TheAppleBlog

Often, you find that the hard drive capacity on your Mac just won’t cut it. As your collection of MP3’s, video and photographs begins to grow, you often find your diskspace running out at a fairly fast rate. There are two directions you can then take. If you own a machine such as a Power [...]

Griffin Technology have been a long term manufacturer of iPod accessories. They rose to fame through the iTrip radio transmitter, and have been increasing their product line-up ever since. They recently adopted the ‘Made for iPod’ branding, working with Apple to create certified accessories.
My first impressions of the iTalk were relatively positive. It fits [...]

The Grand Theft Auto series of games for PS2 and PC were extremely popular, and heck, they still are, with more sequels and spinoffs than the “Law and Order” TV series. It figures that someone else would make something similar. In comes “True Crime: Streets of LA”…. Now, 2 years after being released for consoles [...]

My Tiger upgrade went smoothly. I took some notes on my personal blog while adjusting to and playing with the new system.

Feel free to gather your own upgrade notes in comments to this post!

Unless you just got an e-mail address recently, you’ve had to deal with what we in the industry refer to as a “metric crapload” of spam. By some accounts, spam now accounts for some 80 percent of all e-mail traffic. How can you stop the flood and keep e-mail usable?
Server-side tools like SpamAssassin are a [...]

I’ve been an audio professional for 20+ years. Since the early 90’s I’ve done hundreds of audio transfers to CD. Back in 1993 I was charging $100 per CD with no mastering or editing at all. Back then I had a digidesign system in my old Mac IIvx with a nubus sound [...]

I was chatting with Josh the other day, on my 17″ Powerbook, propped up by bottled-water caps. If you’re a Powerbook or iBook owner, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the heat that results from using your computer on a flat, un-ventilated surface. Maybe you’ve even MacGyver’ed a solution similar to mine… So Josh and [...]

I’ve had the chance recently to play with You Control, which is a software application that is essentially a bundle of small utilities and apps that you may already have running on your system. The idea is that YC (as I’ll refer to You Control from here on out, to avoid any “Who’s on First” type nuances) runs all these things off a single engine, instead of multiple little things all starting and running individually. So what are you actually getting for $29.95 that the multiple free apps don’t offer – and is it worth it?

Back before Menu Calendar Clock, there was a great, tiny, free utility called Pth Clock. Basically it replaced the System Clock in the Menubar and upon hovering over it, the date was displayed. It was simple, but useful for my day to day needs. Well one day it was no longer available, but rather was consumed, upgraded, and offered for sale as part of You Control. There was a lot more there than I cared to use (and pay for) and so I went back to the System Clock (that is until I discovered Menu Calendar Clock – but that’s a story for another day). So my bias began against YC.

If you edit video, even for your school projects, you know all too well the wonders of DV and Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is so good, it’s being used by many of the industry’s biggest pros. Of course, many have still held out, and continue to use older analog systems – film, reels, [...]

Apple’s iPhoto in Mac OS X 10.1 was the reason I finally bought a digital still camera in 2001. Since then I’ve taken quite a few gigabytes’ worth of pictures filled with fond memories. While the built-in integration between iPhoto and .Mac, as well as iPhoto’s ability to “export” photo web sites to directories were decent alternatives to share pictures, those methods remained however not very cost-effective and somehwat inconvenient.

In 2004, Flickr.com opened its doors to the world as yet another photo sharing web service. “Yet another?”, you may ask. Well, not quite. Flickr offered a radically new approach to photo sharing, for the first time introducing the concept of a “photo stream“.

If you’re anything like me, you constantly seem to find yourself drafting out very similar emails to people. Whether it’s “Thank you for your payment”, “Why haven’t you dispatched my eBay item yet” or a long, drawn out reply to someone explaining why you can’t open that .exe file on your Mac. Whatever the reason [...]

Wireless, portable, optical, multi-button, and equipped with a scroll wheel, MacAlly’s BTMicro is the go-anywhere mouse for modern road warriors.

I know what your thinking. Mind Mapping software; this has got to be cool. Well, your right. Just not in the way you think.
Almost all educational institutions, when teaching students how to compose essays and articles, or how to organize their ideas, teach them to make outlines. Visual representations of the [...]

It’s beyond me why the majority of car stereo systems (even newer ones) don’t have an auxiliary input. And if they do have one, they’re somehow “strategically” placed on the back of the unit inside your dash. It just seems to me that with the massive increase in the use of portable music devices, more [...]

A Marshall guitar rig can cost you upwards of $3000. What about a Marshall rig that mixes your guitar with thousands of your favorite tunes, runs off of a battery, weighs in at only a few ounces and fits in your shirt pocket?
For a mere 1% of the dough you’d spend on a Marshall ($29.99), [...]

I love my iPod. I mean I really love my iPod. It’s my little music machine and you better believe I’m not giving it up anytime soon. Unfortunately though, my little iPod is a bit fragile. Within an hour of purchasing mine, it had little tiny scratches all over the screen and metal backing. I’m [...]

The best utilities work well when they’re needed, and stay out of sight the rest of the time. So it is with Stuffit Deluxe 9 from Allume. In fact, I almost forgot about the new Stuffit version after I installed it to review. But there’s more there than meets the eye – that is, if you look for it.

It was only after I’d said that I’d review The Little App Factory’s Connoisseur that the realisation struck me – what use would a student have for a recipe manager? Baked beans and spaghetti Bolognese are the stuff of student diets, not walnut shortbread and creamy fettuccine, just two of the many recipes that come [...]

A few weeks ago I looked at Download Wizard. At about the same time, Josh pointed out to me Speed Download 3, another download wizard in pretty much the vein as Download Wizard. Speed Download 3 is a more mature product, and it has a few tricks up its sleeve that might make it more practical for some, but it’s also a more complex product, and the complexities might not appeal to all.

In my opinion, pinball can be likened to the huge range of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. There are a countless number of variations on what is always essentially the same basic recipe. With this classic arcade game, the simple essentials are always the same. Take a couple of paddles, the ability to tilt the [...]