David W. Martin - page 5

Sprint customers can now check their upgrade eligibility if they are interested in purchasing or upgrading to an iPhone 4S. Although the front page declares that this feature is “Coming soon” it was active this afternoon when I checked.

Welcome Sprint customers! Now you have a chance to buy the phone that the rest of us are already enjoying. So what are you waiting for – go check your eligibility now!

Hopefully the Sprint deal you get will be better than the one that AT&T is giving its customers.

Bill Gates offers his condolences:

I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death. Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work.

Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives.

The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.

For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.

[via AllthingsD]

Tim Cook’s email to Apple employees regarding the passing of Steve Jobs is below:

Team,

I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

Tim

Apple has announced that Steve Jobs the co-founder of Apple, has died. He was 56 years old.  Apple made the announcement this afternoon and we’ll have more updates on this breaking news throughout the evening.

If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com

Today an AT&T customer service representative (CSR) lays the blame for the current upgrade pricing squarely on Apple, inc. According to the AT&T CSR we spoke to this morning upgrade eligibility dates and the pricing models are all dictated by Apple, Inc. and they cannot be changed.

If you’ve had an iPhone long enough you’ll recall a similar customer service fiasco a couple of years ago with the iPhone 3GS.  If you missed the last time early adopters weren’t able to upgrade and extend their contracts take a look at Apple and AT&T Royally Screw Loyal iPhone 3G Customers it wasn’t pretty.

If you stood in line last year to buy an iPhone 4, the year before that for an iPhone 3GS, etc., and count yourself a loyal Apple customer? Well, we’re all idiots, because Apple and AT&T just screwed us royally and now it looks like history is repeating itself.

Mac OS X Lion brought about changes to some of the gestures in Mac OS X. If you prefer the way the gestures worked in Mac OS X Snow Leopard you can bring some of them back. The trick to go back in time is just one key away.

Apple’s issued the call to all Mac OS X Lion Developers to submit their iCloud enabled OS X Lion apps today. Shortly after this first request went out Apple also asked iOS developers to submit their iOS 5 apps today.

Apple has posted an online tool that you can use to check your iPhone eligibility for an upgrade. Basically it tells you if you are allowed to buy an iPhone 4S at full retail price or at a subsidized price.

Get ready for a shock that will piss you off folks. A number of readers are reporting that so far no eligibility dates are being updated to make it easy to get that annual iPhone upgrade that we’ve all been used to in the past.

Apple’s big media event is Tuesday and you can bet that they will be talking about iCloud their new service which is going to replace MobileMe. So it might be a good idea to get ready by backing up some of your data before making the switch.

Continue reading

The tip today is a simple one geared towards people who are new to Mac OS X Lion. I’ll show you how to tweak the settings for your Mac OS X menu bar clock. You can switch between a digital or analog clock, change how the date displays, etc.

File Vault 2 in Mac OS X Lion is very useful and it has improvements over its predecessor that I really like. One of those improvements is that you can now use it to encrypt external drives this even includes USB thumb drives which are easily lost.

Tracking shipped packages is fast and easy in Mac OS X Lion due to Apple Mails tight integration with WebKit. It is also one feature that Apple brought to Mac OS X from iOS that I actually like.

I like this tip since it offers you a quick and easy method for viewing the windows belonging to other apps without loosing focus on the current app you are using.

Initially after the release of Mac OS X Lion it looked like Apple had removed the tap-to-drag functionality in Mac OS X. Tap-to-drag activates when you tap your trackpad, release, tap again and then hold to drag items around on the screen.

Well Apple didn’t remove it, but they sure did find a good place to hide it and I’ll show you where in today’s tip.

Using tokens in Finder searches and some other application searches will make searching for files on your Mac a lot easier. It all starts when you press Command+F in the Finder.

If you’ve followed my tips you’ll notice that I like gestures and all the new, revised, or previously existing gestures have a whole new life for me after the release of Mac OS X Lion.  Now I use gestures more often on my Mac than ever before.

I’ve talked about some of my favorites and today I’ll share another one of those with you. I’ll show you how you can look up words in the Mac OS X dictionary with two taps on your track pad.

Last year everyone was pretty excited about the Clamcase for the iPad. Excited enough it seems that the company has revised the product to work with the iPad 2. Previously I felt that the MacBook Air would make a better replacement for an iPad stuffed into a keyboard case yet people still wanted to convert their iPad to a laptop. It appears that the desire to do this continues into 2011. There are a plethora of keyboard cases to wrap your iPad 2 in and in this review we’ll take a look at the Clamcase for the iPad 2 – The Trooper Limited edition ($149).

Apple computers have a unique boot option called Target Disk Mode which allows access to a system’s hard drives via Firewire cable in older Macs and a Thunderbolt cable in newer models. You access Target Disk Mode by pressing and holding the “T” key while the system starts and until you see either the Firewire or Thunderbolt symbol on the screen.

Once you see the symbol appear you can connect your computer to another Mac Or PC and the hard drives on the Mac in Target Disk Mode will mount on the other system with full access. Since you have full access to the startup disk your data’s security is compromised, but here are a few ways to fix that. I’ll show you how in today’s tip.

I was checking for new mail in my Cult of Mac mailbox the other day and ran into a new message from Cult of Mac reader Justin Kurian.  He wrote:

…’Apple iMac Users Experience More Graphic Anomalies‘

Hi David,

I was reading your article and noticed the picture of the task switcher in Lion. How do I access that? I hate how they got rid of the swipe function for it.  Thanks!

– Justin

Accessing the Task Switcher in Mac OS X Lion is easy and I’ll show you how to do that today. Plus we’ll look at using swiping gestures while the Task Switcher is active.

Mac OS X Lion came with a new version of iCal an application that people either love or hate. It sports a new look and a new feature called Quick Add. It is a new way to quickly add events to your calendar.

Steve Wozniak took some time recently with Patch to talk about his friendship with Steve Jobs, the origins of Apple Inc., Apple’s future and whether he would go back to work at Apple. Woz, as he is affectionately called, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs designing the Apple I and Apple II computers that got everything started back in the early days of the company.

Last week I reported that after the release of Mac OS X Lion iMac users were complaining about graphic or video problems. I was experiencing some of the reported problems too. My particular problem was akin to what others have seen on their 2011 27-inch iMacs configured with a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 and AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The problem is intermittent and it always disappears for a while after a restart.  See above for an example of how my problem manifested itself.

I contacted AppleCare about the problem, but no fix was available and they claimed that they had never seen this problem before. On the other hand after I submitted a bug report to Apple I got a completely different answer from Apple engineering.

VMware released version 4 of Fusion for the Mac earlier this week. Fusion 4 virtualization software will let Mac users run Windows, Linux and now Mac OS X Lion along with the native Mac OS X operating system. VMWare claims that the new version if optimized for Mac OS X Lion and that it offers over 90 new features. The biggest new feature is the apps ability to virtualize Mac OS X Lion.

A leaked image from AT&T’s internal inventory system published today by Engadget shows something interesting — a white iPhone 4s. The listing appears under a handful of other iPhone models.

This mountain view is the nicest thing you’ll see in the Windows 8 Developer Preview that Microsoft recently released. The rest made me throw up a bit in my mouth – especially the Metro UI. I’m not sure I’m ready to think that different yet.

The mountain scene above was produced after Windows 8 booted and after it was idle for a short period. I was running Windows 8 as a Parallels Desktop 7 virtual machine on my 13-inch MacBook Air. I’ll tell you how you can do that yourself at the end of the gallery.

I spent a couple of  hours exploring Windows 8 and this gallery is a broad overview of the changes that Windows 7 users have to look forward too.

After spending all this time with Windows 8 I grabbed my MacBook Air and hugged it tight. I’m so glad that I have Mac OS X Lion and not Windows 8.