TheAppleBlog

So you’re loving your brand new Magic Mouse but are missing the ability to activate Expose and Spaces right from the mouse? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. Using SIMBL and a neat little preference pane called MultiClutch, we can map our own custom shortcuts to the left and right swipes coming [...]

I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.
One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital [...]

Although I’ve been supporting Macs since they came out in 1984 (when I was in high school), I haven’t received any “formal” training. It has mostly been learning by doing, reading the occasional book and now of course, TheAppleBlog. Does formal certification really make a difference as a technician? You tell me.
Recently I got into [...]

I was playing around with Google Quick Search Box recently and was really surprised by all the functionality it provides. Once I got it fully set up with plugins and services, I realized it can give me just about everything I used to rely on Quicksilver for.
Quicksilver has really become the default interface for my [...]

Did Snow Leopard leave your old AppleTalk printer out in the cold? Grab a hot cup of cocoa and warm your printer up with some of these handy tips to continue to use your classic AppleTalk printer with your state of the art operating system.
Print Via USB
Of course! Get a longer USB cable if possible, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This time of year, it seems almost inevitable. There’s a forum post somewhere, a plea for help in the middle of the night, asking a time-honored question. No, it’s not “the answer to Life, the Universe, Everything!” It’s more profound than that: “I’m starting school this fall and I want to know what to get, [...]

The OS X boot image epitomizes the simplicity and elegance of the operating system itself, showing a basic Apple logo set against a light grey background. I’m a huge fan of this simple layout, but was very interested to hear about BootXChanger, a tiny application that can alter the boot image to anything you’d like.
BootXChanger [...]

As I mentioned in the My Netbook: The iPhone article, my iPhone is central to my life. But one area that’s been a challenge is getting text to and from it. As I mentioned in the article, most of what I write on the iPhone is blog posts where any formatting is done after the [...]

Aperture is a great photo management application, but may not be suitable for everyone. I recently made a decision to move back to iPhoto in order to use some of the features in the latest release. Several of these, such as face recognition, are not present in the current version of Aperture.
This decision posed a [...]

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 [...]

One of the big, new features of the iPhone is its ability to tether. BlackBerrys have had this ability for a while, so below I have outlined how to tether your BlackBerry with your Mac to use your Internet connection to browse the web with your computer.
Some Things to Note

This tutorial is for Leopard.
I have [...]

I previously wrote an article on how to stream your data from a Time Capsule and local computer over the Internet. After figuring out the basics of networking, I moved onto wanting to control my media center computer remotely. Below I’ve outlined the steps to set up remotely controlling your home computer over the Internet.
Some [...]

I recently switched from my iPhone to a BlackBerry. A few weeks after the transition, I have discovered my likes and dislikes between phones, and by far the most frustrating difference is the “syncing with computer” feature. An iPhone is literally plug and play, whereas a BlackBerry requires tons of configuration, even for the simplest [...]

With the iPhone 3G S on sale in a matter of days, a rush of 3G and original iPhone owners will be selling their phones and upgrading to the new model. If you are planning on selling your current iPhone, there are a few simple steps that can help maximize your resale value.
Before beginning the [...]