TheAppleBlog

Once upon a time, iTunes did exactly what it sounded like it should do: play music. It was the digital jukebox for your mac, Rip, Mix, Burn, remember that?
Looking at the sidebar in iTunes now, I’ve got Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, iTunes U, Audiobooks, Applications, and Radio, and that’s just the main library. [...]

Time again to pop a shell and dig into the deep, geeky Unix internals of OS X with Dig Into Unix. Today we are going to look at two top-shelf power tools for text editing: sed and awk.
Sed is a Stream EDitor, and if you recall our previous Dig Into Unix installment concerning standard streams, [...]

Snow Leopard’s release is just around the corner, so here are some quick and easy steps to make sure that you are ready to upgrade.
Turn On Time Machine
If you haven’t already, now is a great time to turn on the Time Machine built in backup. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great first line of [...]

This is the third installment of our Dig Into Unix series, an ongoing look into the deep, geeky insides of the core of OS X. In the first part, we got to fire up the Terminal and take a look around the filesystem as the OS sees it, which is slightly different from how the [...]

Continuing our Dig Into Unix series, we’ve now covered the absolute basics of launching Terminal.app, moving around the file system, looking at files with cat, and learning about commands with man. Now, I’d like to introduce you to the power of vi.
vi (pronounced vee-eye) is a text editor for the command line, and was originally [...]

Just about as far back as I can remember, every new release of an operating system has brought new features, additional functionality, and, unfortunately, more bloat. This applies equally for OS X and Windows, and in recent years has become even more prominent.
Windows XP was bigger than both NT or 98, Vista was far bigger [...]

When Apple revamped its operating system and adopted Nextstep as the base of OS X, they brought along with it an extremely powerful version of Unix based on the open-source project FreeBSD, now known as Darwin.
Unix has a long history, one that started in the basements of Bell Labs by a group of AT&T engineers [...]

Apple has once again received top honors among computer manufacturers for customer satisfaction, and not by a small margin, either. The recent American Customer Satisfaction Index survey (PDF) has Apple beating their closest competitor by 10 points, something with which the creators of the survey are very impressed. Apple hasn’t always been so lucky. There [...]

Since first appearing in Tiger, Automator has brought programming to the masses in a simple drag and drop interface. An entire ecosystem has sprung up around Automator, using its ability to create and distribute complex workflows and actions, and the ability for developers to provide Automator with actions specific to their application. If you are [...]

Apple prides itself on creating products that are simple and easy to use. A prime example of this philosophy can be seen in Mail, the default email application included with Mac OS X. Mail is not an all-encompassing “collaboration” tool, and it is not “groupware;” it does email (and a little bit of note-taking and [...]

One of the things that I’ve always loved about the Mac is its cohesiveness. Everything just flows. It’s the experience that careful attention to design has created.
When I open the lid of my MacBook, OS X springs back to life, just as expected. When I press CMD+I in Safari, the page I’m viewing is opened [...]

If any one application is near and dear to almost every Mac users heart, it is the web browser. With more applications becoming web based, and web applications becoming more complicated, the browser’s appearance, feel, and most of all performance become even more important. 2008 has been a big year for web browsers, with Firefox [...]

If you are planning on getting started in developing for the Mac, one of the first things I recommend setting up is a version control system. Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, so you can access your code from anywhere you have an Internet connection, team up with partners across the world, and keep [...]

Syncing Google Calendar with iCal just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new setup tool released by Google called Calaboration. Calaboration is a Google Code project that allows you to add calendars to iCal with a simple point and click interface, a process that used to take quite a bit more digging.
Before [...]

Jon Hicks from Hicks Design has released the Helvetireader skin for Google Reader. Helvetireader takes a minimalist approach, masking many of Google Readers abilities, creating a simple and very easy to read interface to Google’s excellent RSS feed reader.
Google Reader has been my RSS reader of choice since I made the switch from Bloglines [...]

Apple’s replacement for .Mac has had a very rocky start, and has a long way to go before its ready to compete with free alternatives. Many users do not want to move away from MobileMe because of the deep integration with the Mac desktop, while others are reluctant because its hard to find another single service [...]

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Haddock, President of the Haddock Corporation, an Apple reseller that has been in the Mac business seriously since there have been Macs.
I first found Haddock a couple of years ago when, in a panic over accidentally wiping out my hard drive in some kind of strange Linux [...]

Put that old Mac to work!
If your one of the many Mac faithful who recently upgraded to a shiny new intel mac, you may be wondering what to do with your older PowerPC system. After pondering this very question for a while, I found that there were three answers. You could:
A) Put the [...]

skEdit is the web developers text editor. While not nearly as feature packed as some other text editors in the Mac software market, I’ve been using it for two weeks and in that time it has easily saved me three months worth of work.

The Smart InputManager Bundle Loader (SIMBL), developed by Mike Solomon, is a hack, and not only that, it’s a hack that allows for more hacks. In this meaning, it’s a good hack. SIMBL allows developers to write plugins for cocoa applications that would normally not allow them. Once SIMBL is installed, each [...]