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Author Archive for Alfredo Padilla

Alfredo Padilla is a writer and activist who has a passion for technology (especially Apple products), social justice and baseball. Given the choice he would rather be out hiking somewhere beautiful with his wife and beagle.

Holiday Buying Guide: Picking the Right Digital Camera

Written on November 18, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 4 people have commented

With Black Friday rapidly approaching, the time of the year for spending is upon us. Although I’m sure all of us Mac lovers are considering which Apple product we’ll be blowing our budget on (mine will be a Magic Mouse), there are also the other gadgets in our lives to consider.
One of the most important [...]

Facebook Developer Turns Back on iPhone

Written on November 12, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 14 people have commented

Facebook for the iPhone is one of my most used applications, and I’m not alone as it’s amongst the most popular iPhone applications ever. This success is due to the size of Facebook itself, that the application is free, and that it is very well done. That last is due mainly to Joe Hewitt, who [...]

Will the Cloud Lead Me Away From the Mac?

Written on November 09, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 36 people have commented

There’s no doubt that cloud computing is a growing trend. All you have to look at is the popularity of netbooks to see that many people nowadays will be quite happy with a computing device that gives them access to the web, and not much else.
I’m certainly part of this trend, as I write this story [...]

One Finger Discount Gives MacHeist the Finger

Written on November 07, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 6 people have commented

As we wrote yesterday, MacHeist is doing a new promotion, this time offering six Mac apps for free. MacHeist has long been controversial in the indie developer community, with many developers believing that the promotion, which offers a bundle of applications at either a steep discount (or in this case for free), reduces the value of [...]

Upcoming Snow Leopard Update Disables Atom Processor Support

Written on November 02, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 17 people have commented

Users who are running a hackintoshed netbook with Intel’s Atom processor may want to be careful next time an update for Snow Leopard is pushed out. According to OS X Daily, users have found that the latest developer preview of the 10.6.2 update disables support for Atom processors. The processor is used widely in the [...]

Home Screen Analysis: Too Many Apps, Too Few Good Ones

Written on October 30, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 21 people have commented

Recently I read about the First & 20 project, an effort to share the home screens of various technorati. When I heard about it I immediately shot off to the page to look through the home screens. I was most excited about the possibility of finding new applications. As we all know, one of the [...]

Quick Look: Creating and Using Site Specific Browsers

Written on October 28, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 7 people have commented

The advent of the cloud over the past few years has meant that a lot of the tasks that we were used to doing on our Mac have now moved to the web. This brings with it a host of issues, from data ownership to reliability of services (see recent Sidekick fiasco) and whether the [...]

Does the New iMac Foretell the Next Apple TV?

Written on October 23, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 26 people have commented

Apple’s brand new 27-inch iMacs come with an interesting feature: the ability to act as a display for connected devices via the built-in DisplayPort connection. This means that, with the proper adaptors, you can connect an array of home theatre devices to the iMac, including Blu-Ray players. The screen has also moved to the HDTV [...]

TAB Faves: 5 Tower Defense iPhone Apps Worth Owning

Written on October 16, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 5 people have commented

Recently we looked at the plethora of tower defense games available for the iPhone. For anyone who looked at that list and wondered where they should actually spend your money, today’s article is for you. I’m not going to argue that the following five games are the best tower defense games on the platform, but [...]

e-Textbooks: How Apple Can Dominate the Education Market With the iTablet

Written on October 07, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 23 people have commented

Apple tablet rumors are swirling once again, and it looks like we might be able to put our hands on the mythical iTablet sometime early next year. The question that everyone is asking is where the device’s niche will be. Tablets have been around for years, but none of them have been what you would [...]

49 Tower Defense Apps for the iPhone

Written on October 07, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 17 people have commented

I was first introduced to the world of tower defense games a couple of years back with the venerable Desktop Tower Defense. I do have to admit that I wondered if the whole idea of the game, placing various types of gun turrets to try and annihilate a group of small creatures/people before they can [...]

New Mighty Mouse With Multitouch Forthcoming?

Written on October 02, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 13 people have commented

Apple has a new Mighty Mouse in the works, according to a filing with the FCC reported by Engadget for the Bluetooth version of the mouse. The Mighty Mouse has been oft maligned, mostly for the small scroll nub, which gets easily infested with dirt, rendering it completely useless. As a former Mighty Mouse [...]

Future Fodder: Apple TV the Center of Your Media Universe

Written on September 29, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 32 people have commented

Looking through Apple’s current lineup of products, there’s one that stands out as the sad little orphan: the Apple TV. Apple itself has gone out of its way to lower expectations for this product, with Steve Jobs calling it a “hobby.”
The problem with the Apple TV is that its feature set just isn’t particularly compelling. [...]

Get Your Google Reader Fix Natively

Written on September 17, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 19 people have commented

Although much has been said about the death of RSS I, for one, still get most of my news via RSS feeds every day. I find Twitter to be filled with too much extraneous junk, and services like Friendfeed and Facebook still don’t offer the feature set I want from my daily news aggregator. My [...]

TAB Welcomes: Alfredo Padilla

Written on September 16, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 2 people have commented

Where to begin? I didn’t always aspire to write about technology, but my complete lack of interest in a real social life got me noticed on a discussion forum about three years ago and led to a job offer. I’ve been slaving over a keyboard ever since.
I became a Mac user just before that, purchasing [...]

How-to: Get Google Gears Working in Snow Leopard

Written on September 15, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 7 people have commented

Snow Leopard was a remarkably painless upgrade for me, but one particularly important piece of software was broken: Google Gears.
For those who don’t know, Gears is Google’s framework for storing browser data offline. It works with many Google services as well as some third-party products. I use Gears primarily with Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) like [...]