Soon users may not need to jailbreak in order to get custom widgets on the iPhone with iOS 5. At least, that’s what a recent patent granted to Apple suggests.

Multiple references of widgets, custom widgets, and user created widgets using a “widget creator module” are reference in the patent listing on the US Patent Office site (emphasis mine):

The GPS module 135 determines the location of the device and provides this information for use in various applications (e.g., to telephone 138 for use in location-based dialing, to camera 143 and/or blogger 142 as picture/video metadata, and to applications that provide location-based services such as weather widgets, local yellow page widgets, and map/navigation widgets).

The applications 136 may include the following modules (or sets of instructions), or a subset or superset thereof: … widget modules 149, which may include weather widget 149-1, stocks widget 149-2, calculator widget 149-3, alarm clock widget 149-4, dictionary widget 149-5, and other widgets obtained by the user, as well as user-created widgets149-6; widget creator module 150 for making user-created widgets…

This diagram from the patent displays widget references as well, including the Stocks and Weather widgets which are already included in iOS 5 beta (seen in the screen shot at the top of this post):
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If you use GitHub for version control or just to share and manage code, you ought to grab the brand new GitHub client for Mac OS X. It’s a great looking app that lets you find and manage repositories, check commit history and changes, sync and view branches, create and merge branches, compare and rollback commits, and everything else you’d expect from a version control client and the social code sharing site.

You can download GitHub for free or read more about it on the github blog.

The latest developer preview of Mac OS X Lion includes a nice looking new login screen that features an Apple logo placed over the ubiquitous Lion linen. If just plain linen wasn’t enough for you, now you can have the Apple logo version as your wallpaper too.

Click the image above or here for the giant full sized version

The image was converted from a PDF file, making the ginormous 3995×2500 resolution a little funky, but if you use any mortal sized screen it should look great.

Here is what it looks like on Lion’s login screen:
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The next iPhone will be released in September, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Citing several sources with apparent knowledge of Apple’s plans, here’s what Bloomberg seems to confirm about iPhone 5:

• A5 CPU, same as iPad 2
• 8 megapixel camera, up from the current 5mp
• iPhone 5 will “closely resemble the iPhone 4”
• iPhone 5 pushed back in order to ship with iOS 5

Apple has publicly announced the iOS 5 release date is set sometime this Fall. If Bloomberg is correct, then the release of iOS 5 and iPhone 5 will coincide with one another. This year, the Fall equinox falls on the Friday of September 23rd, which would leave a full business week afterwards for some dates to align, although Apple seems to have affinity for Tuesday and Wednesdays for product releases.

iPad 3?
Tossed into the report is also a brief mention of a “new iPad” that has a more responsive and higher resolution screen, coming in at 1/3 higher resolution than the current iPad 2 display. There is no timeline given, but presumably iPad 3 would be due out in 2012.

Most of Bloombergs report reiterates past iPhone 5 rumors, and there is a clear pattern forming of major news outlets reporting the same information about the next-gen iPhone. This does indicate some reliability, as we have seen the same reiteration of rumored hardware and specs leading up to the release of iPad 2, Verizon iPhone, iPhone 4, and even the MacBook Air.

You can plug any USB hard drive into a Time Capsule and expand the available disk space of the Time Capsule that way. This is then accessible as usual as a Network Attached Storage device for your Mac backups or whatever, and you can then even directly backup wirelessly to that external drive connected to the Time capsule using Time Machine.

Apparently this feature has existed since the dawn of Time Capsule, but I just inadvertently discovered this. This is great because it allows you to expand your Time Capsule storage yourself if you run out of space, but also because you can buy the cheaper model and then just attach a huge external drive to create a massive capacity NAS device.

You may have seen that Apple announced two new versions of the Time Capsule, they come in 2TB for $299 and 3TB for $499. Spending another $200 just to get another 1TB of storage seems a bit expensive, and that’s exactly where I found the tip on 9to5mac. In a post where they say the new 3TB Time Capsule price tag is “crazypants” they suggest you buy the 2TB model and then use your own 3TB drive for a total of 5TB of storage. This is great idea, and suddenly the Time Capsule became a lot more appealing to me, because this means less money for more storage.

If you feel like doing this, both the Seagate 3TB USB external hard drive and Western Digital 3TB USB external drive are $149 with free shipping from Amazon. Stack that on your brand spanking new Time Capsule 2TB, and you’ve got yourself some serious wireless storage capacity.

Firefox 5 is hot off the digital presses for Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and Android. The new version is said to include over 1000 improvements and performance enhancements, with better HTML5, support for CSS animations, better tab handling, bug fixes, and more, but there’s nothing visibly different from 4.0 when you first launch the app.

If you already use Firefox 4, you can update to 5 directly through the “About” menu and apply the update, otherwise head on over to Mozilla.com to download the latest version.

Updated 2/21/2012: Here are quick instructions on how to perform a clean Mac OS X Lion installation. Read beyond these steps for some background on the initial confusion surrounding OS X Lion clean install practices.

• Download OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and make a bootable OS X Lion installer from a USB drive
• Boot from the aforementioned Lion installer by holding “Option” at boot and selecting the external boot installer drive
• Choose “Disk Utility” from the Mac OS X Utilities screen
• Select the destination hard drive from the left side and click on the “Erase” tab, set the format as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click “Erase”
• Exit out of Disk Utility, and back at the Mac OS X Utilities screen, select “Install Mac OS X”
• Select the destination hard drive and install as usual

Choosing a clean install will force the destination drive to lose all existing data. Only do this if you have a backup made and you are comfortable with formatting the Mac hard drive. Carry on for some background on the OS X Lion clean install nonissue.

Update: Lion is now available on App Store to download. Yes, you can still perform a clean install with the final release App Store version.

Mac OS X Lion is around the corner, and mixed in with the excitement is some frustration based on a misunderstanding of the system requirements. The latest bout of frustration comes from a post on MacRumors titled “Lion Clean Install Requires Snow Leopard Disk?” that apparently quotes Steve Jobs responding to a users question regarding a clean install:
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Apple unleashed several major updates to its professional video editing software suite this morning, featuring Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, and Compressor 4. Final Cut Pro X was rebuilt from the ground up and is said to reinvent video editing. Apple’s SVP Phil Schiller expresses his enthusiasm:

“Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro. We have shown it to many of the world’s best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped.”

Many popular Hollywood movies have been edited in prior versions of Final Cut Pro, giving some serious clout to it’s abilities, a few include X-Men: Origins, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, 300, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, Where the Wild Things Are, Eat Pray Love, and True Grit.

Despite being a complete redesign with hoards of new features, the price of Final Cut Pro X and it’s component apps have actually dropped substantially, and they are all available as downloads through the Mac App Store:

• Final Cut Pro X – $299.99
• Compressor 4 – $49.99
• Motion 5 – $49.99

Each new app release is already at the top of the Mac App Store “Bestsellers” list, indicating both enthusiasm and a significant pent up demand for Apple’s latest video editing package.

System Requirements are a bit stricter this time around, requiring Mac OS X 10.6.7 or newer, an Open-CL capable graphics card or Intel HD Graphics 3000 or later, both must have at least 256MB of VRAM. Your Mac should also have at least 2GB of RAM, but 4GB (or more) is recommended. You can read more about the GPU requirements on Apple support.

Embedded below is a first-look walkthrough of Final Cut Pro X, for those interested.
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Uninstalling applications from Mac OS X is probably the easiest method of removing apps from any operating system, and it’s far easier on a Mac than anything you’ll encounter in the Windows world. Deleting apps is so simple that some new Mac users are left wondering what else they’re supposed to do, I have received several family tech support questions where they are determined to find an “Uninstall Programs” control panel like in Windows – this is not the case on a Mac, where app removal is dead simple.

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Just what you’ve been waiting for. Now you can hide your Facebook usage in plain sight with a crafty app called ExcellBook. That screenshot you see up top is Excellbook in use, it makes Facebook look like some boring old MS Excel spreadsheet, creating just about the best Facebook disguise I’ve ever seen.

Even the app icon looks kind of Microsoft Office-ish, which makes Excellbook a very sneaky cover that certainly hides Facebook well, assuming your company didn’t block Facebook access completely that is.

I tried the app out and it works as advertised, but I couldn’t figure out how to change the default language from Spanish, unless you can figure that out your boss might think you’re suddenly working in another language if they look too close. What’s the motivation here? Other than to kill productivity, TheNextWeb says the app is some kind of publicity stunt for a clothing company, but there’s no hint of that in the app.

You can download ExcellBook for Mac OS X or Windows at the appropriately named BeStupidAtWork.com.

Use it, don’t abuse it, and try not to get fired.

Ever wondered how Mac OS X would work with a large touch screen? Curious how iOS would perform on a bigger screen than the iPad’s 9.7″ display? These videos will show you how both of Apple’s fine OS’s look on a 21″ touch panel. The Mac OS X video is shown above and the iOS video is embedded below.

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Did you know you can instantly access a dictionary, thesaurus, or Wikipedia entry for a word or phrase, from nearly anywhere in Mac OS X? All you need to do is remember a super easy three-finger tap trick.

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The next time you hear someone talking trash about the iPhone or Apple’s future in the mobile world, present this impressive fact: Apple has enough cash that it could buy outright most of it’s hardware competitors in the mobile phone industry.

Yes, as ridiculous as that sounds, Apple could buy most of the industry, that means Apple could pay cash and acquire HTC, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola Mobility, and Sony Ericsson, the only remaining competitor in the mobile vendor space would be Samsung, which is worth $53 billion.

This impressive data and graph come from Asymco, who says that it’s entirely feasible that Apple’s $70 billion in cash and liquid assets could soon be worth more than the entire mobile phone industry:

The more remarkable thing is that as market values of phone vendors continue to decline, Apple’s cash will continue to grow dramatically. Indeed, a time may soon come when Apple’s cash will be worth more than the entire phone industry.

I wonder what Apple’s competitors think about that?

The iOS line is gearing up to be a viable contendor in the video game console world, thanks largely to the new wireless AirPlay video mirroring feature coming in iOS 5.

It works like this: an Apple TV2 becomes a wireless receiver that an iOS 5 equipped iPad 2 can then export it’s screen to, the TV can then either mirror the iPad 2 display, or if an supports it, the TV can display different images than what is on the iPad 2, turning the iPad 2 into a controller. Yes, that means the feature is currently limited to iPad 2 in beta 1 of iOS 5, but I suspect that will broaden to the rumored A5 equipped iPhone and possibly other iOS hardware through some jailbreak tweaks.

Watch these videos to see the potential here:

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If you run iOS 5 beta 1 on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you might be interested to know the beta includes an automatic expiration date of August 4th.

For those with proper access to the newest beta releases from iOS Dev Center, this won’t be an issue as long as you upgrade to the newest betas as they become available from Apple. This leaves those who had a friend activate their UDID or who used the VoiceOver tweak to run iOS 5 on an iPhone without a dev account – this could very well effect you. If you are running the beta without a dev account, I suggest downgrading from iOS 5 beta before this becomes a potential problem, you don’t want to be stuck with a useless iPhone on August 5th.
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Have a Steam game library along with some save game files? Maybe you’d like to move those games and the gaming library to another hard drive or even another computer? Did you just get a new Mac? Maybe you upgraded your hard drive and went with a clean Mac OS X install, but you want to maintain all of your Steam saved games from the old drive so you can pick up where you left off. There are many reasons why you might want to move a Steam game collection and Steam game files to a new hard drive.

This tutorial will show you how to move a Steam game library and Steam saved games collection to another hard drive or computer. We’ll assume you have some basic networking experience along with file management know-how.

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Sometimes the best way to avoid distraction when trying to work is to isolate other components and hardware, so I really like the simplicity of this Mac setup. It’s just the essentials, a MacBook Air 13″, some school books, and coffee, nothing to pull your attention away.

Most students are out for the summer, but if you are taking summer classes or just prepping for Fall term, don’t miss out on Apple’s 2011 Back to School Promo which gives you a free $100 App Store gift card with a discounted purchase of any Mac. There are some rumors suggesting the Air will get an update soon though, so if you’re looking at Apple’s ultralight waiting another month could be to your benefit.

Picture via Flickr

Apple has started to air a new iPad 2 commercial on TV, it’s titled “Now” and follows a similar theme to the other two recent iPad 2 TV ads.

“Now we can watch a newspaper, listen to a magazine, curl up with a movie, see a phone call, now we can take a classroom anywhere, hold an entire bookstore, and touch the stars. Because now, there’s this.”  iPad 2

In classic Apple style, it shows people what they can actually do on an iPad, and manages to convey quite a bit in just 30 seconds. All in all, it’s an enjoyable commercial, and if you watch TV you’ll probably see airing soon if you haven’t already.