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Author Archive for Bob Rudis

ExpanDrive 2.0 Enhances GUI, Speed, and Connectivity Options

Written on April 24, 2009 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Building on the success of their initial offering, ExpanDrive has released version 2.0 of their Mac client for accessing a wide array of online storage systems.
ExpanDrive is built on MacFUSE, an open-source project that provides the base functionality and SDK for connecting to remote and alternative filesystems. The ExpanDrive developer-alchemists have mixed in a bit [...]

EFF Volleys to Make Jailbreaking Free of “Jail-Time”

Written on February 18, 2009 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

As most savvy technology readers know, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits “circumventing” digital rights management (DRM) and “other technical protection measures” used to protect copyrighted works. While this ban was meant to deter copyright infringement, many corporations have misused the law to chill competition, free speech, and fair use. Every three years, the U.S. [...]

Scripting iWork: Numbers and Yahoo! Finance

Written on February 09, 2009 by Bob Rudis and 8 people have commented

When iWork ‘08 was released it felt like a half-implemented suite for a whole host of reasons: lack of interoperability between the applications, very basic functionality, performance issues — especially with Numbers ‘08 — and lack of scripting. Apple’s new iWork ‘09 suite has addressed many of those issues, and the one feature that truly [...]

Mitigating a Missing Mobile Safari Security Feature

Written on January 02, 2009 by Bob Rudis and 4 people have commented

In the event you were too distracted by the festivities associated with the ringing in of the new year and missed the news: the internets are broken (again).
To be more specific, what has actually happened is a portion of the trust system that is the foundation of secure transactions on public IP networks has been [...]

VirtualBox 2.1 Adds Support for Hardware Virtualization On OS X

Written on December 23, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Christmas has come early for users of VirtualBox, a free and open source virtualization solution from Sun Microsystems. Version 2.1 is a huge upgrade to the product as it includes VT-x and AMD-V hardware virtualization support on OS X and full VMDK/VHD support — including snapshots — putting it on par (at least from a [...]

DIY Magi: Great (and Free!) Gift Pack for New Mac Owners

Written on December 22, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

With both shopping days and budgets running short, you may be wondering what to get your friends and family members who have either just purchased or will be receiving a new Mac.
With 1-8GB USB flash drives having a street price of ~$6-$15.00 and a plethora of highly useful free software for the Mac ripe for [...]

2008 Best App Ever Awards: Your Vote Counts!

Written on December 22, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

iPhone news and review site 148apps.com has announced the launch of Best App Ever, a new site which allows you to nominate your favorite apps and games in any one of thirty categories.

Most Innovative App – The most innovative app on the iPhone OS platform
Most Useful App – The app you just can’t live without
Best [...]

Tales From the Command Line: textutil

Written on December 18, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 8 people have commented

I really enjoy the overall experience reading books and articles on my Sony PRS-500 eBook reader, but dislike having to fire up Boot Camp or VMware into Windows in order to purchase books from the Sony eBook Store, especially when there are thousands of books in the public domain and tons of blog and article [...]

iPhone & OS X DIY: Take Control Of Your Holiday Displays With Griswold

Written on December 16, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 3 people have commented

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could control your Christmas lights from your iPhone?” That simple question, posed in passing eleven days ago by a good friend, set off a flurry of activity which has become Griswold.app (for the iPhone/iPod touch) and Griswold Server (for OS X Leopard, Windows and Linux/BSD). Both are being released [...]

Optimize iPhone Photo Retrieval With Apple’s Image Capture Utility

Written on December 11, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

Despite the iPhone having a less-than-stellar camera, I wind up taking more pictures with it than any other device we own. This becomes a painful reality every time I connect my phone up to my MacBook Pro since I am reminded that I have enabled the launching of iPhoto whenever there are new pictures to [...]

No Excuses: Tracking Your Fitness On OS X

Written on December 11, 2008 by Foofy and 11 people have commented

It should be obvious that the blogging elves at The Apple Blog care about the fitness of our readers, especially at this dessert-laden time of year. If you managed to stuff yourself as much as I did at Thanksgiving you may be in need of some extra assistance ensuring that the only thing that gets [...]

Final Vinyl Makes Sound Routing and Recording Surprisingly Simple

Written on November 28, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Being a big fan of my Griffin radioSHARK I was disappointed when the developers dismissed all plans on cranking out an HD Radio version of the device. Given the extensive source tagging in the digital stream, they could have integrated both recording to iTunes and purchasing from iTunes with little effort.
Still wanting to experience HD [...]

Shields Up! Twelve Security Holes Fixed by New iPhone/iPod touch Firmware

Written on November 24, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

Weldon did a phenomenal job covering the visible and functional changes in the iPhone/iPod touch 2.2 firmware release. If you are holding off on the update, or just haven’t gotten to it yet, you may want to pencil in some time with iTunes as there are a twelve security fixes in this firmware release, each [...]

Upgrades, Darn Upgrades and Statistics

Written on November 21, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Hopefully Benjamin Disraeli will posthumously forgive me for the major abuse of his quote (made famous by Mark Twain), but the fine folks over at the Omni Group gave us all a sneak peek into some very interesting data they’ve been allowed by users to collect on various details of the operating system their applications [...]

Apple Unleashes A “Perfect Storm” Of Updates

Written on November 21, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Apple TV 2.3 was not enough. They could not stop at iPhone OS 2.2. Apple had to introduce the perfect storm of updates to impact users of all their systems and devices by unleashing Quicktime H.264 Compatibility Update (now at version 7.5.5) and iTunes 8.0.2 (plus the required download of the new iPhone SDK to [...]

Poladroid Adds 1940’s Flare to Your Modern Snaps

Written on November 16, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 17 people have commented

Macs are definitely not all-work and no-play machines, and this fact is made even more evident via a nifty little application called Poladroid. With holidays coming up, nostalgia will most likely be at an all-time high and Poladroid helps you inject some into your modern pictures in a very slick way.
Not content to just provide [...]

Coda 1.6 Sports Scriptable Plug-ins Interface

Written on November 13, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 6 people have commented

When it comes to web site development IDEs, Coda is one of the “must have” Mac applications.
The premise is simple: one application that handles all aspects of site development and promotion: editing browser code, cleaning up schemas and tables, wielding CSS, managing versioning and promoting changes to staging and production. If you’re stuck on syntax, [...]

Google Launches Multiplatform, In-browser Voice and Video Chat

Written on November 12, 2008 by carolyn and 3 people have commented

Groundbreaking web-based email was not sufficient. Embedded instant messaging was not enough. Google Talk voice chat was too “old-fashioned.” Never satisfied with the status quo, the wizards at Google have rolled out a new Voice and Video service and have made Mac users first-class citizens for the new feature.
As with the majority of their shiny new toys, Google [...]

First Look: Songbird Finally Gives iTunes Some Competition

Written on November 07, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 37 people have commented

Many have oft-complained about Microsoft’s hold on users with its monopoly on installed system components such as Internet Explorer and Microsoft Media Player. Even though the OS X counterparts to those programs are engineered better, the truth is that Apple really does engage in the same practices Microsoft does and it is only their small [...]

How-To: Mac-ify Your VMware Unity Windows

Written on November 07, 2008 by Tom Reestman and 7 people have commented

Even with CodeWeaver’s generous giveaway of CrossOver Mac the other week, there are still times when one has to use a virtualized Windows environment to get work done that just cannot be performed within OS X properly. In talking with other VMware users, I realized that not everyone may hack their hosted Windows environment as I [...]