TheAppleBlog

Originally introduced in OS X Tiger, Automator is a drag-and-drop form of scripting. You can create workflows to easily speed up many tasks. With each version of OS X, Automator has seen some improvements, but with Snow Leopard, it finally realizes its full potential.
It realizes it by allowing you to create your own Services. Unless [...]

Not that any TheAppleBlog readers would ever try to acquire software in a less-than-legal manner, but just in case you know someone who would, tell them to watch out for web sites claiming to bear Snow Leopard gifts.
Like the Adobe Photoshop CS4 and iWork ‘09 before it, Snow Leopard now has a super-special malware edition [...]

Yesterday, we looked at Paris Metro, supposedly the first augmented reality app officially available for the iPhone. Today, Robert Scoble uncovered an Easter egg that looks like it may grant that title to Yelp, which got a version update earlier this week that carried a nice surprise: an AR mode dubbed “Monocle.”
Yelp is one of [...]

Recently the group that I work in was given the opportunity to move from Dell laptops to MacBook Pros. Score! Since the business infrastructure has been 100% percent PC to date, we had to develop something of a business plan for how to deal with having Macs in the workplace. Chief among our concerns was [...]

Who doesn’t battle the Apple Sync Services dragon on a semi-regular basis? Here are a couple of examples from Apple Support about how to resolve problems with this very useful yet unfortunately flawed feature:

Mac OS X 10.5: Resetting the SyncServices folder
Sync Services: Advanced troubleshooting for contact and calendar syncing

There are even more support articles around [...]

A new cat is upon us, but that doesn’t mean I’ll pounce on the latest upgrade, pardon the pun. Dare I admit in public I’m not an early adopter? Hey, if you like living on the edge, go for it. Go ahead and cook your poultry below 165 degrees or eat raw eggs.
Me, [...]

iPhoto is OK, especially if you like lots of automation when managing your image files, but it’s not as likely to appeal to pros or serious amateurs. Some will use Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom, but there’s another photo management solution you may already have on your hard drive.
I’m talking about Adobe’s Bridge utility, a [...]

When Apple changed its One to One policy, I had no idea it would eventually affect me personally. As a consumer who recently upgraded to a high-end digital camera, I am also looking to upgrade my digital photo editing and organizing software.
Naturally, as a contributor to this blog, my first thought was to upgrade from [...]

I took to the soapbox recently about the lack of flexibility in iPhoto for incremental backups. I still don’t have a great solution that suits my particular needs and desires, though some useful suggestions can be found in the comments of that post. But here’s a little tip that may be useful if you’ve got [...]

Previously, I discussed how to create custom CSS email signatures for Mail in Mac OS X. This week, we’re going to look at what it takes to replicate the same signature on your iPhone.
What You Will Need

Your Mac
Your iPhone (it needs to be jailbroken)
PlistEdit Pro (or another application capable of editing plists)
Coda (or another [...]

Since updating to iPhone OS 3.0 on my iPod touch, the icons of some apps periodically get replaced with a faded version of another app’s icon, or with a strange combination of multiple images. Others don’t have an icon at all. I’ve grouped together a number of affected icons on my springboard in the screen [...]

The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from iTunes on a computer, but when trying to stream [...]

The proliferation of handheld GPS units has resulted in a geocaching craze. If you’re not familiar with the sport, here’s the scoop. People venture out with GPS devices and look for containers hidden in the great outdoors by other geocachers. Once found, you jot your name in the logbook, put the container back where you [...]

Much like a migratory bird is genetically driven to fly south for the winter, I am driven to bloviate online. And so over the years I’ve accumulated my fair share of blogging accounts. I’m very active on Twitter, have a WordPress blog, a Flickr account, Facebook, and a rarely-used LiveJournal account. Keeping them all updated [...]

With the academic year about to begin, and having already tackled the important issues of iWork vs. Office, it’s time to turn our attentions to the iPhone. With over 65,000 apps on the App Store, even subtracting all the iFart and iTip applications there are five I feel are indispensable for any college student’s life. [...]

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, [...]

My interpretation of minimalism in the home office is removing all distracting items that are not constantly utilized. For software, this is both easy and cheap. Becoming a hardware minimalist is slightly more expensive and time consuming and I recommend reading Apartment Therapy’s Unplggd for recommendations.
Minimal Mac
I recently discovered a website called Minimal Mac, and [...]

Welcome to another episode of TheAppleBlog’s iPhone Dev Sessions. We left off with a drum app tutorial called Bickboxx. For this tutorial, we’re building off of the first Bickboxx project, so go back and finish it if you haven’t already. Or if you want to cheat, grab the Bickboxx code from Github.
The Story
The Boss is [...]

I have been using Mobile Fotos since its initial release for uploading photos to Flickr. It’s both easy to use and powerful. However, since purchasing the iPhone 3GS, the one feature I’ve been really excited about is uploading videos to Flickr without using email. Prior to the recent software update, if you wanted to upload [...]

As any person who frequently uses email will tell you, email signatures are very important as they usually provide more information than just a standard name and email address from the sender. You can spice up an email signature since Mail offers support for HTML signatures. If you are fairly comfortable with getting your feet [...]