TheAppleBlog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week Gizmodo published a leaked proposal (32MB PDF) from marketing agency Lippincott detailing plans for Microsoft’s upcoming brick-and-morter retail stores. It makes for mind-numbing reading, running at a mammoth 124 pages of (mostly) brain-freezing execu-speak.
I’m glad I don’t work in Marketing. It’s a troubled, stressful world where there’s no such thing as a “lie” [...]

There are a few really handy features in OS X that get very little attention – perhaps because they don’t have a snazzy GUI, or maybe it’s because they only appeal to certain users. Whatever the case, Summarize (found in the menubar under the Application menu) is one of those handy features that gets little attention, but delivers big by helping you get to the point.

According to a report in Friday’s Charlotte Observer, North Carolina lawmakers are falling over themselves to entice Apple to build a state-of-the-art server farm in their backyard — specifically, Catawba or Cleveland county. The carrot they’re dangling? In this case, nothing short of a multimillion-dollar tax break.
According to a “state official” with knowledge of the [...]

There’s a trusted maxim in the marketing game: cheap razor, expensive blades. It comes from the practice of selling razors like the Mach3 or Fusion for next to nothing, and then selling the disposable blades for said razors at a rather more expensive price. Consumers tend to overlook the long-term price of purchase, and instead [...]

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 [...]

Web designers, font purveyors, professional paginators and even application developers need sample data to test their layouts, creations and algorithms. “Lorem ipsum” has been the de-facto standard when placing non-distracting text into test areas and has been shown to exhibit characteristics of standard lettter, word and space distribution. While one could just keep a copy [...]

Joining the ranks of iPhone-specific web applications, is the web hosting company, Media Temple (mt). Their angle is to offer iPhone-toting customers, access to control panel services for their (mt) hosted websites.
Buy Domains, pay bills, reboot your server, and a slew of other options await the (mt)/iPhone crowd. I don’t rock the (mt) [...]

Alright, so while the title of this post is more or less accurate, the polish and full suite of capabilities are not there. But Jing certainly does a nice job of combining the power of Snapz Pro X’s video capture abilities with the simplicity of Skitch to grab screen captures.
Jing’s image editor is lightyears [...]

So for everyone who’s ever complained about the .Mac service, someone is finally trying to do something about it. The notMac Challenge is offering up a choice bounty (at least $10k!) for anyone who can develop a .Mac alternative that’s as easy to use as Apple’s offering, but robust enough to be useful for [...]

Services are a part of OS X that many users either don’t even know about, or forget to use. They are a powerful bunch of actions that you can apply to your workflow – mostly in cases where you’re working with text.
In this Screencast, I’ll show you firstly, how to trim that over-grown hedge [...]