If you make any customizations to Mission Control, or if you encounter obvious problems with how Desktops and apps are handled and assigned, you can restart Mission Control without having to reboot the entire Mac.
If you’re recording video chat or just troubleshooting problems with iChat, knowing the frame rate and other video statistics can be helpful information.
From the Video menu, pull down to “Connection Doctor”, then select the “Statistics” option from the pull-down menu to see the window shown up top. The group under “Local” is your own Mac, and below will be the screen name and statistics of the Mac you are video chatting with.
Frame rate typically hovers around 15 FPS on a high speed connection for both parties, which is slightly lower than what is usually seen in Facetime video calls on the same internet connections.
Apple will participate in a Black Friday sale this Friday, November 25, and some Apple Stores will open at midnight to accomodate anxious shoppers. For those who don’t want to visit a physical store, Apple’s Online Store will also feature sales for the one day sale event.
A large variety of accessories are also discounted, including Apple Wireless Keyboards, iPad smart covers, headsets, iPhone cases, and more.
The special one-day Apple shopping event.
This Friday, November 25.
Mark your calendar now, and come back to the Apple Online Store the day after Thanksgiving for the special one-day event. You’ll discover amazing iPad, iPod, and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.
Apple’s Black Friday sales are generally similar to educational discounts, except they apply to everyone. Last year, this meant $101 off iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models, a $41 savings off the iPad, and a $21 discount on the iPod touch. Other items often have minor discounts as well, but the iPhone typically retains the same pricing structure.
Black Friday is a shopping holiday that immediately follows the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA, while it’s generally US focused, many other countries also adopt sales on that date as well, and Apple has placed the same notification on most of their other worldwide sites, including UK, Australia, Canada, France, and Germany.
Check your local Apple Store hours if you plan on shopping in person, otherwise just visit the Apple Online Store on Friday.
Traveling abroad can quickly become frustrating when you attempt a search on Google.com and discover you are redirected to the local countries variant of Google, with the local language and all. This language redirect can happen when using a VPN or proxy as well. While this is convenient for things like local search and Maps, if you’re trying to find results in English while you’re in a non-english speaking country or on a non-english Google site, the redirect is annoying and can end up being outright confusing.
Fortunately, there’s a simple and quick solution to the automatic Google country redirect, insuring that you’ll always visit the one-and-only Google.com regardless of your current location on the globe.
Letters to Steve: Inside the E-mail Inbox of Apple’s Steve Jobs
is a new e-book from Mark Milian that catalogues the late CEO’s direct engagements with customers and fans through email.
This book is based on interviews with many of the customers and fans Jobs communicated with. These tales reveal the intricacies of how Jobs portrayed himself as likable and accessible through direct interaction with fans. He handled customer-service inquiries himself and carefully revealed hints about upcoming Apple products, guaranteeing headlines on blogs. However, some of these letters, when analyzed, provide a glimpse into his “reality distortion field,” in which he lobs insults, bends the truth and uses misdirection in order to manipulate anyone on the receiving end.
Some of the emails have been seen before on various forums and websites, but the book compiles them into an easily digestible format. It’s probably not going to be as compelling as the official biography, but for just a couple bucks it sounds enjoyable enough.
The book is offered exclusively through Amazon as a Kindle title, but you can read it on just about any hardware with the free Kindle app that works with iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, Windows Phone 7, Kindle Fire, and even Blackberry.
iCloud and iOS includes the ability to sync some iCloud data directly over a 4G, LTE, and 3G cellular connection when a wireless network isn’t available, assuming the iPhone or iPad has a cellular capability anyway.
We’ll show you how to toggle iCloud syncing over cellular in modern iOS as well as older iOS versions.
Apple will release an iPad 3 with a retina display running at 2048×1536 resolution next year, and the production of the IPS QXGA display is already underway by Samsung, Sharp, and LGD, according to a new report. Citing a confident analyst from DisplaySearch, CNET quotes “It’s happening–QXGA, 2048×1536. Panel production has started“.
Talk of an iPad 3 with a retina display isn’t anything new, theoretical discussion of such hardware started before the iPad 2 was even announced in 2011, with various pieces of evidence and conjecture surfacing early on.
Current iPad 3 rumors indicate the following possibilities:
There are also some rumors suggesting the iPad 2 may stick around as a lower cost model, with the iPad 3 becoming a “Pro” addition that would turn the iPad into more of a product family. Apple offering a lower cost iPad may very well depend on the success of competing lower priced tablets, which thus far have struggled to gain traction in the marketplace.
Later in the aforementioned CNET report is a reference to an “mini iPad” that would include a 7.85″ display. Such a device would supposedly come in the second half of 2012, but only if there’s adequate market interest:
“If there’s demand there. There’s no reason they wouldn’t build a 7.85-inch iPad,” Shim said.
Demand for smaller screened tablets may end up depending on the success of the low priced Amazon Kindle Fire. A recent report indicated that Apple’s iPad maintains a dominating lead in tablet market share, but suggested the newly released Kindle Fire will place direct pressure on the iPad. Amazon’s tablet could be a motivating factor for Apple to be exploring an iPad with a smaller display.
While rumors are fascinating to ponder, it’s wise to take all Apple rumors with a grain of salt, especially considering how incredibly inaccurate and imaginative the iPhone 5 speculation ended up being. In other words, don’t believe it until it’s announced by Apple.
If you signed up for iTunes Match and you’re seeing some peculiar icons in your music library alongside track names, don’t miss this chart put together by Apple that explains what each icon means, helping you troubleshoot the problem.
The icons include:
Why the cloud icons anyway? Because iTunes Match is part of iCloud, of course.
Apple started airing a new iPad 2 commercial titled “Love” last night, it follows the same theme set by past iPad 2 ads closely, and shows a variety of people using the device in different ways. Here’s the text:
For some, it’s a lifelong passion. For others, it’s something discovered yesterday. We all have things that speak to us. They drive us to get up early, and stay up late. Getting lost in the things we love, has never felt quite like this.
It’s another great iPad 2 ad, especially the ending shot of a kid using an iPad inside a homemade fort surrounded by plenty of dinosaurs. The full video is embedded below.
Quick Look is one of the better little features of Mac OS X, but a new hidden option in OS X makes QuickLook even better by allowing you to select, highlight, and copy text directly from the windows.
Apple will overtake HP as the worlds top PC vendor by mid-2012, thanks to tremendous iPad growth and increasingly strong Mac sales.
Currently, HP holds the top spot at 16% of the PC market, but Apple is already sitting very closely behind at 15%, and the anticipated release of iPad 3 early next year could very well be the product that pushes Apple into the lead. This data comes from research firm Canalys, who paints a rosy picture for Apple but does caution the newly released Kindle Fire from Amazon will place some pressure on future iPad sales.
Related, the Washington Post reports that Mac market share is at a 15 year high of 5.2%, growing 24.6% in a year, while the general PC market had comparatively slower growth of just 5.3% in the same period. Also, while the iPad controls more than 60% of the tablet market officially, real-world usage statistics show the iPad accounts for a dominating 97% of web traffic from tablets, suggesting competing tablets are
For the music lovers out there, DockArt takes the “Now Playing” notification concept a step further and actually replaces the iTunes Dock icon on the Mac with the currently playing albums cover art.
You can hide unwanted System Preferences from appearing in the control panel without actually removing them.
This is a helpful distinction for setting up other user accounts or just for hiding System Prefs you never access and no longer need:
The iPhone can be set to always hide the dialing phones number from the recipients caller ID’s. That means that if you turn off the “Show My Caller ID” feature, every call you make will not show up on the phone number you are calling, offering additional privacy to phone calls made from your iPhone.
How this works is by initiating every phone call with the prefix *67 to force the number to appear as “Blocked” or “Unknown” on the receiving caller ID, which in iOS is handled by a little toggle that automatically appends phone calls made from the iPhone with the blocking prefix. This is helpful for many reasons, whether you’re making anonymous phone calls, or even if you just want to be sent to someones voicemail, since most people don’t answer a blocked call these days.
Turning this feature on with your iPhone is quite simple, here’s what you’ll want to do:
Read more »
Ever set a desktop background picture on the Mac and have no idea where the original wallpaper image is stored in OS X? Maybe you set an image from the web and lost it, or maybe you’ve wondered where that default background image is stored so you can share it with your iOS device or another Mac? Me too, and there’s a way to quickly find the original file location of what is set as the desktop wallpaper on a Mac.
By using a defaults write debug command, you can display the full path to the currently active desktop image, directly printed on the wallpaper itself.
Greg Joswiak is a Vice President of Marketing at Apple who focuses on promoting the iOS lineup. After working at Apple for 20 years, he has come up with four lessons that can help explain Apple’s incredible success. Shared at a recent speech in Cambridge, they are quoted below from Wall Street Journal:
Focus—”It means saying no, not saying yes. We do very few things at Apple. We are $100bn in revenue with very few products. There are only so many grade A players. If you spread yourself out over too many things, none of them will be great.”
Simplicity—”Make complex things simple. A lot of people think it means take something simple and leave it at its core essence. But it isn’t that. When you start to build something, it quickly becomes really complex. But that is when a lot of people stop. If you really know your product and the problems, then you can take something that is complex and then make it simple.”
Courage—”Courage drives a lot of decisions in business. Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you. You don’t build a product just because everyone else has one. ”
Best—”If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it. You need that differentiation. At Apple if we can’t be the best then we are not interested in it.
Sounds like the spirit and influence of Steve Jobs to me.
Using a defaults write command, the iTunes Dock icon can be set to display a “Now Playing” song and artist pop-up that transitions in and out and music starts. It’s a nice addition, particularly if you’re playing songs from a shared network playlist and have iTunes hidden in the background.
Stanford University is on a roll lately offering a wide variety of free online courses to anyone, either through iTunes U on topics like iOS 5 Development, or through self-contained courses conducted entirely from the web that are free to enroll in. The latter is the case here, with Stanford offering 10 new online courses that are completely free to the public. Each class is taught by a renowned Stanford professor and is focused on technology and computer science, although two concentrate on the entrepreneurial side of things as well.
All classes start January 2012, so enroll now if you want to start learning from one of the best universities in the world:
You won’t get college credit for completing the courses unless you’re a Stanford student, but they will provide you with a statement of accomplishment and a performance rating compared to other online students, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to learn something.
Free courses from Stanford University is a freakishly good deal, where undergrad tuition alone is about $40,000 a year!
Stanford has offered this style of online learning in the past, recently offering a free online “Intro to Databases” course conducted on the web. That class is wrapping up so if you enrolled in that one, these classes are a great opportunity to further relevant knowledge.
