TheAppleBlog

My life is busy (and yes, if you’re wondering, it is all about me), and frequently I tend to rip or download music without taking the time to apply ratings to it. Since ratings are one of the best methods for determining the usefulness of your playlists, neglecting to add that information to your tracks [...]

I really enjoy the overall experience reading books and articles on my Sony PRS-500 eBook reader, but dislike having to fire up Boot Camp or VMware into Windows in order to purchase books from the Sony eBook Store, especially when there are thousands of books in the public domain and tons of blog and article [...]

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could control your Christmas lights from your iPhone?” That simple question, posed in passing eleven days ago by a good friend, set off a flurry of activity which has become Griswold.app (for the iPhone/iPod touch) and Griswold Server (for OS X Leopard, Windows and Linux/BSD). Both are being released [...]

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 [...]

The Dock has become an iconic feature on the OS X operating system, present from the very earliest versions. It provides a unique way to open applications and monitor what is running on your system, while also offering a space to minimize application windows to.
While I’m sure many of you are quite happy with the [...]

It’s the time of year when — love it or hate it — you need to start thinking about Christmas shopping. If you’re the kind of person who prefers to leave their shopping until Christmas Eve, then by all means skip on to the next post! I prefer to plan ahead and beat some of [...]

In the interests of all those readers who need to unlock their iPhone 3G’s for use on different carriers, I donned my investigative hat and tested an iPhone 3G unlock that really seems to work.
While the iPhone Dev Team plunder the secrets of the mysterious baseband in search of the ever elusive software unlock, some [...]

Apple’s user interface is heralded as a sleek, modern experience. A great deal of attention is paid to the design of icons, and a guide is published to help ensure that developers also create icons which meet the standards of OS X.
If you’d like to use custom icons in OS X — whether for applications, [...]

ShareTool is a piece of software which allows you to easily access your Mac from a remote location. To quote their tagline: “ShareTool is hands down, the fastest, easiest, and most secure way to access all of your Bonjour services from anywhere in the world.” The term ‘Bonjour services’ is fairly generic, but means that [...]

There has been a huge amount of speculation about whether Apple would release a laptop with a trackpad resembling an iPhone or iPod touch screen. While this always seemed unlikely, there’s no doubt that the iPhone has the perfect sized screen to function as an (albeit very over-featured) trackpad. Snatch is an application for the [...]

In a previous article I explained how in the last year I’ve moved the majority of my data to the Cloud. By utilizing MobileMe’s syncing mechanisms, I’m able to do this without sacrificing the “comfort” and “safety” of having all my data local. This not only saves me from worrying what I’d do if all [...]

If you own an iPhone and a Mac you can easily create ringtones within Garageband. I love music, but am not a music maker, so I don’t really use Garageband at all. Luckily, you don’t have to know much of anything about the program to easily create ringtones for your iPhone. Trust me. If I [...]

The iPhone is indeed a wonderful little device and, for some of us, a game-changer in terms of managing our digital lives from the palm of our hands. There are, however, some essential features that Apple neglected to implement.
Regular GMail and Google Calendar users will have noticed the glaring lack of a Calendar synchronization option, making the [...]

I really, really detest the Market Felt typeface used in the Notes application in the iPod touch and iPhone. It is hard to read, hard to edit points into, and looks plain childish.
Fortunately, I stumbled upon a way to easily have your notes displayed with Arial Helvetica. And, no, you do not need FontSwap, jailbreaking [...]

As someone with a large media collection (around 550GB), I’m always looking for inventive new ways to store, backup and stream all my content.
One of my main annoyances with simply storing media on an external drive is that you obviously need to have the device physically plugged in. My Lacie Drive worked well, but was [...]

I recently set up a Mac mini in my living room to act as a media server. Instead of trying to update separate music libraries every time I added songs to my collection, I was just adding the music to the Mac mini’s iTunes library and streaming it my laptop. That worked fine until [...]

One of the reasons I like Mac’s so much more than Window’s boxes is their outstanding networking capabilities. No matter if I need to add a network printer or share files with someone on my network, it can be done in a matter of minutes.
Setting up two Macs to network and share files can be [...]

An onscreen keyboard can be a powerful tool for screencasters. This tutorial will show you how to turn on the onscreen keyboard that OS X has built in.
To turn on the onscreen keyboard:

Go to the System Preferences panel
Select the “International” icon

Go to the “Input Menu” tab
Select the “Keyboard Viewer”

You now should have an American flag [...]

Have you ever taken some video clips with your point-and-shoot digital camera, downloaded them to iPhoto, and found them playing sideways? This is a common occurrence in our house. We’ll get some great footage of our kids doing something cute or funny, only to find that it was shot in a portrait orientation [...]

To right click on any Mac without changing any configuration:

Click “crtl+Mouse button”
A right click menu should pop up

To enable right click on an Apple desktop with an Apple mouse connected:

Go to “System Preferences”
Click “Keyboard & Mouse”

Click the “Mouse” tab
A picture of the mouse will show up. Click the drop down menu on the right [...]