TheAppleBlog

I just came across a fairly easy way of getting high resolution album art for any album in your iTunes library. Navigate in the iTMS to the album for which you want the art, right click on the album title in the top frame, and copy the URL. Then, post that URL into this site, [...]

As you may have heard, it would appear the Treo 700 is going to be announced tomorrow Monday September 26th, 2005.
TreoCentral.com will be covering the event live.
Rumors are claiming they’re going with Windows. R.I.P., PalmOS?
That isn’t stopping me from having more fun with the Treo 650.

A while back, I’d briefly praised Flickr.com.
In your Flickr account, [...]

I’ve recently acquired a Treo 650. It’s quite neat. What follows is a collection of a few useful resources and lessons learned, getting the Treo working with Mac OS X Tiger:

Apple engineers are some of the most imaginative and pioneering in the technology industry. But they missed the boat on the design of my 65W Powerbook G4 adapter.
About one year after I bought my $3900 Powerbook, the power supply started to short out. Of course this event occurred after the warranty had expired. [...]

I recently stumbled upon this great piece by John R. Chang on using a GSM Phone as a Bluetooth Modem on Mac OS X.

Just a quick heads-up in case you haven’t noticed yourself…
If you’re running the Saft plugin for Safari, it WILL break Safari following the update to 10.4.2. Opening Safari will pop up a window telling you that Saft isn’t supported in the current Safari version and it gives you the option to Try Anyway, Quit [...]

This morning I chatted with my Grand-Ma’ (Mamie) who lives in France for about 50 minutes. It cost me around $2. Little did she know, our crystal-clear conversation was happening while I was doing the dishes, through a Motorola HS810 bluetooth headset connected to the powerbook that was sitting in the living room, [...]

The SIP protocol, by its open nature, enables various providers to interoperate and compete for your loyalty, so you might shop for SIP services the exact same way you’ll shop for e-mail services. This open protocol also enables every industrious Software Author in the World to build best-of-breed real-time communications tools. These tools are coming. For all platforms. Mac. Linux. Windows. Developers are working around the clock to be the first-to-market with the next Skype-killer, in a race to earn your loyalty.

Just a little note about the new Podcasts feature in iTunes: it’s really cool. For a while now, I’ve been listening to Leo Laporte’s KFI Radio Podcast, so it really interested me when I found that I could plug in his podcast link into iTunes, and it worked! Really well!!
I didn’t like the way that [...]

We all love our Macs, and most of the time, they love us back. But occasionally, programs start crashing, or the spinning-pinwheel-of-death becomes a common sight. In these situations, there are a few steps you can take to try and remedy the problem. Today, we will be looking at repairing damaged file permissions.
What are permissions?
Permissions [...]

I attended a cousin’s wedding last week. He asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking candid photos during the wedding. I being the closet photog, starved for scenery other than the sunsets from my front yard was more than happy to oblige him.

So morning of the wedding, I took my job very seriously. I started snapping away. Trying to get all angles, people, emotions and so on (ok, so that translates into angles that I’m not sure what I was shooting, eyes half open, food being chewed, etc, etc) I ended up with about 400 pictures by mid day.

SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and is to real-time communications what SMTP and e-mail are to message delivery, and is slated to become the next major revolution in the ways we humans communicate. Want to start playing? Start here.

Right now, if you need your VPN client to work, I’d recommend steering clear of Cisco’s recently-released 10.4 VPN client. When it works, it seems to work fine. When it’s not working, you have to uninstall and reinstall it to get it to work. However, if you’re on 10.4 and you have to use Cisco’s [...]

Slashdot is pointing at a terrific write-up detailing the speed gains in running a Mac Mini off of an external Firewire drive instead of the relatively slow notebook sized hard drive it has inside.
The idea makes great sense, and being a desktop computer (even though it’s small enough to take with you…) makes it a [...]

While Spotlight is definitely cool, it doesn’t quite fit my workflow. Quicksilver remains the supreme app on my Tiger installation. At a glance these tools may seem similar – even potential competitors – but in the end they’re VERY different tools. Alas this is a discussion/argument for another day. Let’s set that aside and move on to the point of this post.

Spotlight has made itself a little home in my workflow by including Spotlight Comments. If you’re unaware, Spotlight Comments are a new section in each file or folder’s Get Info screen. You can add your own information to each item indexed on your system for additional Spotlight specificity.

For me, Spotlight Comments represent a way to tag my files a la Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. This is immensely more useful for me than the default full text indexing that Spotlight offers. I want a narrow result set most of the time. Adding tags that make sense to me accomplishes this nicely.

But there’s a problem. I’m lazy. I don’t want to have to click each file, CMD I to Get Info, enter my Spotlight Comments for that file, close the window, and move to the next file. That’s like 5-10 seconds of mouse movement and typing and, well, I’m tired just thinking about it. Enter my faithful sidekick, Quicksilver. (Hi-Ho Quicksilver!)

I received an email from Charles Pazos this past weekend asking how to set up Mail to check your GMail account. Here you go, Charles.
From Google’s help page :
—–
Open Apple Mail.
Click ‘Mail,’ and select ‘Preferences…’
Open the ‘Accounts’ tab, and click the plus sign (+) along the bottom to add a new account.
Enter ‘pop.gmail.com’ in the [...]

Support for RSS in Firefox, then Safari, are mostly encouraging developments to slowly further bring RSS into the mainstream. Both browsers are implementing the concept of “Live Bookmarks”. Bookmarking a site now offers us the ability to not only save its location, but also become aware of its changes and store its updates on our own computer for future consumption. The question remains whether or not said content will actually be consumed by the end-user.

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!

Pre-order tiger from Amazon for $35 cheaper?

The invasion of the PodPeople.