MacMost: Archives

Apple announced its latest quarterly financials this week, and Wall Street was enthusiastic about the report. Shares jumped in after-hours trading and continued to rise the next day. The company earned more than $35 billion with a profit of nearly $7 billion, slightly up from last year.
The most impressive piece of news was the 31 million iPhones sold. The launch of the new MacBook Air models drove more than 3.8 million Mac sales. In addition, Apple’s guidance for next quarter was higher than analyst estimates.
While the business side of Apple was happy with this news, the developer side had a rough week when Apple closed its developer portal after it was compromised by an intruder. Though it looks like no real damage was done, Apple has kept the area closed for an extended period while it improved security at the site.

“My mother doesn’t understand new technology. She just sent me a text message telling me to check my email. In the email, she asked me to call her.”

If you use and iPhone and travel outside of your home territory, you may run into huge phone bills when you return unless you sign up for the right services. Be sure to log on to your carrier's system before you leave and sign up for voice, text and data plans to fit your needs. Or, be sure to set your phone so it never tries to use mobile networks so you won't be charged. (Apologies for the audio quality on this one!)

When you travel with Apple devices there are some small accessories that you can bring along to help you connect and use your devices. See which simple and cheap accessories I bring along when traveling.

You can set iPhoto and Aperture to use an external app to edit photos instead of merely using the adjustment and filter editing in the apps. You can set iPhoto to use Pixelmator, but Photoshop works more smoothly when trying to save back into your library.

“I heard that To-Do apps help increase your productivity. So I have installed 238 of them.”

Apple released a new version of Logic, its pro audio app, this week. The re-designed app Logic Pro X includes new features such as automatic drum tracks, bass amp designer, drum kit designer and pitch editing. There is also now a companion app for controlling Logic using an iPad connected wirelessly to the Mac.
The map apps race continued this week with Google updating their iOS app to 2.0. The new version gives iPad users full resolution, and improvement over the old version which only allowed iPhone emulation mode. In addition, there’s a long list of new features like indoor maps, live traffic reports, and Google+ integration.
Rumors are flying that a new iPhone is on the way. Some believe it will be called the iPhone 5S and will feature dual LED flash, a fingerprint sensor, faster processor and larger battery. Others claim that there will be two models: a standard one and a lower-cost option. If the reports of production starting this month are true, then we could see the new phone in September or October.

When you type a link in a word processor, it often converts that link to clickable text. But if you are writing a document for print, or just don't want the link to be clickable, then you need to change it to normal text. You can do this on a case-by-case basis by simply using Undo. Or, you can change preferences to stop these links from appearing in the first place. Learn how to do this in TextEdit, Pages and Microsoft Word.

The free GeekTool app allows you to put images, file content and shell script output right on your Desktop background. You can use this to customize your desktop in a variety of ways, such as showing current weather, news or financial information. Or, you can use it to monitor your Mac or systems on the Internet.

Game Center is a universal high score system provided by Apple that many app developers can use in their games. Once you extend your Apple ID to use Game Center, you can compete in high score leaderboards, challenge friends and register in-game achievements.

A U.S. District judge ruled that Apple did indeed conspire with publishers to fix e-book prices when it launched iBooks. Apple continues to deny the charges and reportedly plans to appeal. All five publishers also charged in the case have already reached out-of-court settlements with the government.
Apple had pushed a pricing model where publishers must sell books at the same price on all services, rather than letting retailers, such as Amazon, set prices at any amount.
In another court, Apple and Amazon made peace over a lawsuit concerning the “app store” name. Held up for years, the case started when Apple accused Amazon of infringing on its App Store trademark by using a similar name for selling apps for Kindle devices. Amazon had countersued. Both companies have agreed to drop the cases.

After iTunes Radio
“Unemployed Radio DJ. Will banter for food.”

An often-requested feature of Mac Mail is the ability to tag messages with keywords. While full tagging ability isn't included in Mail, you can add colored flags to messages to help you organize them. You can even rename the flags to make them more useful. But for true tagging ability, you would need a third-party extension like MailTags.

When you download an app from the iOS or Mac App Stores, you have the ability to then go back to the store and leave a review. Here is how to get to the review form. There are also some general guidelines you may want to follow when writing a review. Make sure you review the app, not the App Store system. If the app isn't the one you wanted, don't review the app based on your misconception. Also take price into consideration and don't use the review process as a way to get support from the developer.

Creating useful spreadsheets is usually a matter of combining several techniques. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a table to hold a small database of information. Then, you'll create a second table to count the number of records that have certain criteria. Finally, you'll use the second table to create a pie chart. Each element updates automatically as new records are added or changed.

Every year Apple makes special offers during the summer for the college-bound. Students already get a discount on purchases, but for the next few months, they can also get a $50 or $100 iTunes gift card with their purchase. This makes it easy for a student to buy a Mac or iPad and load it up with iWork apps for free.
It looks more and more likely that Apple’s next new product will be a wearable wrist device. Trademark applications have been filed by Apple in several countries for the name “iWatch.”

The Year 2113
“So? What’s inside the capsule from 2013?”
“Looks like a 3GB hard drive and some networking equipment.”

The latest version of Pixelmator introduces a handy new way to select part of an image. You can paint with a brush to add to or remove from a selection and cut out a person or object. You can then apply filters to that selection, or invert the selection to apply filters everywhere else.

Ruby is a popular programming language that comes installed on your Mac and can be accessed in the Terminal. You can use the Rub command line interpreter to run simple programs in a single line. You can also write more complex programs in a text file and run them. This gives you similar functionality to using BASIC on the Apple II.

Every computer uses DNS servers to translate domain names to numerical addresses that can be used to find web pages. You can use the default DNS provided by your ISP, or you can choose your own. Sometimes you will see speed and quality improvements by using a public DNS instead of the default. Learn how to set your DNS in System Preferences and learn a potential pitfall of doing so.