Pixelmator for Mac has long been a killer photo editing app. But I’ll cut straight to the point, Pixelmator is the single best Photoshop alternative for the Mac platform at it’s price point, and at just $29.99 (App Store link) it’s much more affordable for the average joe than Adobe Photoshops whopping $500 tag.
Apple is working on a real television set (iTV?) that utilize the artificial intelligence agent Siri as the controller, according to a new report from The New York Times. They go so far as to say prototypes are already underway, and that “it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when“, suggesting that Apple may announce the product in 2012 with a release of the TV by 2013.
A Siri based remote control system is described as follows:
It’s the stuff of science fiction. You sit on your couch and rather than fumble with several remotes or use hand gestures, you simply talk: “Put on the last episode of Gossip Girl.” “Play the local news headlines.” “Play some Coldplay music videos.” Siri does the rest.
Of course this experience goes beyond just playing TV shows or the local news. As the line between television programming and Web content continues to erode, a Siri-powered television would become more necessary. You aren’t going to want to flip through file folders or baskets of content, checking off what you want. Telling Siri to “play videos of cute cats falling asleep” would return an endless YouTube stream of adorable napping fur balls.
The NY Times mentions they first heard of plans for an Apple television a year ago, and that the project has been in some stage of development since 2007 when the iPhone and first Apple TV box was released. Why the wait until 2013? Other than refining the intelligence of Siri, Apple has been waiting for large flat panel displays to become cheap enough to be reasonably priced for the consumer.
News and rumors of an Apple television set have exploded over the last week after comments made by the recent Steve Jobs to his biographer proclaimed that he had ‘cracked’ the TV, which the NYT says is a reference to using Siri AI as a replacement for the remote. This was soon followed up by reports that the creator of iTunes is leading the project.
Siri is currently only available to iPhone 4S users, but is widely expected to make appearances across the Apple lineup down the road, including in Mac OS X and the iPad.
Despite the relative ease of updating to iOS 5 through iTunes either directly or by IPSW, some users are still reporting problems.
In some cases this is user caused (error 3194 is easy to fix as is error 3200 & 3002), but if you’re continuing to have issues it could be related to a firewall or a handful of other causes.
For those cases, here’s another approach to manually update to iOS 5. Basically you just throw the downloaded IPSW file into the default IPSW location and have iTunes update without downloading, this seems to work for nearly everyone encountering problems.
Microsoft has put out this interesting concept video to demonstrate what they think the future of computing will be like. The iPad influence is clear, and in short, everything is a touch screen or tablet, complete with holograms and other things that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie. The best part? There’s none of that ugly ribbon UI either! Microsoft describes the video as follows:
Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.
You have to hand it to Microsoft for thinking out of the box here. Presumably Windows 8 is the first step in this touch-everything direction of active tiles and an entirely new UI. You can get a preview of that now by installing Windows 8 in VMWare or VirtualBox right on your Mac, the developer preview is free while in beta although it’s fairly boring without a touch screen.
Looks great, but until they’re shipping real iPad competitors running an OS baked in Redmond, consider this as a purely theoretical part of the future.
Video and several screenshots are below:
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Spaces are the the Virtual Desktop feature in OS X, and it’s part of the Mission Control window management system on the Mac. If you’ve opened a few desktop spaces that you no longer need access to, you can close them.
Perhaps the fastest way and most efficient means of closing a desktop space in Mission Control for Mac OS X is by using the option key. Here’s how it works:
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Want to sleep in? You can quickly turn off all your alarms on the iPhone by telling Siri simply to “turn off all alarms“, Siri will then confirm the alarm change plus show you the alarm settings. Oversleeping due to Siri likely won’t be a valid excuse to get out of school or work for the day, so it’s best to save this one for the weekend.
More useful during the work week, you can also tell Siri to turn on all alarms and Siri will display the scheduled alarm times:
This little tip was sent in by Jeff S by way of FinerThingsIn, thanks for sending this in.
Fire up your DVR and get ready for some couch potato action next week, a documentary about Steve Jobs titled “One Last Thing” will air on PBS this November 2nd at 10:00 PM. The film is said to be an hour long, and will include interviews with Jobs himself, as well as his colleagues and friends. Here’s the official description:
ONE LAST THING takes an unflinching look at Jobs’s difficult, controlling disposition, and offers unique insights into what made him tick. While there has been near-universal agreement that Steve Jobs was a great innovator in business and technology, ONE LAST THING looks into why he was so great. What were the influences that shaped his character? What drove him from such humble beginnings to the heights of success?
Featuring interviews with, among others, Ronald Wayne, co-founder of Apple with Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Ross Perot, who invested in NeXT Computer when Jobs was running out of money; Walt Mossberg, principal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who interviewed Jobs every year from 2003-2010; will.i.am, frontman and producer for The Black Eyed Peas, whose “I Gotta Feeling” currently ranks as the most downloaded iTunes song ever; Dean Hovey, designer of the original mouse for Apple; Robert Cringely, writer and host of the PBS series TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS: THE RISE OF ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES; Robert Palladino, calligraphy professor at Reed College, whose classes Jobs credited with inspiring his typography design for the Mac; and Bill Fernandez, who introduced Jobs and Wozniak in Sunnyvale, where the three hung out in his father’s garage and tinkered with electronics.
In a never-before-broadcast interview from 1994, Jobs expounds on his philosophy of life: “You tend to get told that the world is the way it is, but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact; and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
In his many successful Apple product launches, Jobs developed his own catchphrase to tease his audiences. Appearing to reach the end of a presentation, he would then announce to the expectant crowd: “Oh — one more thing,” before unveiling his latest design achievement. This documentary exploration of the life of one of America’s most successful innovators and entrepreneurs pays homage to his famous presentational skills and his unique talents.
This is one of many shows to cover Steve Jobs in the wake of his passing. If you’re a fan of the subject matter, it’s hard to get enough of this stuff.
You can read the press release or check your local listings for more information.
Want to tile a wallpaper on the Mac? A tiling wallpaper will repeat all over the desktop background, just like a tile is repeated in flooring or a wall. Well, you’re in luck because modern Mac OS X versions can do tile a wallpaper image, just like you could do way back in ancient Mac OS releases and all other versions too.
But how you tile a desktop image depends slightly on versions of system software, and on the size of the image itself.
Walter Isaacson was on Charlie Rose this week to discuss Steve Jobs and the writing of his biography
. If you’re interested in Steve Jobs and his legacy, this is another great interview filled with interesting tidbits. It’s arguably better than the recent 60 Minutes segment and at nearly an hour long, touches on a fairly wide variety of topics related to Jobs.
The discussion between Isaacson and Rose also clarifies some of the soundbites that you’ve undoubtedly heard related to Mr Jobs cancer treatments, the reason the book was written, the naming of Apple, and what other industries that Steve would have likely disrupted had he survived another 7 years (including one I haven’t found mentioned online… yet).
This is the second recent Charlie Rose episode to cover Steve Jobs, the first being a discussion on Jobs with various Silicon Valley executives and friends just a few days after his passing.
The Mission Control “Spaces” feature in OS X is essentially a virtual desktop environment. A nice way to differentiate each individual desktop Space is to go about assigning different wallpapers to different desktop spaces.
Setting unique wallpaper backgrounds per desktop is easy in Mac OS X now, here’s the quickest way to do this:
Don’t want to see the Stock Ticker and market details on the iOS Notification Center every time you swipe down to view it on your iPhone or iPad? Many users don’t, and this was one of the first questions a friend asked me after updating to iOS and discovering market details as a prominent feature of the Notifications panel. So if the stock market and movements don’t play any meaningful role in your daily life, here’s how to remove the stocks widget from all versions of iOS and clean up your notification panel a bit.
Anyone can buy an unlocked iPhone 4S right now if you are willing to pay the full price of the device, meaning the lower carrier subsidized contract 4S prices do not apply. The unlock applies to both the GSM and CDMA carriers currently being sold, available at the following price points:
The iPhone 4S GSM SIM card slot is unlocked when the full retail price is paid at an Apple Store. In the case of the CDMA carriers selling the device like US carriers Sprint and Verizon, the Micro SIM card slot is also unlocked and will support other GSM carriers. The carrier unlock allows the iPhone to be used on another US carrier like T-Mobile, or allows for cheap roaming abroad with the purchase of a local SIM card, with the other benefit being that you are not tied to a contract with any single US cell provider.
You can verify the unlock immediately when the iPhone 4S is first connected to iTunes, where the following message is displayed:
Initial reports indicated the unlocked 4S would be sold in November, which may suggest a change in policy at some point when paying the full out-of-contract price.
Buying an unlocked iPhone at full price is typical outside of the USA, but in the USA was somewhat of an anomaly until earlier this year when Apple started selling the iPhone 4 unlocked at the full retail price. That has since translated to the iPhone 4S, and presumably will carry on with future iPhone releases as well.
Want to see recent items on a per app basis? The Mac makes this easy with a variety of ways, but perhaps one of the most convenient involves a simple tap gesture.
This is particularly fast and simple, and here’s how it works.
Forget what Software Updates you’ve installed on a Mac? Maybe you need to check if a particular Mac workstation has installed a particular software update? With a little work, you can easily check which particular software updates have been installed before in Mac OS X.
We’ll show you several different ways to get a list of software updates installed onto a Mac. How you can get a list of installed software updates on a Mac depends partially on the version of MacOS / Mac OS X system software installed on the Mac. There are a few different approaches, some which work on all versions of Mac system software, and others which are version dependent, as you’ll see.
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 scanned files or dubious quality PDF’s this makes them significantly easier to read.
The process of increasing contrast and sharpening text in a PDF is made quite simple with Preview app on the Mac, we’ll walk through how to accomplish this.
Notification Center in iOS makes it easier than ever to see when new messages and mail comes in to your device, but if you receive sensitive or private emails on your iPhone or iPad, you may not want them showing up on the lock screen at all.
If you’d rather not see any alert or notification showing up on the lock screen of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can make a quick settings adjustment to hide the new mail notifications from showing on the locked screen of iOS devices completely.
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.
