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 the most desired electronic gifts are three Apple products: the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Here’s the full list as polled from Neilsen:

Most Desired Electronics Among Kids for Holidays 2011

For kids aged 6 through 12:

• iPad – 44% want one
• iPod touch – 30% want one
• iPhone – 27% want one
• Computer – 25% want one
• Tablet computer (non-iPad) – 25% want one – Kindle Fire is $199
• Nintendo 3DS – 25% want one
• Kinect for Xbox 360
• Nintendo DS / DSi /DS Lite
• TV Set
• Smartphone (non-iPhone)
• Sony PlayStation 3
• Blu-Ray Player – (note the Playstation 3 is also a blu-ray player)
• E-Readers
• Microsoft Xbox 360
• Other mobile phone
• Nintendo Wii
• PlayStation Move
• PlayStation Portable (PSP)

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 iPhone app, movie, song, artist, anything, rather than the iTunes local media library.

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, some extremely elaborate creations can be built in your own virtual world, it’s kind of like virtual Legos on crack, and is known to be very addictive.

• Get Minecraft – Pocket Edition for iPhone and iPad (App Store link)

Here’s the official description from the App Store:

Imagine it, build it. Create worlds on the go with Minecraft – Pocket Edition

Minecraft – Pocket Edition allows you to build on the go. Use blocks to create masterpieces as you travel, hangout with friends, sit at the park, the possibilities are endless. Move beyond the limits of your computer and play Minecraft everywhere you go.

* Randomized worlds
* Build anything you can imagine
* Build with 36 different kinds of blocks
* Invite and play with friends to your world (local wireless network)
* Save multi-player worlds on your own phone

There are a ton of nonsensical knock-off titles trying to capitalize on the Minecraft name on the App Store, so be sure you either click directly through a verified link or search for “Minecraft – Pocket Edition” , making sure it’s by Mojang.

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 cases you’ll need to own a Windows copy of the game to get it working (frankly the game is going to run a lot better natively in Windows through Boot Camp anyway), leaving this in the realm of determined die-hards.

Neither the Cider or Wineskin methods are the easiest thing in the world to get working, and if you have no experience with this sort of thing you should probably just buy the game for Xbox 360, PS3, or stay with booting into Windows on your Mac. Nonetheless, if you’re committed, here’s what you’ll need:
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 the record, this also works in OS X Lion if you want to run a VM of Lion atop Lion for testing purposes or whatever, that is also perfectly acceptable in the EULA.

Requirements:

• VMWare (free 30 day trial)
• Mac OS X Lion installer app (re-download it from the Mac App Store)

VirtualBox and Parallels may work also if you’re installing Lion on top of an existing OS X Lion base, but it doesn’t seem to work with Lion on 10.6.

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 created LSD in a Swiss lab in the 1930’s, who wrote Steve Jobs a letter in 2007 asking for help to promote the chemical for therapeutic studies. That letter was obtained by Yahoo News, and is repeated below:

Dear Mr. Steve Jobs,

Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple Computers and your personal spiritual quest. I’m interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.

I’m writing now, shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser’s proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness. This will become the first LSD-assisted psychotherapy study in over 35 years, and will be sponsored by MAPS.

I hope you will help in the transformation of my problem child into a wonder child.

Sincerely
Albert Hofmann

The last line of the letter relates to Albert Hofmann’s famous book “My Problem Child“, which discusses his accidental discovery of LSD and how its misuse drove it to become illegal and eventually fuel the 1960’s counterculture movement.

There’s no word on if Steve Jobs responded to the request. Albert Hofman passed away a year after sending the letter in 2008, and Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011.

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 reasonably well considering it’s just $199.

How does it stack up to the iPad 2? The video below from iDo is a pretty fair comparison for some basic tests of booting, loading web pages, and streaming videos:

We also embedded The Verges video review of the Fire below, it’s not a comparison but it’s a good quick look at the device:
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 their name.

A large menu containing an alphabetically sorted list of preference panels will show up, and you can select any from here.

The same preference menu is also available from the “View” menu bar, so you can use whichever approach to finding system prefs is most convenient.

This trick is limited to somewhat new versions of Mac OS, from Mac OS X Lion and newer, including all the way up to MacOS Monterey.

Thanks for the tip and screenshot James

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 the iOS device (technically it works with Androids too), which is fooled into thinking the Mac is a Bluetooth keyboard, then all you have to do is type in the Mac app and it appears in iOS. Smart huh?

• Type2Phone costs $4.99 on the Mac App Store (App Store link)

Requirements for using Type2Phone are fairly basic: you’ll obviously need a Bluetooth enabled Mac and iOS device that is set to discoverable, and Mac OS X 10.6.6 and iOS 3.2 or later. Then all you need to do is launch the app on the Mac, and from the iPhone/iPad tap on Settings > General > Bluetooth to enable and then select the visible Mac to pair the iOS device to.

Other than the ability to use a Mac keyboard as a way to type on the iPad or iPhone, you can also use the app to finally copy text from Mac OS X and paste it directly to an app on the iOS device. These two features are so useful that it makes you wish Apple had included them in iOS and Mac OS X directly, it just makes sense.
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 Client and Server. Apple recommends that users install the update only on Macs they don’t mind erasing, warning that downgrading back to the stable 10.7.2 build is impossible (although this is usually easy through Time Machine backups).

We’re hoping the vague “iCloud document storage” changes are to officially include native iCloud file syncing in Mac OS X, although there is no word on that yet. If you’re interested in reading the official release notes, you can check them out on 9to5mac.

For reference, Mac OS X 10.7.2 was released on October 12, 2011 and included iCloud support in addition to bringing a variety of fixes and adjustments to Lion.

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 a permissions repair, this can often resolve those problems.

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 a hardware issue but a software one.

There are two solutions that are both relatively simple, for best results you need to do both:

• Update to iOS 5.0.1 – if you haven’t done so already, do it manually or through OTA
• Back up and restore the iPad or iPhone after updating to iOS 5.0.1 – do this if you’re already running 5.0.1 and it feels slow, this works, we walk you through the process below

The iOS 5.0.1 update seems to make a difference in performance because whatever was constantly running in the background draining battery (location services?) was presumably causing the devices to run slow as well. This was partially resolved with some battery tips that involved turning off tons of features, but the 5.0.1 update helps for most users and is thus highly recommended in and of itself. Even after installing the update though, some users report sluggish behavior and in that case you’ll want to backup and restore.

Restoring the iOS Device to Resolve Speed Issues

How long this takes depends on how much media is on the iPhone or iPad and how large the backups are:

• Connect the iPad, iPhone, iPod to the computer and open iTunes
• Right-click on the device and choose “Back Up” and let the process finish, this may take a while
• When the backup is finished, click on “Restore” (you can also select to back up from here) and let the device be wiped clean
• Once the iOS device is completely restored and in it’s original state, go back to iTunes and right-click on the device name again, this time selecting “Restore from Backup” – this also may take a while but let it run

After the device is finished restoring from the newly created backup, it should be significantly faster than it was before running the latest version of iOS.

We’ve tried this on a variety of iOS devices and it seems to work wonders, did it work for you?

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 school.

• iTunes U & Stanford: iPad and iPhone Application Development (iTunes link)

If you haven’t downloaded any courses from iTunes before, a new section in the iTunes Library sidebar titled “iTunes U” will appear to contain the lessons.

Stanford’s description of the course is as follows:

Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone platform using the iPhone SDK. User interface designs for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multitouch technologies. Object-oriented design using model-view-controller pattern, memory management, Objective-C programming language. iPhone APIs and tools including Xcode, Interface Builder and Instruments on Mac OS X. Other topics include: core animation, bonjour networking, mobile device power management and performance considerations.

Official prerequisites to the course are: C language and programming experience, and recommend experience with UNIX and object oriented programming. You’ll obviously need a Mac, Xcode, and the iOS SDK installed as well.

• Download Xcode 4.2 from iTunes – free
• Install the iOS SDK – free

Stanford University has made it a tradition to offer select courses for free online, including past iPhone development classes and the currently ongoing “Intro to Databases” course.

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 “the future of the notebook”, and a MacBook Air 15″ would be an excellent compliment to the product lineup.

Assuming a MacBook Air 15″ followed the weight difference (0.58lbs) of the existing 11″ and 13″ models, a theoretical 15″ model may weigh in at 3.54lbs.

On our personal wish list for such a machine would be 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD standard with a 512 GB SSD option, 1680×1050 or higher resolution, a discrete GPU, and Core i7 processors at 2.5GHz or above, while still retaining the stellar battery life that all of Apple’s devices are known for. A built-in coffee maker and personal assistant would be nice too, with the former being unlikely but the latter a possibility through the rumored Siri integration in future versions of OS X.

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 any size, the only restraint is that the Mac have the physical memory to be able to accommodate the disks creation.

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 used AirDrop before or who have ran into problems with it, here’s how to move files between Macs the easiest possible way with AirDrop.

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. This means music that you have ripped from your own CD’s, gathered over the course of time, downloaded from the web, or bought from iTunes, are all accessible to be streamed through the iTunes Match service.

To use iTunes Match, you’ll need to sign up for and set up iCloud if you haven’t already, then install the latest version of iTunes. After launching iTunes, you’ll see a new “iTunes Match” option under left sidebar where you can sign up for the service.

Download iTunes 10.5.1

You can get the latest version of iTunes through Software Update, iTunes Update, or by downloading it directly from Apple:

• Download from Apple.com/iTunes (no email address required just click big blue ‘Download’ button)
• (Direct download links for Mac OS X and Windows coming soon)

Apple describes how iTunes Match works as so:

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are, your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes has to upload only what it can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

The last point of upping the quality of songs is rather substantial, since anyone carrying a music library around for quite some time undoubtedly has many 128kbps songs in their library.

There is a limit of 10 devices and 25,000 songs to the service, although songs purchased from iTunes Store do not count against that limit.

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 apps at once, and quickly determine what apps can appear in the Notification Center screen on the iPad or iPhone, and also what apps don’t show up there.
Read more »