This week Mac and iOS developers gathered in San Francisco for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. On Monday Steve Jobs and other Apple executives talked about the upcoming releases of Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and the new iCloud Service.
Lion will be released in July and sold exclusively as a download in the Mac App Store for $29.99. The new OS will change how the desktop, spaces and applications work with a new Mission Control feature that will make moving between tasks more like iOS. There will also be autosaving, versioning and resuming functions as well as an updated Mail application.
One of the most useful features of Apple Mail, often overlooked by many, is that you can reply with only a small selection of quoted text, rather than quoting the entire email. Before hitting the Reply button, simply select some text in the message. Then only that selected text will be quoted in the reply. This comes in handy when you are replying to a single question in a longer email.
Pages is great for creating and formatting documents. But when you just want to write — and really concentrate on the writing — many writers turn to a simpler plain text editor. iA Writer is that app for the iPad. You can sync with Dropbox, and there is even a special keyboard with buttons more suited for writing.
“Now that I’ve dropped it in the snow, I’m thinking it was a bad time to switch to the white iPhone.”
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Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference next week. In an unusual move, they have pre-announced the topics for Steve Jobs’ keynote presentation. As expected, he will show Lion, the next version of Mac OS X due out later this year. In addition, a new version of the iPhone and iPad operating system will be discussed. Also, the new iCloud service will be unveiled. The keynote will take place on Monday, June 6 at 10 a.m. in San Francisco.
In a rapid series of events this week, Apple began battling it out against a recent attack of trojan malware. Apple released a security update for Snow Leopard on Tuesday that identified and eradicated the Mac Defender malware. But the next day a new variant of the trojan appeared that looked different enough from the original that it was not detected. Apple responded on Thursday with an update to the security definitions that catches that version as well.
Another classic board game comes to iOS with The Game of Life For iPad and The Game of Life Classic Edition for iPhone. Both build upon the old game, and if anything are more fun because you don’t have to set up and clean up or manage all of that paper game money.
In the Finder you can use File, New Finder Window or Command+N to open a new window. But what should appear in that new window? You can set that in Finder, Preferences. It can be your home folder, your Documents folder, your hard drive, or any folder you choose. So if you have a projects folder or something you access all the time, you may want to use that instead for the quickest access.
“I hear that Apple is getting into cloud services.”
“Good. Maybe I can finally upgrade my harp with some new apps.”
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the first Apple Store, all of the stores received an upgrade this week. The upgrade consisted of new table displays with iPads next to each product displaying prices and details. Customers can also use the iPads to call over a store employee.
When Lodsys threatened to sue iOS app developers, claiming that they owned the patent on in-app purchases, it sent a chill through the app development community. Apple came to their defense this week firing back at Lodsys saying that they had licensed the patent from them, and that Apple’s license covers developers. Developers reacted enthusiastically to Apple’s support.
There are a lot of musical instrument apps for the iPad, but what about the most fun musical instrument of all? Ukulele HD has just about every virtual instrument mode you can imagine. You can press buttons to play chords or finger the chords yourself in several ways. You can play individual notes too.
If you look in Safari’s preferences, under Bookmarks, you can check off “Include Bonjour” in one of the three bookmarks sections.For instance, you can turn it on for Collections so it shows up on the left when you Show All Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu. Many wifi printers and other devices will broadcast the location of their local admin web page using Bonjour. You can see these appear here and get quick access to their admin pages with information and controls.
“Don’t worry dear, you can come up with another superhero name.”
