Apple is looking to license AirPlay to TV manufacturers, according to a new report from Bloomberg. TV’s with built-in AirPlay support would allow users to stream media directly from their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and other Apple hardware, directly to the TV without the need of an Apple TV box. The “devices that could be used for video may be available this year,” according to Bloombergs source.

This report from Bloomberg is significant because it seems to address the long discussed rumors of an Apple branded television. Instead of Apple producing an actual television to compete with the TV heavyweights, they can instead license the use of their AirPlay streaming media technology and be included in a wide range of televisions. This would be a winning situation for nearly everyone involved, including the TV makers, Apple, and the consumer.
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Wondering how the iPad 2 specs make a difference in gaming? Check out this picture of Real Racing 2 HD taken by Andy Ihnatko during his iPad 2 review (image via Flickr), the difference is pretty remarkable for an existing game: less jaggies, better anti-aliasing, better framerates, just better graphics all around.

That image doesn’t surprise me too much when you start looking at the iPad 2 graphics benchmarks, here’s an impressive chart from Anadntech which really shows off the iPad 2′s enhanced GPU:
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Here’s a stupid Mac trick: grab your iPhone/iPod earbuds and place them about an inch inward on the corners of a MacBook Pro… they’ll stick. Much like the iPad 2 and it’s Smart Cover, the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook all have magnets in the upper lid to keep it shut.

I just tested this out with a metal pen and a small screwdriver and the magnets held them too. Useful? Not really, but it’s fun. This also makes a decent prank to play on someone if you let your imagination run wild, although it’s not as heart-stopping as a fake kernel panic.

Thanks for sending this in Peter!

Are you looking for a gorgeous wood cover for your iPad 2? Check out Miniot‘s offering, it has all the features of Apple’s magnetic smart cover except that it’s made from beautiful wood.

If the appearance wasn’t enough to grab you, it’s priced at €50, which is actually cheaper than the official Apple leather smart cover for iPad 2. Now, if I can ever find an iPad 2 in stock somewhere on planet Earth, I’ll buy one of these in a heartbeat.

Check out the video of the Miniot Wood Cover in action:
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Mac OS X turns 10 today and after seeing the above image on Twitter I got to thinking that this may be the last we see of the traditional Mac OS X installer disc. With better methods of installation in place, what’s the point of Apple printing more DVD’s, better known as plastic coasters?

Choose One: Mac App Store or USB Key
I wouldn’t be surprised if future versions of Mac OS, starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, come exclusively in two installation methods: digital distribution through the Mac App Store like when you install the Lion Dev Preview, and a USB key like what comes with the new MacBook Air.

Faster & Fool Proof Installations
Having installed Lion along with Snow Leopard, I’ve used both the Mac App Store and the MacBook Air USB Keys to install Mac OS X. Guess what? Not only is it easier than using a DVD, but it’s faster. I did a fresh reinstall of Snow Leopard on my Air using the included USB key and the entire process from start to finish took maybe 20 minutes, how can you beat that speed?

If you’re the average user and connected to the internet, you’ll use the Mac App Store, it’s far too easy not to. If you need to perform a physical install and use a boot drive, you’ll use a USB key. Installation through either method is so simple and so fast, what’s the point of DVD installers anymore? Look at the size of this USB key:

It’s faster to use, not as fragile, and totally bootable. Why wouldn’t you want to use that as an installation method?

Goodbye to the CD and DVD
The benefits of ditching the CD/DVD installer outweigh whatever cons that I can’t even think of. People have been predicting the demise of the CD for a while now, and Apple has been eliminating box software software in their stores in favor of the Mac App Store. I think it’s finally here, the disc is dead, at least as a way to install software and system updates.

RIP CD’s, you’ve been fun.

PS: You still make great drink coasters.

[ Images via AppleSpotlight and Cnet ]

Have iPad envy? Do you prefer the ease of the iOS interface? Maybe you just like the way iOS looks and want your Mac to resemble that user interface.

By combining a few tips, we can make the Mac OS X desktop look a lot like iPad’s iOS:

1) Add Spacers to the Mac OS X Dock – this is done with a Terminal command that must be executed once for each spacer you want to create. The command is:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'

Enter that into the command line then hit return. Then hit the up arrow and return again for each additional spacer you want to create, ie: do this 5 times for 5 spacers. Then you must kill the Dock for changes to take effect:

killall Dock

The spacers can then be moved around like any other Dock icon, just click and drag them. To get the proper iOS appearance, reduce the number of icons in your Dock to 4 or 6, but remember that the trash can will take up a space on the end as well.

2) Make the Mac Menu Bar Black or just hide the Mac Menu Bar – There are multiple ways to do this, and you can either turn the menubar black with Nocturne which makes it look like it’s out of iOS, or you can hide the menu bar or change the coloring or opacity of it. A simple method is to use the app called “MenuEclipse” which lets you adjust the opacity of visible menu, it’s what I used in the screenshot above.

3) Increase Mac desktop icon size – Use a reverse finger pinch while on the desktop or hit Command+J and bring that slider up to 100+ pixels, depending on your desktops resolution size.

4) Make aliases of apps or folders you want to show on your Mac desktop – Select an app or folder and hit Command+L or hold down Command+Option while dragging the app to the Mac OS X desktop to create an instant alias.

5) Adjust the Aliased Desktop Icons to be on a Wide Grid – the icon grid spacing you’ll want is probably larger than the defaults that OS X allows, so go ahead and line them up manually.

6) Hide Macintosh HD and other drives from your desktop – iOS doesn’t display any drives, so you should set Mac OS X to behave the same way. This is easily done through by clicking on the Mac desktop, then opening Finder preferences and unselecting the checkboxes next to the items you want to hide from the desktop. If you use these, you could also just incorporate them into the iOS desktop styled grid.

7) Use an iOS icon set – I didn’t do this in the screenshot, but you could also take change your Mac icons to a set that resembles the squared appearance of iOS icons. The Flurry set from Iconfactory is a good start and still holds a Mac-ish appearance.

And there you have it… your Mac desktop now looks a lot like an iPad.

Believe it or not, Mac OS X is celebrating it’s birthday and turns 10 years old today. First released to the public on March 24, 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was a huge conceptual leap forward for the Mac platform. Unfortunately the first OS X iteration was painfully slow and largely unusable due to performance issues, and these troubles kept most Mac users on Mac OS 9 until 10.1 was released which sped things up dramatically. Things rapidly evolved from there and the rest is obviously history.

This is what the first release of Mac OS X 10 Cheetah looked like, featuring elements that are still familiar today but with a candy striped Aqua interface:

Over the course of 10 years, what started as Mac OS X Cheetah has been refined into Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which is scheduled for release this summer and looks a bit different:
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Apple announced in a press release today that Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and one of the lead creators and developers of Mac OS X, is leaving the company. Here’s Serlet on his departure:

“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,”

Taking his place is Craig Federighi, Apple’s current vice president of Mac Software Engineering. Serlet has this to say about his successor:

“Craig has done a great job managing the Mac OS team for the past two years, Lion is a great release and the transition should be seamless.”

This is obviously pretty major news for the Mac platform, since Mac OS X Lion is due for release this summer. John Gruber of DaringFireball describes Bertrand Serlet as “one of the good guys” and says “It’s hard to overstate how influential he’s been in the creation of the core OS and Cocoa libraries. He’s been building, revising, iterating, and improving this system since 1989.”

Some are taking this as a bad sign for the Mac, including several tech tabloids that I won’t bother linking to who propose all sorts of conspiracy theories and more end-of-the-Mac type scenarios that are equally ridiculous. I don’t buy that idea and neither should you, the Mac will obviously evolve but almost certainly be around for many years to come.

You can read the full press release at Apple.com.

You may remember that YouTube video that went viral a few years back called “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years” – it featured photographer Noah Kalina taking a self portrait every day over the course of six years, and then all the pictures are put together in a movie. It’s interesting to watch since people obviously change a fair amount over six years.

Now there’s an iPhone app that lets you do this yourself, it’s called EveryDay. It’s a simple but fun idea, the app reminds you to take a daily picture, and you line your face up on a grid, the longer you do it the better the end result. It’ll collect all your photos and then you can turn them into a movie just like the aforementioned famous one from Noah Kalina. Watch the preview video above to get an idea, near the end you’ll see how it turns out.

If this sounds fun to you, you can grab it from the App Store:

• Everyday – $1.99 (iTunes Store Link)

This is a great idea for an app that has captured a lot of peoples imaginations and it’s sure to be popular, it’s already been mentioned by several prominent tech blogs including TechCrunch and DaringFireball. This is the apps simple GUI:
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See that screenshot? That’s my Macs Downloads folder measuring in at a whopping 26.18GB and begging for deletion. I’m a pretty savvy individual but I’ve somehow neglected to periodically delete the contents of ~/Downloads and it grew to include over 7,000 files and consume 10% of my overall disk space.

Here’s the worst part about this: the majority of that space was taken up by music files, including songs that have already been added to iTunes. In other words I needlessly had two copies of tons of music. Oops.

The moral of the story here is don’t forget to check on your ~/Downloads folder from time to time, it grows a lot more than you’d expect. If you want a super fast way to do this, this tip is great: hit Command+Spacebar to enter Spotlight, type “Downloads” then hit Command+i to bring up the Get Info window.