my options?Your options are slim. Unlike later models, the 1G iPhone requires a SIM card to operate as a basic iPod, even after AT&T service has been terminated or transferred to another phone. You can get a new SIM card from AT&T, but this will require signing up for a new phone service contract. Unfortunately, there’s no way around this limitation besides jailbreaking your iPhone with one of the methods floating around on the internet. 22. Merge Partitions Is there any way to un-partition a non-boot hard drive in OS 10.6 without wiping the data?You’re in luck. Since 10.5, OS X’s Disk Utility has been able to add and remove partitions from disks without affecting other data on the drive. However, Disk Utility won’t merge data from the deleted partition to another partition on the drive, so back up all your data--especially files on the partition you’ll be removing--before you begin.Once all your data’s securely backed up, launch Disk Utility from your Mac’s Utilities folder, then select the drive in the sidebar (be sure to choose the icon noting the drive’s capacity, not just its name). Click the Partition button, then in the shaded box showing the drive’s Volume Scheme, select the partition you want to remove. Click the minus button below the Volume Scheme chart to remove the partition (don’t worry, it won’t disappear right away). Click and drag other partitions to resize them and fill the empty space that will be left behind by the deleted partition. You can also click the plus button to add a new partition that can also be resized. Click Apply to commit your changes and begin Operation: Un-partition. 23. No Scratching I just bought a new 21.5” iMac (late 2009 model) and found a serious design flaw: the CD slot has sharp aluminum edges that can inflict permanent, irreversible scratches to valuable CDs. Help!These days, Apple’s really into razor-sharp edges. For example, the unibody MacBooks also famously have sharp edges where users rest their wrists, and those very same sharp edges have made it onto the slot on the side of the iMac where CDs are loaded. Luckily, those sharp edges are just on the outside, not on the internal drive itself. So if you carefully and slowly slide in your CD without touching the outside edges, you may avoid scratching your CD. But here’s a more practical solution: Put electrical tape around the edges of the slot. This isn’t the most beautiful thing to look at, but it’s almost guaranteed to keep scratches at bay. Another option would be to purchase an external CD drive to either use as your primary CD drive or to make copies of your valuable CDs. That way, if a CD gets scratched, at least it’s not the original. 24. Font Fixes When using Mail, any font that I use in my outgoing email always shows up on recipient PCs as Courier--that archaic, typewriter style font. How can I get my Mac fonts to translate onto PCs?In order for a font to be successfully seen on somebody’s computer, they need to already have that particular font installed on their machine. If your recipient doesn’t have the same exact font as you, their computer will substitute your font with a font that is already installed on their system. This applies to emails, websites, Word documents, almost anything. If maintaining the integrity of fonts is important to you, you’ll need to create PDF files or images and attach them to your outgoing email message. 25. App-Update Errors When I try to update apps from my iPhone, I get a “Cannot Connect to iTunes Store” error, yet I have no problem downloading new apps, and no problem updating them in iTunes on my computer. What gives?Assuming the problem is reoccurring and not a freaky networking accident, it sounds like your iPhone (or the problematic apps themselves) may be confused about the status of your iTunes account. This could be because a different user has logged into your iPhone, because you have multiple usernames or passwords tied to your iTunes account, or even because your billing information was recently changed on another device. The easiest place to start is by navigating to Settings, tapping Store, and confirming that yours is the currently active account on your iPhone. If it is, try signing out and signing back in with your most recent iTunes account information, then verify that your address and billing information are correct. If the problem persists, the apps may the culprit. Try updating them in iTunes, then deleting them from your iPhone. Reconnect your iPhone to your computer to sync the updated apps back to the phone. If, down the road, these same applications refuse to update from your iPhone again, deleting them from your Mac and re-downloading them from the iTunes Store may fix this. 26. Make Windows Behave I have various finder windows set to appear in different views depending on their content. But certain windows stubbornly--and randomly--refuse to remember my preferences. Is it a bug, or am I missing a setting?Setting a specific folder to open in a particular view (such as columns, icons, or lists) can make browsing files in the Finder a lot easier. Just open and set each folder to your preferred view, then select View > Show View Options in the menu bar and check the topmost button in the resulting window to force the Finder window to always open in that view. Unfortunately, the Finder has ignored these helpful preferences since the earliest days of OS X. Your stubborn folders aren’t the first!Your folders may be confused by corrupt .DS_Store files, the invisible files created by the Finder to store icon sizes, window backgrounds, and more. System utility apps like TinkerTool and Cocktail can reveal or delete these files for you, or you can use the Terminal to delete them yourself if your UNIX Fu is strong.If those options don’t do the trick, your Mac may think you don’t have permission to reset the view options of certain folders. Some, like the Applications folder, don’t technically “belong” to any user except the system itself, and only the system (also known as the root user) can make permanent changes to these directories. What looks like random stubbornness may be OS X remembering that it’s in charge of these folders, not you.To show your Mac who’s boss, log in as the root user, then set uncooperative folders to the view setting you prefer. Just be careful, and remember to log back into your normal user account and disable root access when the job is done. Moving or deleting the wrong files while logged in as root can have serious consequences for your Mac. Apple explains how to log in as root here. 27. Just Open! I used to double-click any photo, and it would open in Photoshop. When I installed 10.6, this feature disappeared. Now I have to drop the photos onto the Photoshop icon.Snow Leopard ignores “creator codes,” which changed its file-opening behavior--it’s all about file extensions now. Right-click a JPG, choose Get Info, and under Open With, choose Photoshop, and click Change All. Do this again for PNG, PSD, TIF, and any other photo file types you want Photoshop to get first dibs on. 28. iPads Kill Wi-Fi When enough of us use iPads on the office Wi-Fi, it can crash the Wi-Fi itself! I’ve heard this is a common problem--is there a fix?You’ve heard right, and it’ll take an OS and/or firmware update from Apple to vanquish this annoying glitch. Until then, know that the issue is caused because an iPad can stop renewing its DHCP lease when it goes to sleep, so if you set your iPad to never sleep (Settings > General > Auto-Lock > Never), you’re good. That’s hardly ideal, and at Mac|Life HQ, we set up an iPad-only Wi-Fi network, which creates a smaller pool of DHCP leases and keeps the main Wi-Fi network safe. Interestingly, iPads are also prone to other Wi-Fi glitches, like sketchy signal strength, frequent drops, and slow speeds. Bizarrely, one of the first things you should do is increase the brightness upward and turn off the Auto Brightness option (Settings > Brightness & Wallpaper). We can only guess that something’s screwy with iPad power management
 29. Mac Pros Are Hot I just wanted to bring to your attention a widespread, frustrating issue that exists with all 2009 Mac Pros. Whenever you play any audio, the CPU rapidly heats up (core temperatures as high as 90ÂșC, CPU heat sink 60ÂșC). This problem exists in 10.5 and 10.6, but does not happen in Windows running in Boot Camp, so it appears to be a Mac OS X bug. And after spending $8,000 on Apple’s top machine, I feel like I have been had.Yes, this seems to be a prevalent problem with the 2009 Mac Pros. Playing any type of audio heats up the Pro precariously close to--but not quite at--dangerous heat levels. If your Mac actually reached dangerous heat levels, it would shut itself down. This increased heat also causes decreased performance. Unfortunately, we don’t have any solutions for you, but we’re publishing your letter in the hopes that greater publicity on this issue will help get a speedy resolution from Apple.Next page: Answers Guide continued >> 30. What a Mess!One of my co-workers spilled juice on his older MacBook Pro, and now the keys are sticky (when pressed down, they don’t pop up right away). What’s the best way to clean up?Sounds nasty! Although this particular spill has long dried, we’ll start these cleanup instructions from the moment right after spillage to make them more widely useful. So: Immediately power down, disconnect the power cord from the MacBook, and remove the battery (if it’s removable). After doing as much as you can with paper or cloth towels, turn the machine over with the lid partly open to allow the liquid to drain, making sure that the laptop doesn’t close all the way. Give it about 72 hours to completely air dry and then take apart the machine to thoroughly clean the innards. The website iFixIt.com has great step-by-step guides to taking the keys off and getting your MacBook back to normal. When dabbing at disassembled keys and other parts, we recommend a bit of gauze lightly dampened with rubbing alcohol. 31. Airport Fizzles I stream my music from iTunes to an AirPort router, but it frequently cuts out. What can I do?First, make sure your iTunes and AirPort software are up to date. If the problem persists, move your router away from possible sources of interference. Wi-Fi is convenient, but it’s not an exact science. Signals can be impeded by microwaves, wireless phones, thick masonry, and more. If dropouts continue, try changing the channel on which your AirPort broadcasts in the Wireless tab of the AirPort section of AirPort Utility. 32. Family Planning My wife and I have our own iPhones and iTunes accounts, and we’re adding an iPad to the happy family. Can we sync both iPhones and the iPad (plus our Apple TV) to a single iTunes account, and share our apps on all devices without affecting our current library and future purchases?Bad news first: there’s no way to merge multiple iTunes accounts into one, so your family will have to keep juggling separate accounts and purchases from your iPhones, Apple TV, and bouncing baby iPad. The good news is that apps, like DRM-protected movies and TV shows, can be used on up to five authorized computers and the iDevices that sync to them. Just open iTunes, select Apps in the sidebar, then drag iPhone applications you want to share from iTunes to a networked computer or removable hard drive. Select File > Add to Library in iTunes on the second authorized computer, then choose the exported apps to load them into that computer’s library. These apps won’t retain saved data from the original computer, but otherwise they’ll be fully operational and can be updated normally. Apple TV purchases, however, will still be tethered to one of your computers. But even these files can be synced and transferred to multiple computers and iDevices.Here’s the better news: Home Sharing, introduced in iTunes 9, simplifies this process by allowing users to drag and drop media to shared computers within iTunes. Activate Home Sharing by selecting Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing. Repeat this step on all your computers, entering one iTunes account username and password on each. Then you can drag media from shared libraries in iTunes’ sidebar into a computer’s local library at will. Future purchases can be shared automatically by clicking the Settings button at the bottom of Home Sharing iTunes library, then selecting which media you’d like to share. Once you set up all computers on your network, syncing works automatically, zapping new media off to each machine. 33. Double the Addresses Why do I have duplicate Contact entries on my iPhone but not on my Mac?Odds are your iPhone has gained multiple groups of contacts after syncing them both wirelessly through MobileMe and through iTunes when you connected your iPhone to your Mac. Whatever the cause, check your iPhone Contact app’s Groups. If you see a group named From My Mac in addition to groups you’ve created in OS X’s Address Book, it’s a sign your iPhone thinks you have two distinct sets of friends.It's hard enough to find the contact you're looking for--who needs duplicate entries?To fix the problem, first back up your Mac’s contact data. Connect your iPhone to iTunes, uncheck Sync Address Book Contacts in the Info tab, then re-sync. If that doesn’t remove the extra contacts, turn off MobileMe contact syncing in Settings on your iPhone, choosing to delete the existing contacts on your phone. Next, turn Contact syncing back on, and choose to merge MobileMe’s data onto your iPhone if asked. Now you should have just one set of contacts shared between your iPhone and Mac. You’ll have half the friends, but half the hassles. 34. Conquer Syncing What's the most elegant way to sync iTunes libraries between work and home computers?We use SuperSync, a program that lets you sync your iTunes library among multiple computers on local networks or over the Internet. SuperSync’s busy interface can seem a little daunting, but in just a few quick steps, you can start copying music from your crib to your cubicle and back again. Casual Fridays will never be the same.A. Buy the SoftwareSuperSync looks and feels kinda like iTunes, but is a whole different beast.To get started, you’ll need a copy of SuperSync running on both your home and work computers. Two licenses will set you back $24, or you can snag ten for $34 and give one to your manager for Boss’s Day.B. Make the ConnectionsWhen you first launch SuperSync on your home Mac, it loads and displays your iTunes library in an iTunes-alike window organized by genre, artist, and playlist. While SuperSync may look a little like iTunes (and it can even play some unprotected audio files), it’s really a conduit and control panel for syncing, not a jukebox. Your DRM-protected files must still be played by an authorized copy of iTunes, although SuperSync will transfer them just fine.SuperSync can even keep metadata updated across different Macs.If your music collection doesn’t live in your Mac’s Home folder, you can point SuperSync to a library stored on a remote or network drive and share from there. To set up sharing, just check the obvious boxes and enter a password in the application’s Network preferences. While you’re there, you can fine-tune what you sync and how. For instance, you can keep specific media types--all videos, for instance--out of your shared library and pick which metadata changes will be synced back to your home machine. Whether you simply want to copy files or meticulously update their play counts, ratings, and more across your computers, SuperSync has your back.C. Start the SyncTo sync your library, install and launch SuperSync on your work machine, then turn on sharing and connect to your home computer. This is easiest (and fastest) on a local network, but you can sync your music over the internet by manually forwarding ports on your home router, or by using a UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) router and letting SuperSync do the work for you.When the syncing starts, SuperSync's interface gets pretty busy.Once you get both computers talking to each other, you can synchronize your entire library in one go, sync individual files, or transfer albums, artists, and whole genres at once. You can even sync your playlists--both their music files and the lists themselves in the iTunes sidebar. Naturally, files added to iTunes on your work computer can be synced back to your home Mac. Just finish your download in iTunes, then phone home with SuperSync. New files will be noted automatically and can be transferred with a click. 35. Hot Flash My MacBook Pro has been acting strangely. It will become sluggish, get hot, and the fans will come on at full speed. Activity Monitor shows that a process called “PTMD” is taking over 60 percent of my CPU. How do I prevent PTMD from taking over my Mac?This may not be a common question, but it certainly is a burning one! According to Apple’s Mac OS X Reference Library, PTMD stands for “platform thermal monitor daemon,” and it communicates any OS notifications effecting thermal conditions to your hardware. This daemon is supposed to automatically quit itself when it’s done communicating, but apparently your Mac erroneously thinks that its thermal conditions are continuously changing, so it’s trying to let your hardware continuously know this incorrect information.This seems to be a new problem that has cropped up for some users in Mac OS 10.6.3, so hopefully it will be fixed in a future update to the operating system. In the meantime, you can manually quit out of PTMD in Activity Monitor (launch it from your Utilities folder) whenever it starts acting up. You may also try resetting your Mac’s System Management Controller, which is responsible for thermal management (follow the directions here). 36. It's a RAIDI have Apple’s RAID card in my Mac Pro, and it always pops up this error message: “Write cache disabled due to insufficient battery charge.” But...what is a RAID card, and what should I do?Apple's Mac Pro RAID Card improves RAID performance and reliability.RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks, and it’s a tech that lets you combine multiple hard drives so they appear as one. RAIDs can either be mirrored or striped--in the first, each drive is an exact copy (or mirror) of the other drives, so if one fails, you’ll still have all of your data intact on another (known as redundancy). If you configure your drives as a striped RAID, the storage space of all of your drives is added together into one larger drive. This will give you increased performance and increased storage space, but no redundancy unless you’ve configured your RAID with parity handling (which uses a portion of each drive to hold identical copies of data from one of the other drives). RAIDs can be controlled by software like Apple’s Disk Utility or the excellent SoftRAID ($129, softraid.com), or they can be controlled by hardware like your RAID card. The main advantages of a hardware-controlled RAID are increased performance and reliability. With the error message you’re receiving, it sounds like the battery on your RAID card has died, so take it into Apple to get replaced. 37. iPad 2 What upgrades will we see in the next version of the iPad? (We emailed a trio of well-known tech experts for their predictions.)  Daniel LyonsNewsweek"I'd guess the following:» Front-facing camera for videoconferencing» Multitasking (duh, already announced)» Higher-resolution screen» No Flash» Gorgeous ads that will change your life» Unicorn tears"    Christopher NullYahoo! News, Technology"Dual cameras--a front-facing camera for videoconferencing will be huge for opening up a whole new market for the iPad."        Dylan TweneyWired"One of the things most obviously missing from the current iPad is a webcam. This would instantly transform the iPad into a videophone, and its size—just slightly bigger than the human face—would be perfect for face-to-face video chats. It’s also likely that the next iPad will have more memory and a faster processor. If we’re lucky, it might have an HDMI port too, so you can hook it up to a TV to show off photos, videos, and apps. One thing it definitely won’t have, though, is support for Adobe Flash. That door is closed, probably forever."   38. Mac Van Winkle When I wake my MacBook Pro from sleep, it doesn’t connect to my Wi-Fi. Sometimes it even forgets the Wi-Fi password. How the heck do I get it to remember?First, check out the extensive troubleshooting steps that we gave in Question #2 to see if any of those ideas solve your problem. Beyond that, your problem may be caused by one of the following issues:» Two Wi-Fi networks with the same SSID (wireless network name). For example, do you connect to one wireless router that’s named “Linksys” at work and then another router that’s named “Linksys” at home? If so, your Mac may be trying to apply the password from one router to the other router. Rename one of the wireless networks.» Keychain problems. Launch Keychain Access (in Utilities) and delete any AirPort Network password entries for the wireless networks that are giving you problems.» Preferred Networks problem. Go into your Network System Preference, click on AirPort, then the Advanced button, then the AirPort tab. Delete any unused networks, and drag your current network to the top of the list.» Corrupt preference file. Trash the file located at Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and restart your Mac.» Security incompatibilities. Try changing the type of wireless security on your router (for example, WPA instead of WEP).» Wireless interference. Turn on interference robustness on your router or change the wireless channel.» Your system may need a general maintenance. Run Disk Warrior on your machine, repair permissions with Disk Utility, empty the caches, and run the UNIX maintenance scripts with Cocktail. 39. Style Manual What exactly does Steve wear on a daily basis?We asked our team of fashion experts, and they said, “The same dang thing no matter what.” So we made them stalk the streets of Cupertino and watch hours of keynote footage to bring you the scoop on Steve’s sartorial secrets. That’ll show ’em.Next page: Answers Guide continued >> 40. Sad Mac My iMac flat-out freezes when I try to wake it from sleep. I ran DiskTools Pro, which verified and repaired my hard drive, but it still hangs after waking from sleep.This is often a symptom of a failing graphics card or a failing logic board inside your Mac, in which case you would need to take your Mac into an Apple Authorized Service Provider for repair. However, before assuming the worst, you can perform a series of basic troubleshooting steps to rule out other variables that may be causing this symptom.» External devices: When your Mac fails to wake from sleep, try unplugging any external hard drives or peripherals to see if doing so makes your Mac suddenly wake from sleep. If so, those external devices may be to blame. » RAM: You may also have bad RAM inside your machine. You can try to pinpoint bad RAM by either removing one of your RAM chips and see if the problem continues, or by running the Apple Hardware Test to see if it can identify any bad RAM. To run the Apple Hardware Test, take a look at the DVDs that came with your Mac; one of them will say that the Apple Hardware Test is on it. Insert that DVD and restart your Mac while holding down the D key on your keyboard. » Reset your Mac’s System Management Controller (get instructions here).Next, try to rule out the software problems: » Trash the following files and then restart your Mac: Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist and Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist » Reboot your Mac in single-user mode and run fsck (file system check)--get instructions here. » Back up your Mac, then erase and install Mac OS X.If all of these steps fail, it's time, sadly, to bring your Mac into an Apple Authorized Service Provider. 41. Stop Time When Time Machine is running, my Mac virtually comes to a stop. What is happening, and what should I do?Any time an application such as Time Machine is actively reading or writing to a hard drive, you may notice a tiny bit of a speed loss if you’re also trying to access your hard drive as well because the read/write heads take time to physically move to different locations on the hard drive platter.However, the key phrase is “a tiny bit of a speed loss,” meaning that the speed loss should be negligible to most computer users. Time Machine is designed to be fast and extremely lightweight, so if your computer is actually coming to a standstill, then something else is going on. The best way to troubleshoot this is by eliminating variables. First, make sure that you do not have any virus software scanning your backup drive. This is a known factor that could slow down your Time Machine backups to a crawl and that may affect your computer’s overall speed as well.Then, eliminate the possibility that your backup drive has a hardware problem by swapping it out with a different backup drive. If you don’t have another drive handy, a utility such as Drive Genius ($99, prosofteng.com) or Disk Warrior ($99, alsoft.com) can help you sniff out failing hard drives. Your backup drive must also be partitioned properly, as explained at tinyurl.com/3zne68.Next, use a different backup program like ChronoSync to see if the slowdowns continue. If they do, ChronoSync will let you see which file is actively being backed up while the problem is happening. It could indicate a problem with that particular file or with your internal hard drive.Other than that, you can try some general tips to speed up your Mac overall: Upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard; purchase faster internal and external drives (7200 RPM or SSD); use a faster connection interface (eSATA or FireWire 800); add more RAM to your Mac; and turn off hard disk sleep in the Energy Saver System Preference (this last one has a huge impact if your hard drive is powered via USB only and has no separate AC power). 42. Display Despair Why has Apple used so many display interfaces recently, and is the current Mini DisplayPort standard the best tech for the job?Mini DisplayPort meets VGA with this adapter.Apple’s flirtation with different video interfaces makes it seem like a puppet of the International Dongle Cartel, but it’s really all about doing more with ever-shrinking video ports. That includes today’s Mini DisplayPort, which can carry video and audio and connects to VGA, DVI, or HDMI displays at resolutions up to 2560x1600. We’re not sure if that makes it the best technology, but if it lets us carry just one small adapter that works on both MacBooks and iMacs, we’re happy. 43. Feelin' Social Does Apple have a Twitter account or Facebook page of any sort whatsoever?YouTube has your favorite Apple commercials.Steve may be cool with answering emails, but the company isn’t too keen on Twitter. There is no official Apple Twitter account. Facebook is a bit more complicated. While Apple hasn’t set up an official company page, it has created an App Store Facebook page: facebook.com/AppStore. Our preferred destination, though, is the Apple YouTube channel, which lets us check out all of our favorite Apple commercials: youtube.com/apple. 44. Feelin' Blu When will Apple include USB 3.0 and Blu-ray in Macs? What’s taking so long?USB 3.0 gear is already trickling onto the market, so it’s probably just a matter of time before the first computers sporting the blazing new standard roll out of Cupertino. Unfortunately, Blu-ray is another story. Apple’s interest in promoting its HD iTunes movie downloads and Steve’s declaration that bringing Blu-ray to the Mac is “a bag of hurt” don’t bode well for Blu’s chances on the Mac. 45. Photo Downloads There seems to be no way to download my photos from my iPhone directly to my Mac without using iPhoto. Even then, I have to drill down through some crazy iPhoto directories in the Finder just to copy the photos somewhere else. Can’t I just pull these photos off my iPhone and put them wherever I want?Any photos that are in iPhoto can be easily and quickly copied somewhere else on your Mac simply by dragging and dropping them out of iPhoto. For even more control over the size, format, and name of your photos, use the File > Export command in iPhoto. You don’t need to--and you really shouldn’t--be drilling down into any iPhoto directories on your Mac.Now, onto your next question of bypassing iPhoto altogether. In Mac OS 10.6, the Image Capture application gives you a significant amount of control over what happens when you connect your iPhone. If you have multiple cameras or iPhones, Image Capture even lets you set different preferences for each individual camera.Image Capture is the place to go to directly download photos from your cameras or to set what happens whenever you connect your cameras.You could have your iPhone launch Image Capture itself, which lets you manually download your photos into the directories of your choice and then delete those photos from the iPhone. You could have your iPhone launch Preview, which lets you import iPhone photos from the File menu. You could have your iPhone run an AppleScript.But perhaps best of all, your iPhone could launch AutoImporter, a hidden application that automatically imports photos to the directory of your choice, without you intervening at all. It’s located at Macintosh HD/System/Library/Image Capture/Support/Application/AutoImporter, and you can set this application’s preferences by choosing AutoImporter > Preferences. 46. Tame MobileMe I have four Apple devices: two MacBooks, an iPhone, and an iPad. It would be wonderful if MobileMe would do its job and sync all of my calendar and contact information, but I continually have glitches. One of the devices will often stop syncing, and then I have to wipe out data and start all over again. Is there any way to alleviate these problems?We’ve heard from an Apple support representative that syncing problems with MobileMe are very common because the MobileMe servers are not yet robust enough to handle more than 1,000 synchronizations before everything needs to be reset from scratch again. While 1,000 synchronizations might sound like a lot, consider that a sync takes place every single time you make a change to a contact or a calendar. The good news, however, is that this same representative told us that Apple is aware of its MobileMe syncing shortcomings and is continuously working to increase the competency of its servers.In the meantime, if you want to stick with MobileMe syncing, your best bet for solving the glitches you’re experiencing would be to follow our extensive guide from our November 2009 issue (or find it online here--scroll down to #37) on how to reset your MobileMe syncing from scratch on all of your devices.Alternatively, you may want to ditch MobileMe altogether and explore alternatives such as the web-based calendaring and contact solutions from Google, which can synchronize to your iPhone and iPad using Google Sync (google.com/mobile/sync). On your Mac, you can synchronize to Google using Spanning Sync ($25 for one year, spanningsync.com) or use the built-in (but more limited) syncing tools within Snow Leopard’s Address Book and iCal.If you have an extra Mac that you can use as a server machine, you can even take syncing into your own hands by using a product like Apple’s Snow Leopard Server ($499, apple.com) or the outstanding Kerio Connect ($540, kerio.com). 47. The Other Team I’m running Windows 7 on my Mac using Boot Camp. How do I maintain my computer so both the Mac and Windows platforms stay healthy? And how can I make a clone of my computer that captures both?For tips on how to keep your Windows 7 partition healthy, you’ll want to turn to our sister magazine Maximum PC (this is a good place to start), where you’ll find the experts on all things PC-related. Although conventional wisdom about PCs dictates that you’ll want to defragment your Windows hard drive regularly and immediately install antivirus software on your Windows partition, those are two things that Mac users are not required to do.Your Mac will continue to maintain its health as long as all those hundreds of thousands of Windows viruses can’t reach your Mac files from within the Windows 7 environment. And they won’t be able to since Boot Camp only allows you to read your Mac partition but not write to it.If you gotta run Windows 7, Boot Camp can get it done on your Mac.However, if you install a program like MacDrive 8 ($49, mediafour.com), you’ll have full read and write access to your Mac partition...and so will all those Windows viruses. So be doubly sure to have antivirus software on your PC side.To clone your entire computer, you’ll need to make two clones: one for your Mac partition and one for your Windows partition. For the Mac partition, use a tool like SuperDuper ($28, shirt-pocket.com) or Carbon Copy Cloner (donations requested, bombich.com). For your Windows partition, we recommend Winclone (donations requested, twocanoes.com). 48. Log Me OutMy iMac has separate user accounts for my wife and me, plus a Guest Account for when we have parties and people are drawn to the 27-inch screen to play. Can the Mac automatically return to the login screen after some period of inactivity? I don’t want guests to have access to our accounts, and I don’t want my wife to have to remember to log out when she’s finished. I just want it to go back to the login screen to force the next person to log in as a user or guest.No problem--head to System Preferences > Security and check the box for Log Out After X Minutes of Activity, setting X to be any number you like. While you’re there, make sure Disable Automatic Login is checked too. That way, the login screen always appears when you start up, instead of a default administrator account.The auto-logout option is in System Preferences > Security.It’s also easy to lock down the Guest Account with System Preferences > Parental Controls, which lets you select which applications will be available. By default any files in a Guest Account’s Home folder are deleted when they log out, but you could park an alias in the Dock to a shared folder on your hard drive, called, say, “Save Stuff Here.” While you’re sprucing up the Dock, add some big, pretty icons for party-startin’ apps like Photo Booth and Camera Bag.Set up a Guest Account with System Preferences > Accounts, then manage--or spy on--it with Parental Controls. 49. Silence How do I disable voice control on my iPhone 3GS? I never use it, and it's annoying when it's in my pocket and accidentally activates.Good news: You can shut off Voice Control dialing. Bad news: Voice Control everything else stays on. To shut down Voice Control dialing, you need to turn on the Passcode Lock option for your iPhone. To do this and turn off Voice Control Dialing, navigate to Settings > General > Passcode Lock. Once you turn on Passcode Lock, you can turn off Voice Dial. 50. Behind the Black Shirt What does it take to become a Genius Bar technician?There are fewer great occupations in life than working at the Genius Bar. Think about it: When someone asks you what you do for a living, you get to tell them that you’re a Genius. On top of that, you get to manhandle Apple computers all day long, dealing with situations like figuring out what in the heck is going on with a MacBook that a carpenter impaled with his drill (remember to tell him it’s no longer under warranty). Check out our handy chart to see what it takes to become a Genius Bar employee. A. Get Smart! First things first: You gotta have plenty of knowledge about past and present Apple products. Geniuses must know hardware ranging across entire generations of Apple products, as well as software offered for all of the latest operating systems. After all, you never know what to expect when you work at the bar. For all you know, a customer might bring in their Performa 460 and ask you to transfer their hard drive data to one of those newfangled Mac Pros. B. Be Happy--and Discreet Employees at the Apple Store must be like employees at Disneyland--you’re in the Happiest Place on Earth, so smile
and keep your lips zipped tight about any advance knowledge of upcoming Apple products you might have. Or else. C. Magic Hands Before you can get your hands on customers’ gear, you need to get trained. A lot. Applying to be a Genius begins with a battery of tech questions--and we’re not talking the ins and outs of GarageBand, either. Applicants are expected to have deep knowledge about how to diagnose and fix serious hardware and software issues--after all, most of their job involves coping with damaged or seriously broken gear. Survive that hurdle, and it’s off to Cupertino for four weeks of sessions that include acquiring three Apple certifications (OS, Desktop, and Portable) and practice time with fake customers who are really good at being a pain in your backside. After that, the apprenticeship continues in a real live Apple Store for as much as another month before you become true blue Genius material. D. Black is Boss The shirt color is an essential part of working in the Apple store. The shirt depicts what department you work in and makes it so that customers know who exactly the Geniuses are who can help them with their waterlogged iPhone. E. Load-Bearing Can you diagnose a problem and solve it within 15 minutes? The Geniuses at the Bar can. Appointments taken at the back of the store are only supposed to take as long as it takes to get you halfway through your favorite sitcom, which ensures that even stores with heavy traffic volumes have a chance to help everyone out.

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