Apple has released iBooks Author, an easy to use app for Mac OS X that lets anyone create interactive multi-touch books for the iPad, these can be published on the iBookstore or iTunes U and offered as free or paid titles.

iBooks Author should be a big hit with both small and large publishers, teachers, and anyone else who wants to become a published eBook author. While the original aim is the educational market, made obvious by all six templates being textbooks, iBooks Author really has much wider appeal and could very well start an independent iPad book publishing craze on the iBookstore just like the App Store did years ago for apps. I’ve been playing around with the app all morning and it really is nice, with surprisingly powerful tools put into a simple to use interface.

iBooks Author is a free download and requires Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later and iTunes 10.5.3 or later:

• Download iBooks Author from the Mac App Store

One unfortunate obstacle for publishing that is beyond Apple’s control: ISBN numbers. ISBN’s are a series of numbers sold by a monopolistic organization who charges a highly inflated $125 for a single number, or sells them in packages at $1000. These numbers required to sell a book through the iBookstore (or anywhere else for that matter). Other than that, there are no fees attached, but Apple does take their customary 30% of each book sale to provide the iBooks service and store.

If you’re interested in the iBooks publishing program, don’t miss the iBooks Author Gallery and check out Apple’s FAQ on the matter.

iTunes 10.5.3 has been released, the update includes support for the new iBooks 2 and iTunes U initiatives on iOS, and allows syncing of interactive iBooks to an iPad. The download weighs in around 100MB and overall it’s a fairly minor iTunes update, but it’s worth downloading to keep on top of things, and it may be required for the next iOS update.

Download iTunes 10.5.3

There are three ways to get the latest iTunes:

• Download from Apple
• Get it through Software Update
• Update through iTunes

Downloading from Apple is the best way to get the update at the moment, with iTunes not yet informing all users that the update is available.

The installation notes are brief, focusing on iBooks:

iTunes 10.5.3 allows you to sync interactive iBooks textbooks to your iPad. These Multi-Touch textbooks are available for purchase from the iTunes Store on your Mac or from the iBookstore included with iBooks 2 on your iPad.

iBooks textbooks are created with iBooks Author — now available as a free download on the Mac App Store.

Stacks are a Dock feature in Mac OS X which allows for an easy way to see the contents of Applications, Documents, Downloads, and whatever other folder placed into the Dock. There are a few different ways to view the Stacks, which appear on the right side of the Mac Dock, like grid, automatic, list, fan, etc. This trick will allow you to quickly change the icon size of those icons when in the “Grid” view of Stacks.

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Have an older generation iPhone 3G or 2G? If so, you’re stuck on older legacy iOS versions with limited features and sluggish speeds. But not anymore with Whited00r, which installs a custom iOS build on the device to help bring it into the modern age.

Whited00r 5.1 is basically an unofficial custom made iOS build that includes many of the iOS 5 features and has been optimized to run on the older hardware. With Whited00r, you’ll get multitasking, wallpapers, folders, and variations of Reminders and Newsstand, and it’s claimed to be much faster than the default iOS 4 installations that drag the iPhone 3G down. Unfortunately there’s no Notification Center, and you will also lose the native App Store, meaning to install apps you’ll have to use iTunes or Safari. If the trade offs are worth it to you, installing Whited00r is very easy for anyone familiar with using IPSW files.

Installing Whited00r 5.1 on iPhone 3G/2G & iPod touch 1G/2G

This works for iPhone 3G, iPhone 2G, iPod touch 1g and 2g. Backup the iOS device beforehand, and proceed at your own risk:

• Download the appropriate version of Whited00r from here
• Unzip the custom IPSW package to somewhere easy to find
• Launch iTunes and hold down Option (Mac) or Shift (Windows) and click on “Restore”, now select the Whited00r IPSW you just downloaded
• Let the process continue and the iPhone will reboot on it’s own

After the iPhone has rebooted, do not restore from a backup, instead select to set up a new device. This is recommended to avoid any conflicts.

This video demonstrates the speed of an iPhone 3G running Whited00r 5.1 compared to an iPhone 3GS running iOS 5:
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Apple has provided another beta build of OS X Lion 10.7.3 to developers, just a week after the last build 11D42. The areas of focus remain the same, iCloud Document Storage, Address Book, iCal, Mail, Spotlight and Safari, but has no known issues and the quick turnaround for a new build suggests the final release is imminent.

11D46 weighs in around 1GB for the delta update, and 1.3GB for the combo. Both can be downloaded by registered Mac developers from the Dev Center.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the OS X 10.7.3 public release showed up sometime this week, maybe even tomorrow after Apple holds their education event in NYC.

All versions of Mac OS X from Lion onward (meaning Mountain Lion, Mavericks, etc) can display messages that require acknowledgement prior to the standard login screen appearing on a Mac. For administrators, this allows a user agreement or acceptable use policy to be displayed before users can login, and for personal use it lets users include a customized message before logging into a Mac.
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SOPA and PIPA are two terrible internet censorship bills that are dangerously close to passage in the USA, and Wikipedia has blacked out their web site in protest.

…but what if you really need to use Wikipedia today? What if you’re a student and your paper was due yesterday and you need to do research? What if you just want to go on a Wikipedia binge?

There are several methods to use and access Wikipedia during the SOPA blackout:

1. Google for a wikipedia page and then quickly hit the “Stop” button to prevent the blackout javascript loading
2. Use Mac OS X’s built-in Dictionary app
3. Disabling Javascript

The first method is self explanatory and is all about speed, just quickly hitting the “X” in any modern browser should cease the javascript from loading at all. The other option is to simply disable javascript for en.wikipedia.org:

For Safari:

• Open Safari Preferences
• Click on “Advanced” and check the box next to “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
• Pull down the “Develop” menu and select “Disable Javascript”
• Load Wikipedia and browse as usual

For Google Chrome:

• Open Google Chrome’s Preferences
• Click on “Under the Hood” and then “Content Settings”
• Find Javascript then click “Manage Exceptions”
• Type “en.wikipedia.org” into the box and pull down the contextual menu, selecting “Block”
• Load Wikipedia as usual

Mac only: Use Dictionary App
Open Dictionary.app, found in /Applications/ folder, and you can use Wikipedia freely. Thanks for pointing this out Karl!

Remember to reenable Javascript when you’re done, and to join the fight against SOPA to stop internet censorship.

Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. This tutorial will show you how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive in Mac OS X, we’ll do this using the Spotlight control panel, and we’ll cover an alternative method as well just in case you want to take a different approach.
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If you’ve tried to take a screenshot of a screen saver before, you’ve noticed that the keyboard shortcuts disturb the screensaver and wake the Mac up. The secret to taking screen shots of a running screen saver is to use the “Test” button while holding down half of the key sequence, here’s how:

• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and click on “Desktop and Screen Saver”
• Click the “Screen Saver” tab, and select the screen saver you want to capture a picture of
• Hold down the Command+Shift keys, then click on “Test”
• While still holding Command+Shift, press the “3” key to complete the sequence, then let go of all keys

The screenshot will appear on the desktop as usual.

Another approach is to take a timed screen shot using Grab or the command line, but the “test” method is usually quicker.

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You’ve probably heard the talk of AT&T throttling heavy data users, but now we can see it’s effects ourselves and it’s probably worse than you thought. AppAdviceDaily put together the video up top, skip in about a minute ahead and you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of download speeds on a throttled vs non-throttled iPhone 4S. The speed difference is gigantic, as low as 0.07mbps on the throttled account vs 1.8mbps on the normal account.

Throttling is only supposed to impact the top 5% of data consumers and unofficial tetherers on AT&T on Verizon. These users typically get a warning text message notifying they are using too much of the data they paid for:

The threshold for being throttled is alleged to vary widely, with some reports saying it’s as low as 1GB and others suggesting it’s over 4GB. Once you’re throttled, you’re basically kicked off the 3G network and stuck on the painfully sluggish 2G EDGE network.

If you’re concerned about this, check data use on AT&T and Verizon by logging into your account. For those close to their allotted data limit, it may be a good idea to disable data or at least turn off 3G until the next billing cycle.

Retrieving public URL’s from Dropbox takes several steps, but Bloodrop makes it easy. Just drag a file onto the app and it will automatically upload to Dropbox and then copy the public link to your clipboard. It’s that simple.

Before grabbing Bloodrop, you’ll want to have Growl (or the free Growl Fork) installed so you can be notified when a file is shared and the URL is ready.

• Download Bloodrop at Google Code

Unzip Bloodrop and copy it to the Applications folder, then launch it to configure with your Dropbox ID and destination folder for shared files. Now put the Bloodrop.app into the Dock and it’s ready to accept files.
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If you want an iPhone to appear as brand new from a software standpoint, you need to reset the device to it’s factory settings. This is ideal if you plan on selling an iPhone or are going to transfer ownership of the device to another individual, and it can also be a very helpful troubleshooting technique for some persistent iOS based software problems. After you have reset the iPhone, it will reboot as if it was brand new and go through the standard new setup procedure that all new iOS devices go through, and can then either be set up as new or restored from a backup.
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FaceTime has long been expected to support video calls over 3G networks, but thus far it hasn’t happened without a jailbreak. Blame it on the carriers, Apple, the rain, maybe 3G is too slow, or maybe it will be a feature for upcoming 4G LTE iPad and iPhone hardware… who knows, but regardless you can use a little loophole to initiate FaceTime video chat over 3G connections without the need for jailbreaking.

• Enable Personal Hotspot on an iPhone
• Connect to that Wi-Fi hotspot with another FaceTime capable iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad

Suddenly you can make video calls over 3G.

Not the best solution because it requires additional hardware, but apparently it works.

Thanks to Av for the tip

An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature isn’t enabled by default for all Mac users. If your Mac is missing the “Encode” menu options, or you want to adjust them, toggling the menu encoder is very simple.

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Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of the media encoding abilities of Mac OS X that are built directly into the Finder. With this, you can convert many popular movie formats into audio tracks, including video files of .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4 format. The resulting converted audio track is a 256kbps m4a file, which can be further adjusted if desired.

Using the video to audio conversion tools in OS X are very easy:
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An updated version of the redsn0w jailbreak utility has been made available to resolve a prominent bug with iBooks and also includes other minor bugfixes that could cause crashing. Versioned as Redsn0w 0.9.10b4, the new release continues to be an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 for the iPhone 4 & 3GS, iPod touch 3rd & 4th gen, and iPad 1, and does not provide support to any other devices.

Fixing the iBooks problem for already jailbroken devices is simple enough, all that is required is to download and run Redsn0w 0.9.10b4 over an existing iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak to apply the fix.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.10b4

• Download now (Mac OS X)
• Download now (Windows)

Alternatively, the Corona untether has also been updated which applies the same iBooks patch without the need for using redsn0w again. Corona can be downloaded on any jailbroken device for free through Cydia.

Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.
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Need to quickly restart the Finder in Mac OS X? Perhaps for a change to take effect with a defaults string, or to resolve a simple error or problem? Restarting the Finder does just what it sounds like, it quits the Finder application and then re-opens it again.

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