It wasn’t long ago that Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview was released, but now TechCrunch is reporting that Apple may be releasing a GM candidate of Mac OS X Lion in the near future. The details are somewhat sketchy, citing just what they’re “hearing” from an unspecified source:

…Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the “GM1″ release, we’re hearing… But from what we’ve heard, this is only the initial Golden Master candidate. In other words, don’t get too excited just yet

If this sounds a little strange, it is, because GM (Golden Master) software builds are typically what is used for mass production, indicating a finished product. TechCrunch’s Seigler even notes this, saying the “title [is] reserved for software that is complete,” so it would be a bit unusual for Apple to start labeling GM builds in the fashion of beta releases. Outside of last minute bug fixes, versioning stable builds is typically something reserved for RC (Release Candidates) builds. That said, the Lion Preview is quite stable and I dual boot between 10.7 and 10.6 regularly, so it’s certainly possible that Lion development is coming along ahead of schedule.

Apple has already announced that Mac OS X Lion will be released in summer of 2011. Most guesses are that the Mac OS X Lion launch will be the same date as iPhone 5 may be released, which event calendars pin on June 5 at WWDC 2011.

via TechCrunch

Apple has released iOS 4.3.1 update for users of iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 GSM, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd gen and 4th gen. The update consists mostly of bug fixes, here are the release notes and changelog:

iOS 4.3.1 Software Update

This update contains improvements and other bug fixes including:

• Fixes an occasional graphics glitch on iPod touch (4th generation)
• Resolves bugs related to activating and connecting to some cellular networks
• Fixes image flicker when using Apple Digital AV Adapter with some TVs
• Resolves an issue authenticating with some enterprise web services

If iTunes doesn’t automatically notify you, you can download iOS 4.3.1 by attaching your iOS device to iTunes and then checking for software updates within the app. If you’d rather download iOS 4.3.1 IPSW directly, you can do that too using the links below.

iOS 4.3.1 Direct Download

These are direct download links of iOS 4.3.1 IPSW files from Apple. Right-click and “Save As” to download:

• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4 GSM
• Pad 1
• iPad 2 WiFi
• iPad 2,2 (3G AT&T?)
• iPad 2,3 (3G Verizon?)
• iPod Touch 3G
• iPod Touch 4G

Noticeably absent is iOS 4.3.1 for iPhone 4 CDMA. Regarding iPad 2,2 and 2,3, if you own one of those devices and you are directly downloading IPSW, you probably know what you’re doing and know which is for Verizon and which is for AT&T, but I don’t have access to that hardware to confirm either at the moment.

Note for those on Windows: these are .IPSW files, if your browser is saving them as .zip or any other archive, you need to rename the file to .ipsw for iTunes to be able to use the firmware. This is not an issue that affects Mac OS X users.

Apple is looking to license AirPlay to TV manufacturers, according to a new report from Bloomberg. TV’s with built-in AirPlay support would allow users to stream media directly from their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and other Apple hardware, directly to the TV without the need of an Apple TV box. The “devices that could be used for video may be available this year,” according to Bloombergs source.

This report from Bloomberg is significant because it seems to address the long discussed rumors of an Apple branded television. Instead of Apple producing an actual television to compete with the TV heavyweights, they can instead license the use of their AirPlay streaming media technology and be included in a wide range of televisions. This would be a winning situation for nearly everyone involved, including the TV makers, Apple, and the consumer.
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Wondering how the iPad 2 specs make a difference in gaming? Check out this picture of Real Racing 2 HD taken by Andy Ihnatko during his iPad 2 review (image via Flickr), the difference is pretty remarkable for an existing game: less jaggies, better anti-aliasing, better framerates, just better graphics all around.

That image doesn’t surprise me too much when you start looking at the iPad 2 graphics benchmarks, here’s an impressive chart from Anadntech which really shows off the iPad 2’s enhanced GPU:
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Now here’s a seemingly stupid Mac trick that is actually kind of useful: grab your iPhone or iPod earbuds (the white ones that ship with the devices), and place them about an inch inward on the corners of a MacBook Pro… they’ll stick! Seriously, the white Apple earbud headphones will stick to the corner of the Mac, just like what is seen in the picture up top.

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Are you looking for a gorgeous wood cover for your iPad 2? Check out Miniot‘s offering, it has all the features of Apple’s magnetic smart cover except that it’s made from beautiful wood.

If the appearance wasn’t enough to grab you, it’s priced at €50, which is actually cheaper than the official Apple leather smart cover for iPad 2. Now, if I can ever find an iPad 2 in stock somewhere on planet Earth, I’ll buy one of these in a heartbeat.

Check out the video of the Miniot Wood Cover in action:
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Mac OS X turns 10 today and after seeing the above image on Twitter I got to thinking that this may be the last we see of the traditional Mac OS X installer disc. With better methods of installation in place, what’s the point of Apple printing more DVD’s, better known as plastic coasters?

Choose One: Mac App Store or USB Key
I wouldn’t be surprised if future versions of Mac OS, starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, come exclusively in two installation methods: digital distribution through the Mac App Store like when you install the Lion Dev Preview, and a USB key like what comes with the new MacBook Air.

Faster & Fool Proof Installations
Having installed Lion along with Snow Leopard, I’ve used both the Mac App Store and the MacBook Air USB Keys to install Mac OS X. Guess what? Not only is it easier than using a DVD, but it’s faster. I did a fresh reinstall of Snow Leopard on my Air using the included USB key and the entire process from start to finish took maybe 20 minutes, how can you beat that speed?

If you’re the average user and connected to the internet, you’ll use the Mac App Store, it’s far too easy not to. If you need to perform a physical install and use a boot drive, you’ll use a USB key. Installation through either method is so simple and so fast, what’s the point of DVD installers anymore? Look at the size of this USB key:

It’s faster to use, not as fragile, and totally bootable. Why wouldn’t you want to use that as an installation method?

Goodbye to the CD and DVD
The benefits of ditching the CD/DVD installer outweigh whatever cons that I can’t even think of. People have been predicting the demise of the CD for a while now, and Apple has been eliminating box software software in their stores in favor of the Mac App Store. I think it’s finally here, the disc is dead, at least as a way to install software and system updates.

RIP CD’s, you’ve been fun.

PS: You still make great drink coasters.

[ Images via AppleSpotlight and Cnet ]

Have iPad envy? Do you prefer the ease of the iOS interface? Maybe you just like the way iOS looks and want your Mac to resemble that user interface.

By combining a few tips, we can make the Mac OS X desktop look a lot like iPad’s iOS:

1) Add Spacers to the Mac OS X Dock – this is done with a Terminal command that must be executed once for each spacer you want to create. The command is:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'

Enter that into the command line then hit return. Then hit the up arrow and return again for each additional spacer you want to create, ie: do this 5 times for 5 spacers. Then you must kill the Dock for changes to take effect:

killall Dock

The spacers can then be moved around like any other Dock icon, just click and drag them. To get the proper iOS appearance, reduce the number of icons in your Dock to 4 or 6, but remember that the trash can will take up a space on the end as well.

2) Make the Mac Menu Bar Black or just hide the Mac Menu Bar – There are multiple ways to do this, and you can either turn the menubar black with Nocturne which makes it look like it’s out of iOS, or you can hide the menu bar or change the coloring or opacity of it. A simple method is to use the app called “MenuEclipse” which lets you adjust the opacity of visible menu, it’s what I used in the screenshot above.

3) Increase Mac desktop icon size – Use a reverse finger pinch while on the desktop or hit Command+J and bring that slider up to 100+ pixels, depending on your desktops resolution size.

4) Make aliases of apps or folders you want to show on your Mac desktop – Select an app or folder and hit Command+L or hold down Command+Option while dragging the app to the Mac OS X desktop to create an instant alias.

5) Adjust the Aliased Desktop Icons to be on a Wide Grid – the icon grid spacing you’ll want is probably larger than the defaults that OS X allows, so go ahead and line them up manually.

6) Hide Macintosh HD and other drives from your desktop – iOS doesn’t display any drives, so you should set Mac OS X to behave the same way. This is easily done through by clicking on the Mac desktop, then opening Finder preferences and unselecting the checkboxes next to the items you want to hide from the desktop. If you use these, you could also just incorporate them into the iOS desktop styled grid.

7) Use an iOS icon set – I didn’t do this in the screenshot, but you could also take change your Mac icons to a set that resembles the squared appearance of iOS icons. The Flurry set from Iconfactory is a good start and still holds a Mac-ish appearance.

And there you have it… your Mac desktop now looks a lot like an iPad.

Believe it or not, Mac OS X is celebrating it’s birthday and turns 10 years old today. First released to the public on March 24, 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was a huge conceptual leap forward for the Mac platform. Unfortunately the first OS X iteration was painfully slow and largely unusable due to performance issues, and these troubles kept most Mac users on Mac OS 9 until 10.1 was released which sped things up dramatically. Things rapidly evolved from there and the rest is obviously history.

This is what the first release of Mac OS X 10 Cheetah looked like, featuring elements that are still familiar today but with a candy striped Aqua interface:

Over the course of 10 years, what started as Mac OS X Cheetah has been refined into Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which is scheduled for release this summer and looks a bit different:
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Apple announced in a press release today that Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and one of the lead creators and developers of Mac OS X, is leaving the company. Here’s Serlet on his departure:

“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,”

Taking his place is Craig Federighi, Apple’s current vice president of Mac Software Engineering. Serlet has this to say about his successor:

“Craig has done a great job managing the Mac OS team for the past two years, Lion is a great release and the transition should be seamless.”

This is obviously pretty major news for the Mac platform, since Mac OS X Lion is due for release this summer. John Gruber of DaringFireball describes Bertrand Serlet as “one of the good guys” and says “It’s hard to overstate how influential he’s been in the creation of the core OS and Cocoa libraries. He’s been building, revising, iterating, and improving this system since 1989.”

Some are taking this as a bad sign for the Mac, including several tech tabloids that I won’t bother linking to who propose all sorts of conspiracy theories and more end-of-the-Mac type scenarios that are equally ridiculous. I don’t buy that idea and neither should you, the Mac will obviously evolve but almost certainly be around for many years to come.

You can read the full press release at Apple.com.

You may remember that YouTube video that went viral a few years back called “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years” – it featured photographer Noah Kalina taking a self portrait every day over the course of six years, and then all the pictures are put together in a movie. It’s interesting to watch since people obviously change a fair amount over six years.

Now there’s an iPhone app that lets you do this yourself, it’s called EveryDay. It’s a simple but fun idea, the app reminds you to take a daily picture, and you line your face up on a grid, the longer you do it the better the end result. It’ll collect all your photos and then you can turn them into a movie just like the aforementioned famous one from Noah Kalina. Watch the preview video above to get an idea, near the end you’ll see how it turns out.

If this sounds fun to you, you can grab it from the App Store:

• Everyday – $1.99 (iTunes Store Link)

This is a great idea for an app that has captured a lot of peoples imaginations and it’s sure to be popular, it’s already been mentioned by several prominent tech blogs including TechCrunch and DaringFireball. This is the apps simple GUI:
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Mac users can often reclaim significant disk space by clearing out their Downloads folder.

Just how significant depends on the user, what they download, and if they tend to that directory often, but… See that screenshot? That’s my Macs Downloads folder measuring in at a whopping 26.18GB and begging for deletion. I’m a pretty savvy individual but I’ve somehow neglected to periodically delete the contents of ~/Downloads and it grew to include over 7,000 files and consume 10% of my overall disk space.

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Prepare for a new addiction: Angry Birds Rio is available to download for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The sequel to Angry Birds brings 60 new levels and is bound to be just as highly addictive and fun, so now is a good time to start setting aside some mandatory procrastination gaming time.

Download Angry Birds Rio from the App Stores

• Angry Birds Rio for Mac (Mac App Store)
• Angry Birds Rio for iPhone (iTunes Store Link)
• Angry Birds Rio HD for iPad (iTunes Store Link

The game is $4.99 on the Mac App Store, $2.99 for iPad, and $0.99 for iPhone & iPod touch. There are new characters and new level designs, as you can see in the screenshots:
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Generally speaking, if you kill the Mac OS X Finder it will automatically restart itself as it should. We say “generally” because from time to time things don’t go exactly as planned, and on rare occasions the Finder won’t reopen itself after being killed, restarted, or manually quit.

When the Finder doesn’t auto relaunch itself after being quit or restarted, you can manually force it to launch by using the Terminal. Because the Finder is basically an application, this forces it to open again, or re-open is perhaps more accurate.

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LetterBox is a very popular plugin for Mac OS X Mail.app that gives you a nice widescreen interface. Unfortunately it seems like every other Mac OS X system update screws up LetterBox compatibility, and 10.6.7 is no different. Thankfully the LetterBox developer is quick to react, and a fixed version for Mac OS X 10.6.7 is out:

Download LetterBox for Mac OS X 10.6.7

• Get LetterBox fixed for 10.6.7 fix now (direct link to DMG file)

If you’d rather fix it yourself, you can do so using the existing version of LetterBox:

Manually Fix LetterBox for Mac OS X 10.6.7:
This is a bit more advanced than just downloading the new plugin, but you can follow the instructions to fix LetterBox for 10.6.5 and then add the following UUID’s:

9049EF7D-5873-4F54-A447-51D722009310
1C58722D-AFBD-464E-81BB-0E05C108BE06

Thanks to Vincent for 10.6.7 UUID fix!

A Macs startup drive can be changed during system boot by holding down the OPTION key, start holding down Option the moment you hear the boot chime sound and while the screen is still black, this will bring up the boot drive manager.

From this startup boot disk menu, you can use the mouse or the arrow keys to select the drive or partition to boot from, and then either click or hit return to startup the Mac from the chosen boot volume.

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Mac OS X 10.6.7 is now available for all to download! If you aren’t automatically notified, launch Software Update to download and install the latest Snow Leopard update that includes bug fixes, security updates, and performance updates.

If you don’t want to use Software Update, you can also download the 10.6.7 updater .dmg files directly from Apple as either the standard updater or a combo update

Mac OS X 10.6.7 Direct Download Links

These are direct download links to DMG files hosted by Apple:

• Mac OS X 10.6.7 Update (475 MB)
• Mac OS X 10.6.7 Combo Update (1.12 GB)

The easiest method for most users to install is using Software Update.

Here are the full release notes for 10.6.7:

This update is recommended for all versions of Mac OS X v10.6 through 10.6.6 Snow Leopard, and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac; including fixes that:

Improve the reliability of Back to My Mac.

Resolve an issue when transferring files to certain SMB servers.

Address various minor Mac App Store issues.

Additional improvements

Includes all the improvements in the previous Mac OS X v10.6.1, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, 10.6.5, and 10.6.6 updates.

Includes Safari 5.0.4.

Includes RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras.

For information about the security content of this update, please visit article HT1222.

Resolves a window resizing issue with X-Plane 9 on Macs with ATI graphics

Addresses an issue with MacBook Air (Mid 2010) computers that could cause a kernel panic.

Address issues in the AirPort driver for certain devices.

Improves brightness on external displays and projectors.

Addresses an issue where DVD Player may display black video on some Macs using the 64-bit kernel.

Addresses an issue with some NEC displays in which the screen may appear black when connected to a Mac Pro (Mid 2010).

Resolves an issue in which some Multiple Master (MM) fonts were missing from Mac Pro (Mid 2010), MacBook Pro (15-inch & 17-inch Mid 2010), and iMac (Mid 2010) computers.

Addresses various issues with MacBook Air (Mid 2010) computer performance.

Resolves an issue in which clicking the Updates tab in the Mac App Store could cause the Mac App Store to become unresponsive.

Fixes a problem opening an afp:// URL that points to a file, and changes the AFP mount path to conform to previous Mac OS X releases. For details, see article HT4538.

Includes the ability to repair certain issues that may prevent hardware RAID volumes from mounting. For more information, see article TS3631.

Fixes a rare issue in Mac OS X v10.6.5 that could cause user accounts to disappear from the Login window and System Preferences after putting the system to sleep.

Improves the reliability of dragging files or folders to the Trash when using an NFS home directory.

If we find anything interesting that isn’t listed, we’ll let you know.

Mac OS X 10.6.7 edges closer to the next major revision of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion, which is due for release this summer.

For security reasons, it’s always a good idea to lock your Mac screen when you step away from the keyboard. On the other hand, there are times where you’ll be away from your Mac but you don’t want to have to re-enter your password to login, or you just don’t want your screensaver activating or your Mac sleeping.

Here’s three ways to temporarily prevent Mac OS X from sleeping or activating the screensaver:

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