Steve Jobs, the driving force behind Apple at its start and also for the last decade, resigned as CEO yesterday. In a letter to Apple employees he said he could no longer meet his duties and expectations as CEO, but would like to remain as Chairman of the Board. He recommended COO Tim Cook as his successor, and the Apple board agreed.
Jobs has left the post of CEO several times before on temporary medical leave, each time putting Cook in charge. He has been running the day-to-day at Apple since January. Apple’s site already features Cook’s bio at http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/tim-cook.html.
Recently while on vacation I was looking for a simple way to take pictures on my iPhone and upload them to one of the major photo sharing services, without much hassle. The official Flickr app does that. It makes it simple to upload pictures from my camera roll directly from my iPhone to Flickr.
One quick way to find a window on a crowded screen is to use the Dock. You can click and hold on a running application in the dock and the menu that appears will include a list of all window titles. So, for instance, if you have several Finder windows open you can click and holder the Finder icon in the Dock to see a list of Finder windows. Select one and it comes to the front.
1984: You can now run programs in windows instead of taking up the whole screen.
2011: New feature! You can now run programs that fill the whole screen!
Strategy games for the iPad are all over the place in terms of quality. Great Little War Game HD is one of the good ones, with many challenging levels and good graphics. It is also easy to learn with tips at the start of each level instead of a massive tutorial to digest. It is a basic turn-based strategy game much like the old Advance Wars that defined this genre.
You can make your Mac remind you of the time. Go into System Preferences, then Date & Time. Click on the Clock tab. Then select the Announce the time option. You can have your Mac tell you the time on the hour, half hour or quarter hour. You can even select the voice. This comes in handy if you have a particularly busy day and need to keep track of time.
Lion was updated to version 10.7.1 through Software Update this week. Most of the changes involved fixing bugs and improving reliability. The update was specific to several versions of Mac hardware and whether you had Lion Server installed as well.
You can get 10.7.1 by simply running Software Update from the Apple menu on any Mac with Lion. Details about the update are at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4764.
In line during the tough economic times of the past.
In line during the tough economic times of today.
Apple had two interesting announcements this week. The first was the addition of a low-end iMac strictly for the education market. In the past Apple has kept around older iMac models and continued to sell them to students and educators. But this time around they have produced a new version of the 21.5-inch iMac for that purpose. The model comes with an i3 processor, 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive for $999. You can buy this low-end iMac from Apple, but only if you qualify for educational pricing. Note that for only $200 more you get the standard low-end iMac which comes with an i5 processor, twice the memory and twice the disk space.
The discontinued white MacBook is also available for educational purposed, but cannot be purchased by individuals from Apple. Reportedly it can only be ordered by educational institutions.
Apple released an add-on to Lion this week in the free Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. It allows a Lion user to use an external hard drive, such as a USB flash drive, as a recovery disk. A hard drive with Lion installed will include such a disk as a separate hidden partition on that same drive. But this method will work even if that internal drive is damaged. It will allow you to boot from the external drive and use tools to repair your disk, restore from Time Machine or even log on to the Mac App Store and re-download and install Lion.
The financial turmoil this week has produced an interesting bit of data. While Apple’s stock price went down with the rest of the market, it didn’t suffer as much as others. Several times on Tuesday, and by the end of the day on Wednesday, by the numbers it was the world’s most valuable company. At the end of Wednesday it was valued at $337.2 billion, ahead of Exxon Mobil which was in the lead previously.
“I gave up chewing on his shoes. He seems to get much more excited when I chew on those new Apple Thunderbolt cables.”
Here’s a simple but fun and beautiful game that can be enjoyed by just about anyone. In Osmos you are a small cell trying to get bigger. You do that by simply eating things small than you, and avoiding things larger than you. But each level has a puzzle aspect to it that keeps it interesting.
Select an editable piece of text in Safari, Mail, TextEdit or almost anything else. Then Control+click or right+click and look for Transformations. You can make the text all upper case, all lower case, or capitalize each word in the selection. Very useful for when you accidentally type some text in all upper case and want to correct it without typing it all again.
