Shopping for kids holiday gifts is notoriously difficult, the last thing you want to do is buy them something they don’t want, or worse yet, something that isn’t “cool”. Thankfully kids are getting easier to shop for (for us geeks anyway), because what do they want? Gadgets, and lots of them. Dominating the top of … Read More

You can quickly search the iTunes Store and iOS App Store from anywhere within iTunes, all you have to do is hold down the Option key while hitting Return in the standard search box. That’s really all there is to it, with Option+Return you search all purchasable content through the online stores whether its an … Read More

The highly anticipated official version of Minecraft for iPhone and iPad has been released to the iOS App Store. For those who don’t know, Minecraft is a virtual sandbox building game with a focus on creating your own worlds and structures that are subject to in-game physics. Thanks to basic electrical circuits and logic gates, … Read More

For the truly dedicated, you can now run Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim directly in Mac OS X thanks to the Porting Team’s unofficial Mac port of the freakishly popular game. The game is played either through a Cider wrapper or Wineskin, the latter being easier but the former apparently having better performance, but in both … Read More

If you don’t want to deal with dual booting between Lion and Snow Leopard, another option is to run Mac OS X Lion in a virtual machine atop an older 10.6 Snow Leopard installation. This is not supposed to work with 10.6 without a quirky configuration, but it does, and it’s easy to do. For … Read More

The late Steve Jobs has always been unapologetic about his usage of LSD, openly proclaiming his experiences with the drug were some of the “most important things I have done in my life” and even criticizing Bill Gates for not indulging in the substance. Those statements didn’t go unnoticed by Albert Hofman, the man who … Read More

The Kindle Fire is out, but if you’re like me you’ve sat on the sidelines to wait for reviews and videos of performance before pulling the buy trigger. Those are starting to appear now, and while it’s obvious the iPad 2 blows the Kindle Fire away in speed and overall utility, the Fire holds up … Read More

Rather than rearranging all of the System Preferences to be sorted alphabetically, you can access a quick pull-down menu of all the panels that is sorted by name. Try it yourself, access System Preferences from the  Apple menu, then click and hold on “Show All” to see the full list of preference panes available sorted by … Read More

If you don’t have a spare Bluetooth keyboard to connect to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch with, why not use a Mac? This seems like a no brainer of an idea, but until the Mac app Type2Phone came along, I haven’t heard of any such solution. The app works by pairing a Mac to … Read More

Apple has seeded the first release of Mac OS X 10.7.3 to developers, the build is 11D16 and focuses on iCloud document storage, in addition to changes to Address Book, iCal, and Mail. The update weighs in at 633MB and is downloadable through the Mac Developer Center to registered devs for both OS X Lion … Read More

In modern versions of Mac OS X, repairing permissions from the Disk Utility app doesn’t repair the users file permissions, oddly this has to be done separately on a per-user basis. If you’re running into problems with Spotlight not finding documents or folders, or if you’re having other issues that can usually be fixed with … Read More

If your iPad or iPhone is running slow after updating to iOS 5 you’re not alone, for many the update has made their device feel sluggish, with taps taking longer to register, stalls between swipes, and just a general noticeable decrease in performance. This seems to effect all iOS devices too, indicating it’s not necessarily … Read More

Stanford University’s School of Engineering has released full HD videos and slides of their Fall 2011 “Developing Apps for iOS” course. The lectures and lessons for CS193P are focused on iOS 5 and downloadable for free from iTunes University, offering a great look at beginning iOS development through the eyes of a world class engineering … Read More

Component suppliers have informed DigiTimes that Apple is already gathering pieces to a 15″ ultra-thin notebook that is set to debut as early as the second quarter of 2012. While DigiTimes cautions they don’t know if the new laptop is a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, Apple openly promotes the current MacBook Air lineup as … Read More

If you want to quickly make a RAM disk for use on your Mac, you could create one manually through the command line, or you can make it even easier by downloading TmpDisk for Mac OS X. The open source application uses a menu bar item to quickly make ram disks from anywhere and of … Read More

Using AirDrop is the quickest way to transfer files between two Macs, even if they’re not on the same network or if there is no Wi-Fi network available to connect to. This is done by creating an instant Ad-Hoc network between the Macs, and there is practically no configuration required. For those who have never … Read More

iTunes Match has been launched in the USA by Apple with the release of iTunes 10.5.1. The Match service costs $24.99 a year to store your entire music library within iCloud allowing you to stream it to any iOS 5+ iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, or Windows PC, regardless of where your music has come from. … Read More

You can quickly add or remove any items from showing up in Notification Center in iOS on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch by modifying your allowed apps through the central system settings. This isn’t the same method as disabling an item like the stock ticker, but it’s faster if you want to adjust several … Read More