More details have emerged regarding the development of an Apple TV set. Hot off the revelation that Steve Jobs was interested in creating a Apple television, Bloomberg is reporting that the creator of iTunes is now working on the Apple HDTV project:

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is turning to the software engineer who built iTunes to help lead its development of a television set, according to three people with knowledge of the project.

Jeff Robbin, who helped create the iPod in addition to the iTunes media store, is now guiding Apple’s internal development of the new TV effort, said the people, who declined to be identified because his role isn’t public.

Bloomberg also mentions that Apple has a prototype in the works, and the TV set may be released sometime between 2012 and 2013. Two of the features of the HDTV set may be iCloud integration, which Steve Jobs himself mentioned, and the inclusion of Siri, the personal assistant and voice-based interface currently exclusive to the iPhone 4S.

One of their sources does caution that “it’s not guaranteed that Apple will release a television”, and Bloomberg notes that outside of the comments made by Steve Jobs himself in his biography, Apple hasn’t acknowledged the projects existence, which isn’t unusual for the secretive company. The current Apple TV set-top box sells for $99 and runs a variation of iOS.

With Preview you can adjust the contrast of a PDF, this makes the text sharper and darker, and for scans or dubious quality PDF’s this makes them significantly easier to read.

• Open the PDF with Preview
• From the ‘File’ menu, choose “Export”
• Click on the “Quartz Filter” drop-down menu and choose “Lightness Decrease”
• Choose “Save”

For a very practical example, I noticed this was sorely needed after downloading Guy Kawasaki’s freely available “The Macintosh Way” book, which is a great look at early Apple history. Unfortunately the PDF’s text is very light making it difficult to read, but the Quartz Filter mentioned above greatly helps this. The downside you may notice with some files (including The Macintosh Way) is an increase in noise. That noise is most noticeable on older PDF’s of scanned books or documents, and at times the trade-off may not be worth it.

The notifications revamp of iOS 5 makes it easier than ever to see new messages and mail, but if you receive sensitive or private emails on your iPhone or iPad, you may not want them showing up on the lock screen.

Those little email previews are easy to hide, here’s how:

• Open “Settings” and then tap on “Notifications”
• Tap on “Mail” and scroll to the bottom to “View in Lock Screen” and slide the adjuster to OFF

This will stop the email sender and subject info from being shown on the locked screen anytime a new email arrives. If you want to disable the notifications from appearing at the top of the screen as well, you’ll need to select the “None” option in the three side-by-side options at the top of that same settings screen.

For those who had this disabled to begin with, you can obviously reverse this process to turn the lockscreen email previews on, but be aware that anyone who picks up the iOS device can then see the basic sender and subjects of the newest email messages, even without entering a pass code.

Apple has posted the full video of the Steve Jobs memorial event, held on October 19, 2011 at the Cupertino California campus of Apple. The celebration featured a variety of prominent speakers, including Tim Cook, Bill Campbell, Jony Ive, and Al Gore, as well as several prominent musicians. It’s 81 minutes long and well worth watching for anyone interested in Jobs and his legacy.

Jobs parting advice to friend and Apple CEO Tim Cook? “Don’t ask what I would do. Don’t ask what I would want. Just do what’s right.”

You can watch it directly on Apple.com here

The video requires Safari in OS X & iOS, or QuickTime 7 on Windows, but will also load in Chrome or Firefox if you have Perian installed.

The full 60 Minutes segment on Steve Jobs, featuring official biographer Walter Isaacson, has been posted online by CBS. The segment focuses on Steve Jobs and the biography itself, which is widely available for purchase.

Steve Jobs was already gravely ill with cancer when he asked author Walter Isaacson to write his biography. Jobs told Isaacson to write a honest book – about his failings and his strengths

Isaacson conducted more than 40 taped interviews with the Apple co-founder and CEO – all of them done while Apple was on its ascent with one great product after another, but Jobs was on his decline, ill with a form of pancreatic cancer that would end his life at age 56.

The videos are embedded below and require Flash to watch online.
Read more »

If you’re set up to use iCloud with an iOS 5 device, you may have noticed that Photo Stream hosts your pictures online on iCloud.com and also syncs the pictures to the Photo Stream of your other devices. Apple will remove these pictures automatically after 30 days or after 1000 photos are uploaded, but if you want to delete them manually you can do that too:

Remove pictures from Photo Stream and iCloud

• Login to iCloud.com with your Apple ID
• Click on your name in the upper right corner of iCloud, seen in the screenshot above
• Click on “Advanced”
• Click on “Reset Photo Stream”

The warning below the reset button says “Reset Photo Stream to remove all photos from iCloud. This will not remove any photos from your devices or computers”, what this means is that if a picture was taken on an iPhone, it will continue to be in your standard camera roll in the Photos app, but will be deleted from the “Photo Stream” folder, and from iCloud.

If you’re concerned about the available space on iCloud, you may want to consider upgrading to one of the paid iCloud plans, which start at $20/year for 15GB of storage. Just remember that your photos (or apps and iTunes music) do not count against the free plans 5GB of iCloud storage capacity.

Enjoy this? Check out more iOS 5 tips in our archive.

Did you hate the sharp case edging on the MacBook Pro? They’re gone in the new models, instead there is a minor rounding of the newest MacBook Pro series case edges. While this may seem insignificant it’s actually a fairly big deal for anyone who is accustomed to the previous MacBook Pro’s sharp corners, which could be downright uncomfortable after extended use.

If this seems unimportant, keep in mind that some users actually went ahead to file their MacBook edges with nailfiles or otherwise to smooth out the edges themselves (see link, or video below).

In search of a good picture to demonstrate the difference, I stumbled across Marco Arment – the Instapaper guy – mentioning his new MacBook Pro 2011 vs the old one (shown up top), and low and behold he points out the same rounded edges. On the left is the previous MacBook Pro and on the right is the new 2011 model year, the difference is subtle, but apparently makes quite a difference in longterm use.

We’ve received a few emails about this change, the most recent from Rieky W:

I’ve just notice that my brand new macbook pro has a new edge profile. It is not as sharp as previous macbook pro, it’s comfortable to place my wrist now.

I know the sharp edges have prevented some users from upgrading or using the MacBook Pro’s longterm, so the corner adjustment may be important enough to sway a future purchase decision for some individuals, and is therefore worth mentioning.

Oh and here’s the popular video that showed users how to file the edges on an aluminum MacBook Pro themselves:
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For anyone who has used the existing iOS 5 jailbreak methods, a new package has been added to Cydia that allows for a semi-tethered reboot.

What the semitether means in practice is that you’ll be able to reboot an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch if you’re in a pinch without the assistance of redsn0w’s “Just Boot Tethered” option, but you won’t be able to use Safari, Mail, or Cydia until you complete the tethered boot with redsn0w and the iOS 5 device connected to a PC or Mac.

From the jailbroken iOS 5 device:

• Launch Cydia and tap on “Add”
• Add the following repository to Cydia:

http://thebigboss.org/semitether

• Using Cydia’s search, search for “SemiTether” and install it

Despite being called a “semi-tether”, it should still mostly be considered a tethered experience due to the app usage limitations. If you’re unfamiliar, you can read the difference between tethered vs untethered jailbreaks, but basically an untethered jailbreak is the most usable since it requires the least maintenance.

As previously mentioned, with SemiTether installed you’ll still need to boot the iOS device using the redsn0w app from Mac OS X or Windows. This is easily done by launching redsn0w, clicking on “Extras” and then choosing “Just Boot” option:

You can find the latest version of redsn0w here. An full untethered release is apparently in the works, we’ll keep you posted.

The newest version of redsn0w released by the iPhone Dev Team provides one of the fastest jailbreaks yet, and you’ll be finished in as little as 80 seconds. This is achieved by offloading some of the procedure to Cydia itself, which then takes longer to open on it’s first launch as the entire process is wrapped up.

If you haven’t jailbroken yet and you don’t mind the tethered booting process, you’ll enjoy the quickness offered by the new redsn0w. If you’ve already used a recent version of redsn0w to jailbreak iOS 5 then there isn’t any reason to download the newest version unless you intend to run it on other iOS hardware.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.9b7

This version supports iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 CDMA & GSM, iPod touch 3rd & 4th gen, and iPad 1. This does not work with iPhone 4S or iPad 2:

• Download Now (Mac)
• Download Now (Windows)

The process is fairly simple, but if you’re new to this you can follow our walkthrough on jailbreaking iOS 5 using redsn0w.

This sweet reader submitted Mac setup comes from Nasar A. and features a little bit of everything: an Apple Cinema Display is connected to the MacBook Pro 13″ on the right, a MacBook Air 11″ sits to the left, and an iPad 2 Wi-Fi and white iPhone 4 round out the mix.

Great Mac setup, thanks for sending this in Nasar!

Send in your own Apple & Mac gear shots to osxdailycom@gmail.com