Blizzard has made its ultra popular virtualcrack game World of Warcraft free to play up until level 20. Free players can access the entire game and all quests of paying players, but there are a few limitations with the free World of Warcrack, notably:

• Free players can not join guilds
• Free players can not accumulate more than 10 gold coins (probably an anti-farmer move)
• Free characters max out at level 20, gameplay continues but experience points stop accruing

Over 11 million people play World of Warcraft on a regular basis, so you’ll be in good company if you get addicted to the never-ending MMORPG.

Blizzard has always offered free trials, but previously you would only get 14 days to test the game before being told you had to buy it. Now you can play endlessly if you don’t mind your character maxing out at level 20, and at any point you can purchase a paid subscription to carry the character and your addiction further.

You can signup for free World of Warcrack on Blizzard’s BattleNet

World of Warcraft runs on both Windows and Mac OS X and has fairly low system requirements, just about any Mac from the last 5 years should play it fine. Kiss your social life goodbye! If you do get sucked in, you can get a slight discount by buying pre-paid cards from Amazon.
Read more »

The public release of Mac OS X Lion is imminent, possibly coming as soon as July 14th, according to the well-sourced 9to5Mac. This news comes immediately after Apple has released the Lion GM build for developers to download through the Dev Center.

Releasing the GM build today will give time for any potential bug reports to come in over the weekend for Apple engineers to address next week, suggesting that the final release could be as soon as next week but more likely the week after.

Looking at the past we can get another hint of the potential release schedule based on prior Golden Master builds. A former Apple employee @iDannyOcean points out that the Mac OS X Snow Leopard build was released a little over two weeks before the official launch, and he suggests that July 19 would be a “good bet” for a launch date. I suspect this could be accelerated slightly, matching 9to5Mac’s date, due to the exclusive Mac App Store digital distribution method. Keep in mind that Apple will still have to print Lion Restore DVD’s and USB Key media to be bundled with new Mac purchases, which may include the long-expected MacBook Air refresh.

OS X Lion will be released exclusively through the Mac App Store as a $29.99 download, this includes a generous personal license that expands the upgrade to all of your personal Macs.

Check out the Lion system requirements and review our archives for more about Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and it’s many new features and improvements.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Golden Master has just been seeded for developers to download, the latest and possibly last dev release of Lion comes as build 11A511.

A GM build typically means a public release is due out in the very near future, meaning the Mac OS X Lion release date may be a lot earlier in the month of July than some originally expected.

Developers can download the GM seed directly from the Mac Developer Center on Apple.com

When Lion is released, it will cost $29.99 as a download exclusively through the Mac App Store. If you’re not a developer, start stocking up on discounted iTunes gift cards and you’ll be able to buy Lion at a discount come time for release, which very well could be next week.

Update: The GM build does not appear to be available via Lion’s Software Update, meaning you’ll have to use the App Store to download the new release.

Update 2: Lion Server GM, iCloud beta 3, and Xcode 4.1 dp7 are also available

Update 3: A public OS X Lion release date may be July 14th

Have a broken old Mac SE or Mac Plus laying around? Dork out your bathroom with a retro Mac toilet paper dispenser!

Affectionately called the iWipe, inside of this Mac SE shell is a mounted toilet paper holder, and the screen was replaced with a translucent piece of plastic so you can see when the TP is running low.

Read more »

Using the same trick to create a new image file based on clipboard contents, you can extract high resolution icons from any Mac OS X application. Preview is smart enough to extract just the icon and not try to copy the app file itself (like Windows would).

• Select any app in Mac OS X Finder and hit Command+C to copy to clipboard
• Launch Preview and hit Command+N to create “New from Clipboard” (alternatively, use the File menu)
• Save the app icon as an image of your choice

This trick is great because it extracts each size variation of the icon automatically, giving you the full resolution range ranging from the tiny thumbnails up to 512×512 pixels, assuming the developer created an icon at that resolution.

Graphic designers and artists should be particularly fond of this one, as it allows you to easily inspect icons at their full resolution to see how they’re crafted.

If you’re a gamer don’t miss Electronic Art’s huge iOS game sale this weekend, everything is just $0.99, even their most popular titles. This represents a discount of up to 90% on some titles, and EA says it’s their biggest iOS sale ever. Make it a gaming weekend!

Check out all the choices by Electronic Arts on the iOS App Store (App Store link)

The sale is in celebration of the holiday weekend and goes until July 4. Sims, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Madden, it’s all there, so grab your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and get downloading.

Apparently Delta Air Lines has placed public-use iPads at their airport terminal at JFK (no not the command line Terminal.app, an airport terminal). This is a great idea for many reasons, maybe it’s a sign of things to come at airports everywhere?

iPads are getting a wide range of uses already become restaurant menus in China and flight manuals, what’s next?

Picture found via Sachin HD, who by the way, is one of the original engineers on the Final Cut Pro project at Apple. He’s got some pretty interesting thoughts on Final Cut Pro X, it’s worth reading if you’re following the news and response associated with that application.

I know what you’re thinking, the only thing missing from the iPad is the ability to throw it on your shoulder and pretend it’s a boom box, right? Well this much anticipated feature is missing no more, because now you can finally take your iPad back to the 1980’s by turning it into a retro boombox with the free Jamboxx app.

This ridiculous app mimics the appearance of the 80’s boom boxes that every cool guy and his brother had on their shoulder while cruising around the mall. It’s not just for looks though, the app actually lets you create “mixed tapes” (playlists) and offers some simple music player features too.

JamBoxx is a free download on the iOS App Store

Unfortunately the ability to breakdance and look totally awesome while rollerblading down Venice Beach comes separately. But hey, it’s a start.

Read more »

If you want to remove the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion “Recovery HD” partition, you’ll need to do a little bit of work because it’s a hidden partition. Hidden means it’s not just a matter of using your dual boot to go into 10.6 and then deleting it with Disk Utility.

Quick side note for devs with Lion Developer Preview: deleting and merging the Recover HD partition may not be a necessary procedure, but we won’t know for sure until Lion is finalized and shipping. The basis of this is the brief mention in the release notes that DP4 was not upgradeable to the final version, which sort of suggests you’ll want to format and perform a clean install once OS X Lion GM is released. Because of this, we are operating under the assumption that “Recovery HD” will get updated alongside the base Lion OS install, and therefore the old dev version won’t function with the final release – again, we don’t know for sure until Lion ships though.

Finally, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t muck around with partitions, diskutil, merging, or anything else, you could easily screw something up and lose all of your data. Ok enough with that, let’s get started.

Delete the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Recovery HD Partition

There are a few ways to go about doing this, all methods will result in data loss which is the intention here, but I’ll point that out anyway. We’ll cover two methods: using the command line tool diskutil, and using the GUI app Disk Utility.

Deleting and merging a partition with diskutil from the command line
This is the most precise method I know of to remove the partition since it targets the recovery disk directly and merges it with the full Lion partition – if you’re not comfortable with the command line this is not for you.

• Launch the Terminal and type the following into the command line:

diskutil list

• This will print out your drives partition scheme and look something like this:



• Look for “Recovery HD” and see which identifier it is using, it this screenshot it’s disk0s4
• To remove that partition we use the following command (you can also use the volume name):

diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/disk0s4

• The partition will be erased, you might want to do this with your standard Lion partition as well since you’ll be wiping the entire thing anyway. Regardless, you’ll now have a blank partition sitting around, so you’ll want to merge that with your other Lion partition:

diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Lion disk0s3 disk0s4

• This will merge the two partitions, with disk0s3 absorbing the space from disk0s4 and expanding, it causes data loss so don’t expect this to preserve anything

The next approach is much more invasive because it formats the entire disk.
Read more »

Do you need your computers IP address often? If so, IPMenulet is likely the quickest way to have the number handy all the time, it’s a free and simple menu item that displays your current external IP address in the Mac OS X menu bar, there’s no other frills or features.

Read more »

Thunderbolt equipped Macs are able to boot from external Thunderbolt drives. This means that you could run a full Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux installation from an external drive connected to a Mac with Thunderbolt connectivity, and because of Thunderbolts speed, it would be extremely fast. How fast? Theoretically, Mac OS X running on an external Thunderbolt drive should be just as fast as booting from an internal drive, but using an external SSD would actually be faster than an internal spinning hard drive.

This also opens the door for further OS X dual booting options, multiple OS booting, and general ultra-fast expansion on hardware that is otherwise limited with internal expansion options. Currently, Thunderbolt comes on the MacBook Pro and iMac, but it is expected to gain further traction with inclusion on upcoming MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and Mac Pro hardware refreshes.

Bootability has been confirmed by Anandtech, who verified that external Thunderbolt drives are bootable when researching the massive Pegasus 12TB RAID setup, shown above attached to a MacBook Pro.

This was found via MacRumors, they also mention that Thunderbolt supports Target Disk Mode, an option that was otherwise limited to Firewire equipped Macs.

Update: Demonstrating the speed of Thunderbolt vs FireWire and USB 2.0 is this recent benchmark chart from MacWorld that shows off an external Thunderbolt drives incredible speeds:

Those read and write speeds are as fast if not faster than many internal SSD’s!

If you have a lengthy amount of text to read or review that you don’t have time to actually read, another alternative is to convert that text into an audio track. This is kind of like making an audiobook out of any text block, and it can be as long or as short as you need it to be. Of course it sounds complex to convert text into audio files, but it’s not at all, Mac OS X makes it extremely simple. In a few moments, you’ll have a fresh MP3 audio file from the origin document, added to iTunes that you can then sync to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Sounds awesome right?

It is, here’s how to use text to speech on the Mac to speak selected text and save that spoken audio as an audio file, and it works it in all versions of Mac OS X.

Read more »

Interested in learning how to use the all-new Final Cut Pro X? Don’t miss this free video learning tutorial set from IzzyVideo.

There are no signups or strings attached (other than owning Final Cut Pro X of course), just set aside some time and start learning.

Read more »

With Mac Preview you can quickly create a new image file from your clipboard contents. On it’s own that might not be too enthralling, but this feature extends beyond Preview, meaning any image that you have copied from anywhere using Command+C will work as the source image to create a new image file. This includes images copied from all web browsers, other Mac apps, and even files in the Mac OS X Finder.

If you use the clipboard and copy/paste with images often, you’ll surely find this feature useful. It’s easy to use, here is how it works.

Read more »

Using Mac OS X Text to Speech tools, we can convert any .RTF or .TXT file into a spoken audio file which can then be transferred to your iPod or iPhone for later listening.

Update: There is an easier way to do a text to audio file conversion using the OS X Services menu, the resulting spoken audio track goes directly into iTunes, you may want to try that first if you do not prefer the command line approach we cover here.

Read more »

Swiffy is a new experimental tool from Google that easily converts SWF Flash files to HTML5, making Flash-only content accessible to hardware like the iPhone and iPad in just a few seconds. This should be a really useful utility for designers and it’s well worth a bookmark if you work with HTML5 and Flash content for the web or elsewhere.

Google explains how Swiffy works:

A SWF file is converted in two phases: the Swiffy compiler (which you can use on this website) processes the SWF file and generates a JSON file. A client-side JavaScript runtime loads that JSON file and renders it using HTML, SVG and CSS.

Swiffy conversion works best if you export Flash animations as Flash 5 files, and the output currently only works in Webkit browsers (Safari and Chrome, for example). The results are fairly impressive and Google included a small gallery showcasing a few examples including a converted ad unit and two simple games. I’d be really interested to see how this performs with more complex SWF files, I’m sure we’ll find that out soon enough.

Check out Google Labs: Swiffy

The release of Swiffy from Google is kind of interesting and shows that HTML5 really is the future of web animation, and regardless of Google’s reasons this is a welcome utility for Mac and Apple users. It’s no secret that Flash is a pretty miserable experience on the Mac, which is exactly why Steve Jobs gave a big ‘no’ to including it on the iPad and iPhone. It’s also why we generally recommend using things like ClickToFlash, Click-to-Play, and to some extent even selectively using ad blockers, it just makes for a better web experience on the Mac, at least until HTML5 has finally pushed Flash the way of the dinosaurs.

Remember the Hackintosh? Mostly consisting of modified netbooks running Mac OS X, the movement became fairly popular until Apple stepped in with the iPad and then MacBook Air to effectively redirect everyones attention back to official Apple hardware. But the hackintosh community isn’t dead – far from it – in fact you can still build a really powerful hackintosh for just about $600. If you want to build your own unofficial Mac, here’s what you’ll get:

$600 Hackintosh Build Hardware Specs

• Core i3 3.06GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive
• nVidia GeForce GT240 with 512MB VRAM
• DVD burner

Not a bad machine at all, especially when you consider the current Mac Mini costs $699 and is stuck on a boring old Core 2 Duo CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB drive.

Lifehacker borrowed the infamous TonyMacX86 walkthroughs and updated it slightly into a single page of easy to follow instructions, they even included a video (embedded below) showing exactly what to do in the BIOS which makes it even simpler.

Oddly enough the guide was published just weeks before Mac OS X Lion arrives, so you’ll probably have to tweak a few things in the near future if you want to run Lion on the machine. Nonetheless, TonyMacX86 is usually on top of all this stuff pretty quick, so you can almost certainly bet that Lion will run on the machines.

If you’re going to be building a PC in the near future anyway, why not build one that is Hackintosh compatible? Add it onto your list of geeky Apple things to do this next weekend.

Check out LifeHacker’s easy to follow guide and make one yourself
Read more »

Finally, a rare picture of an elusive iPad prototype surfaces, with none other than the man Steve Jobs himself is holding it!

Is this the iPad 10? iPad 12? iPad 3000??? Four simultaneous homescreens guarantee all your multitasking needs will be handled with ease, and the luxurious duct tape center gives it a futuristic appearance that is unrivaled by any iPad competitors. With all the rumors about future iPads, did anyone predict the duct tape? This changes everything! Microsoft and RIM are now expected to announce their own tablets modeled entirely in duct tape, but is it too late to compete?

OK enough sarcasm, so this is totally stupid and obviously I’m just poking at the rumor mill that we all get caught up in, but I had to post it. It kind of reminds me of that dumb iBoard and iMat picture from last year.

Not sure where this came from, but we found it on Twitter via @iDannyOcean