An interesting opinion piece on kottke.org can be summarized as: the iPhone is taking over the world. Arguing that between the iPhone’s built-in functionality and the myriad of apps developed for it, the iPhone is going to win the fight for consumers limited pocket and purse space, and many devices (and thus, companies) are doomed as a result. The readers digest version for those of you who don’t want to read the entire article says the following devices are either now or going to be in direct competition with Apple:

* Mobile phones (duh)
* PDA’s
* iPod (duh)
* Power and shoot cameras
* Personal computer
* Nintendo DS
* PSP
* GPS (duh)
* Flip video camera
* Compass (disagree based on personal experience)
* Watch (yup)
* Portable DVD Player
* Kindle
* Pedometer
* Tape recorder
* Heart monitor
* Calculator
* Remote control
* USB key
* etc

Read more here: Kottke: Your Company? There’s an App for that

The iPhone Dev Team sure works quickly, and they have just released Jailbreak for iPhone 3.1 / iPod Touch firmware 3.1.

If jailbreaking your iPhone with 3.1 software appeals to you, then Pwnage Tool is what you’ll be looking for.

Before you attempt to jailbreak your 3.1 iPhone be sure to read the full post on the iPhone Dev Team blog so you can see potential pitfalls.

And as always, back up your iPhone or iPod touch before you do this.

Note that this version of the Pwnage tool does NOT work for the iPhone 3GS running 3.1, that’s apparently still under development.

Check out the jailbreak info here: iPhone-Dev.org: 3 o fun

The iPhone and iPad are amazingly stable, but every once in a while you may run into an app that misbehaves itself and seems to become stuck in some infinite loop of iPhone-frozen madness. Thankfully, if you find yourself in that situation you can force quit a frozen application on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

The secret to force quitting on an app in iOS is by holding down the Home button for 10 seconds from the shut down screen. We’ll detail the steps below for completing this procedure.

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For anyone looking to have a great desktop Mac without paying a small fortune, creating a Hackintosh is becoming an ever-popular solution, and building a Hackintosh just got even easier. Assuming you have the supported hardware, this awesome tool from LifeHacker makes creating a Hackintosh Mac even easier by eliminating some of the more complex technical hacks in favor of running a simple installer! I absolutely adore Apple and their products, but I’m a big fan of the Hackintosh movement, in part because it’s fun and also because it’s a more affordable way to run the best operating system in the world.

If you’re in the market for a new desktop Mac, don’t ignore the Hackintosh option, especially with how easy this is getting to do… Check out the full article on Lifehacker.

LifeHacker: Install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC – No hacking required

[Above image borrowed from Lifehacker]

The next super secret Mac OS X alpha is in the works! In an obvious jab at the feline obsession with Mac OS X build names, a satirical image of a 10.7 build installer has appeared on Flickr, titled…. Mac OS X 10.7 Ceiling Cat! I’ve never really understood Apple’s cat naming system, if anyone does please explain it to me, but Ceiling Cat does make you wonder what cat name we’ll see in the upcoming versions of Mac OS X.

Via Flickr

We know that Snow Leopard added some features to Mac OS X, but what about the things that Snow Leopard took away? Waffle has an updated list of things known to be removed from Snow Leopard, and there’s some interesting stuff on there. Here’s what I found to be most interesting (and surprising) that was removed in Snow Leopard:

* AppleTalk Printing
* Project templates in XCode
* Preinstalled developer examples
* Preinstalled API documentation
* ZFS Support

Now obviously some of these things were removed to save disk space, but I’m actually really surprised by the XCode and developer examples/templates being removed. Many beginning developers lean heavily on examples and now it looks like you have to fish around on Apple’s Developer Connection website to find this information.

Other noteworthy things missing include PowerPC support (this was expected) and the QuickTime Pro for $29, but check out the full list here:

Waffle Wootest: Things Removed in Snow Leopard

Bonjour is a great service that runs in the background of your Mac to auto-discover network resources, that is, it’s great until mDNSResponder goes haywire. I was recently in a very creatively crafted network environment that made Bonjour absolutely freak out and tax my CPU with a million processes, so I opted to just disable the service temporarily.

Generally speaking you should leave Bonjour enabled since it’s functionality is ubiquitously used throughout Mac OS X, but if you DO want to disable mDNSResponder, here’s how to do it:

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Ever wondered what the ‘mdworker’ process was on a Mac? mdworker is short for ‘metadata server worker’ and if you’re still confused don’t feel bad. mdworker is basically the core technology behind Mac OS X’s awesome search engine Spotlight, it spiders meta data from your Mac and its files and creates a readable index so that you can find things practically instantaneously via Spotlight (command-spacebar).

We’ll cover some common questions and answers regarding mdworker on Mac, inspired by my recent switcher friend who arrived at the Mac OS platform from the other side, who tweeted me asking why mdworker is taking up so much CPU.

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Squid is a web caching proxy that is wildly useful for those of us on slower internet connections or anyone that has reduced bandwidth availability, it reduces bandwidth by caching and reusing frequently accessed web pages and works with http and https. Squid has been particularly useful to me on business visits to places where broadband is a distant concept rather than the norm, it really makes the web usable in challengingly slow internet environments. Squid Manager is a nifty manager to use the Squid web caching proxy on your Mac, so if you’re in the market to use Squid on your Mac, be sure to check out Squid Manager.

Download Squid Manager now
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Every once in a while you stumble upon a Mac utility, app, or feature that you immediately fall in love with and wonder how you ever live without… well today and for me, that is iStat Menu.

iStats Menu has been around a while, but apparently I’ve neglected it to my own detriment because this thing is awesome.

Installing is a breeze and it becomes a System Preference pane, where you can adjust settings to monitor everything from the temperatures in your Mac, to CPU activity, disk space, bandwidth usage, and oh so much more.

If you ask me, this is an absolute must download for Mac geeks, so check it out!

iStats is highly configurable, so if monitoring system resources appeals to you then check it out.

Update: iStats was free for a while and a trial can still be downloaded for free, along with a full featured paid version. However, you can still download the free version of iStats Menu and get those features on older versions of Mac OS X.

Need a super easy and simple Stopwatch on the Mac, but don’t want to download anything like a third party app or utility? Look no further than the command line.

You can create an instant quick and dirty stopwatch via the Mac OS X (or linux) command line by launching the Terminal app and typing a simple command string.

Read more »

Need a PDF Editor for Mac? I did too, and this is what I learned. Adobe Acrobat Pro is great software with some killer features, but it’s expensive. Acrobat is hard to beat in it’s functionality, but if all you’re looking to do is make small changes and edits to PDF files, spending $350 for a PDF Editor might be a bit overkill. So what are some other options for a Mac PDF Editor?

Best Free PDF editor for Mac

Preview – FREE – included in every Mac OS X install, the most recent version of Preview in Snow Leopard lets you make all sorts of annotations to PDF documents. In the Snow Leopard version, you can draw shapes onto PDF’s, and write text directly to PDF files for things like a digital signature. It’s basically a limited PDF editor, for free, and there’s no download required! If you’re looking for a free PDF editor solution, I highly recommend just using Preview.app that is already included in Snow Leopard!

Other Free PDF Editors for Mac

Skim – FREE – we’ve written about Skim before, and it works pretty well for making quick notes to PDF documents.

Scribus – FREE – an open source desktop publishing app that has limited PDF editing abilities, and the ability to create your own PDF’s

Best Paid Solution for Editing a PDF on Mac

I say this is a tie because PDFPen is great but a lot more limited than Acrobat, but if you’re just looking to make simple changes, save yourself $300 and buy PDFPen. If you’re a professional and you are going for advanced PDF editing and production features, get Acrobat, it’s expensive but there’s a reason: it’s extremely powerful.

PDFPen -$49.95 – a whole lot cheaper than Adobe Acrobat, with much of the same functionality in terms of making quick text edits to PDF files and the ability to edit faxes, OCR files, and more.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 9 – $350 – the grand daddy of all PDF editors, you’ll pay a fortune for it, but if you’re really serious about creating, editing, and modifying PDF’s this is the best way to go. There is an upcoming version X (10) too that will have even more powerful features.

If you’ve looking for the location of your iPhone Backup files in the file system of a computer, then you’ll be pleased to know they’re easy to find even if a bit hidden. Whether you use Mac OS X or Windows, the iPhone backup process is basically the same; iTunes backs up all of your iPhone files, pictures, media, and identifier information to a specific directory on the computer, which iTunes then uses in the future to restore and sync the iOS device.

We’ll point you to the proper directory locations of iPhone and iPad backup files on a Mac or Windows… but do note that you should not mess with these iPhone backup files unless you know what you’re doing and why.

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Burning an ISO in Mac OS X is very easy thanks to the built-in Disk Utility application that is included from Apple on every Mac. With Disk Utility being bundled with Macs directly from Apple, it also has the huge added bonus of being free, and although there are plenty of paid options out there, why buy something new or install new apps if you don’t need to? With that in mind, here’s how to use Disk Utility to Burn an ISO image onto a disc using just your Mac, and completely for free.

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The new version of the Remote app for iPhone [iTunes link] has a great social feature that allows party guests with the app installed to connect to iTunes shares, see what’s currently playing, add songs to playlists, vote on songs to be played, and make requests.

As the linked posterous blog states: “This is the future of the juke box. The democratization of music wherever you are.”

How cool is this for iPhone party goers? It’s only a matter of time before this makes its way into bars, lounges, and nightclubs.

Check out more here: Sachin@Posterous: At your next party, use iTunes DJ to let *your guests* pick what music is played and vote on the next song

[iPhone image borrowed from above posterous link, it’s not my Britney Spears playlist, I swear]

iTunesHelper or iTunes Helper, is a program from Apple that runs in the background and monitors for the connection of any iPod or iPhone to the computer, if an iPod or iPhone is detected it will automatically launch the iTunes application. The functionality is the same on both Mac OS X and Windows PC’s, and there is no serious ramification to disabling it (other than that iTunes will no longer auto-launch upon connecting your iPhone or iPod).

Disable iTunes Helper in Mac OS X

iTunesHelper.app is autoloaded during system boot in Mac OS X, but if you’re having problems with the iTunesHelper app you can easily disable this from auto-loading by going to System Preferences -> Users -> Login Items, clicking on the iTunesHelper application and then clicking on the minus (-) button at the bottom of the list (thanks Gord!). Unselecting the checkbox next to iTunesHelper application hides it during system launch, as seen in this screenshot:

Disable iTunes Helper in Windows

Go to Start Menu -> Run, type in ‘msconfig.exe’ and hit enter. A system configuration utility will pop up and click the “Startup” tab, from there navigate to iTunesHelper.exe and disable it by unselecting the checkbox next to the app name.

Why you would want to disable iTunes Helper

Sometimes iTunesHelper freaks out and causes system hangs, CPU drain, and other frustrating problems. Otherwise, you may just not want iTunes to automatically launch if you connect an iPod or iPhone, you can disable that setting within the iTunes settings, or you can disable iTunesHelper itself. My cousin was recently having all sorts of problems with the actual iTunesHelper daemon running in the background, so I helped him disable it completely, and his problems were resolved.

By default, Mac OS X Snow Leopard boots using a 32 bit kernel. But did you know you can switch between the 64-bit kernel and 32-bit kernel upon boot?

This should be useful to advanced users who may need to perform such a feet, though the average Mac use likely has no business forcing one kernel to load over another.

So, let’s cover how to do it:
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Do you need iPhone Insurance? For such an expensive phone, I think the answer is yes. iPhone Insurance is not really something I thought of, and I’m guessing something that most users don’t think of until it’s too late and you actually need it. After several of my friends accidentally broke, lost, or otherwise rendered their iPhone’s unusable, I got a bit more curious about iPhone specific insurance options. This list is by no means complete but it’s just what I discovered in my research for insuring the device.

iPhone Insurance Options

AT&T Wireless Insurance – this is tacked onto your regular monthly iPhone service bill at the rate of $13.99/month. Your iPhone will be insured directly through AT&T. There’s a $99-$199 deductible though, so keep that in mind, it may be just as expensive to renew your contract with AT&T for that price. Note: You need to call AT&T to verify this!

State Farm – the cost for State Farm to cover your iPhone (and Mac, might as well cover them both right?) is pretty cheap but vary from region to region. According to CNET, the yearly cost of their plan that covered their Mac and iPhone was $35. That figure should serve as a baseline, and not a rule. The deductible for the plan varies based on what your premium is. Note: commenters point out that some State Farm agencies will not cover the iPhone, this seems to be on a state by state basis, you’ll have to call your agent to know for sure.

Other iPhone Insurance Providers – there’s a slew of insurance providers out there but whether or not they will cover your iPhone is another story. Your best bet is to call your local insurance company and ask them questions specifically about iPhone coverage. I contacted my Home Owners provider and they said my iPhone and Mac are already covered by my existing policy, but, there’s a $500 deductible per incident! The high deductible obviously makes relying on this insurance pointless for just the iPhone, but they did offer to have a lower overall deductible for a considerable amount more per year – not even close to worth it in my case, I’d have to lose 3 iPhones a year just to break even.

Readers Suggestions – I have no experience with SquareTrade but apparently they offer iPhone Insurance too, please do your own due diligence to determine if the iPhone plans they offer are right for you. Additionally, Best Buy offers iPhone Insurance through their Geek Squad service (thanks reader Mike!) but apparently they are expensive.

The bottom line is if you’re trying to insure your iPhone the best bet is to just call around and see who has the best rate, just be sure to check on deductibles and limitations. You don’t want to buy an insurance plan for your iPhone only to find out it’s not covering accidental damage or has a large deductible. Hopefully none of us will actually need (or wished we had) insurance for our iPhones, but should the case arise, it’s good to be prepared right?